Money Well Spent?

I guess I can’t really blame school administrators for their perspective from the losing end of this summer’s school funding lawsuit. If I had just helped to gamble away more than $4 million of someone else’s money, I’d also be trying to convince them that it was money well spent.

The Post-Dispatch reports today that school administrators and representatives of the Committee for Educational Equality and the Coalition to Fund Excellent Schools are not even slightly abashed at the revelation that state’s legal bill in this case ran so high. Then again, wasting taxpayers’ money is a daily ritual for many of these people, so perhaps embarrassment over this matter is too much to expect.

But hide your pocketbooks, gentle readers, because even after the trial court issued a thorough, well-reasoned opinion against the plaintiffs in CEE v. Missouri, these folks want to spend millions more of the public’s money in hopes of persuading the Missouri Supreme Court to … spend hundreds of millions more of the public’s money!

Let me be clear: If some well-meaning private citizens decide to fight out a legal battle about school funding, they are within their rights to use their own money in the effort. But with this case, it is your money they are spending, just as it is your money they would claim if their suit was successful. We owe it to ourselves to tell these school districts that enough is more than enough — they should follow the lead of the St. Joseph school district and abandon this lawsuit immediately.