Paper overdoing school board friction

It is time for your newspaper to sharply reduce the nonstop coverage of every day-to-day action the Beaufort County Board of Education engages in that a member does not like.

This member feeds a continuous stream of details, most of which do not seem unusual within the context of normal board activities, and The Packet puts them on the front page (or close to it).

Barrels of ink are consumed to discuss the factions within the board, the legal services that the board is considering using, and the rules of order being employed by the board, etc. Most boards have issues whereby one or more members may be upset, but usually a board member does not run to the local paper every time to state her case while knowing that the rebuttal is not likely to appear until the board makes its final decision.

The level of coverage that was justified with regard to the past nepotism issue seems to have been maintained for every lesser issue since then.

The paper should spend its time and ink discussing the real issue of our school system — student performance. Instead of endless detail about trivial arguments within the board, there should be more coverage as to how the kids are doing, both positive and negative. Some of the board activity will be ugly, and some may even be newsworthy, but what the board does should be measured by what the kids do rather than what the latest upset among board members may be.

This story was originally published June 22, 2017 at 12:51 PM with the headline "Paper overdoing school board friction."