Editor: An open letter to Jim Bequette, a member of Beaufort County Board of Education : Beaufort Tribune.com

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Editor: An open letter to Jim Bequette, a member of Beaufort County Board of Education

An open letter to Jim Bequette, a member of Beaufort County Board of Education

Dear Mr. Bequette,

Regarding your voicemail message of yesterday to us complaining about our articles about school spending and other school matters, which can be heard by our readers by clicking here, we want you to know that The Beaufort Tribune has not received any email messages or other correspondence from you within the past two months. If you sent the messages you described in your voicemail, they did not reach us, so please read on.

Regarding school spending per pupil in your voicemail, the figures we have published, to which we keep referring in articles and editorials in The Beaufort Tribune, come from this web site, which is a publication of South Carolinians for Responsible Government, a non-profit organization based in Columbia SC. That web site states as follows:

“In Fiscal Year 2009-10, the Beaufort School District total pupil count is projected to be 18,425. The per pupil funding is projected to be $1,379 state, $1,703 federal, and $12,157 local. This is a total projected funding level of $15,240 excluding revenues of local bond issues.”

It is our understanding that the above figures are based directly on State of South Carolina official data furnished by the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee and the South Carolina Local Government Finance Report. We have talked on the phone twice with the keeper of this data on the web site, who has assured us twice that the figures are accurate and that they are comparing apples to apples for each school district in our state.

If you have contrary data, we urge you to send it to the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee and to South Carolinians for Responsible Government.

The Beaufort Tribune will be happy to receive from you a copy of any correspondence you send to those parties, and to report that you have sent the contrary data. But, until we have some official source that contradicts what the official South Carolina data has reported and that contains apples to apples comparative data with the other school districts in our state, we are going to continue to report as follows:

Beaufort County School District spends $15,240 per pupil excluding revenues of local bond issues. This amount is the highest per pupil in the state with the exception of two small subsidized districts in poverty-stricken counties that are also spending at this same highest level.

You threatened that if we do not correct what you claim are errors in our reporting and editorials, you are going to send an op-ed article to the daily newspaper that is based in Bluffton, 30 miles from Beaufort. We wish to remind you that last week we solicited from you and from each of the other school board members just such an op-ed article. We have received no replies to our offer to date.

If you do decide to write an op-ed article, we ask that you send it to us too so that we will have the opportunity to publish it for your constituents, all of whom live north of the Broad River in the area served by The Beaufort Tribune, the local daily online hometown newspaper in Beaufort.

Regarding your comment that The Beaufort Tribune is a “rag”, we respectfully suggest that your assertion is a classic example of trying to bad mouth the messenger because you do not like the message. How about addressing the message?

The Beaufort Tribune
By: George Trask
Editor & Publisher

P.S.

Please send everything you want us to read to the following two addresses, which are published continuously on our masthead under the title “Contact Us”:

beauforttribune@gmail.com

Editor
The Beaufort Tribune
PO Box 6300
Beaufort, SC 29903

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