I always get a perturbed when school folk seem to be misleading me. I think others do, too.

A case in point is a back and forth going on in Elizabethtown. On September 25, 2016 the News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown wrote an editorial about “School Boards see silence as golden.” The editors at the News-Enterprise were upset that local school board members operate under the principal that if no one shows up to protest a tax increase, then everyone approves of that increase. The editors clearly disagree, saying:

“Taking a position that a lack of turnout and input equals an endorsement to increasing tax rates isn’t leadership.”

To be sure, the newspaper also criticized the public for not showing up at board meetings.

Still, the editors said enough to rile one Elizabethtown Independent School Board member into submitting a critical guest column with the title “School board must answer the challenge.”

Perhaps silence on the board member’s part would have been more golden.

The board member’s response strangely opens with a quote from Mark Twain:

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.”

It is at best an odd beginning because Twain certainly isn’t complimenting school boards with this. If you doubt it, just read Twain’s comments following this quote in his book, “Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World.” Twain’s discussion about school boards begins on Page 370.While Twain’s quote seems very clear to me, I’m not sure the Elizabethtown board member gets it. After all, Twain basically says that school boards are God’s perfected idiots.

More importantly, Twain might have been prophetic because something else this in this board member’s guest column really didn’t sound right. The board member writes:

“The funding school districts receive from Frankfort for each student — often referred to as SEEK funding — has not been effectively increased since 2007.”

First of all, local districts receive more than just SEEK money from the state, and the amounts are all reported annually for each district in the Kentucky Department of Education’s Annual Financial Revenues and Expenditures reports. You can access these reports from 1989-90 all the way to 2014-15 by clicking here and scrolling down to the Annual Financial Revenues and Expenditures section.

I accessed the reports for 2006-07 and the latest one for 2014-15. Back in 2006-07 the Elizabethtown Independent School District got total state funding of $10,131,119. In 2014-15 the total state funding for the district was much higher at $16,681,294.That looked like a much larger increase than inflation would account for, but I checked to be sure using the really neat “CPI Inflation Calculator” tool from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics web site. The calculator says that $16,681,294 in 2015 works out to be worth about $14,592,500 in 2007 dollars.

So, in terms of inflation adjusted dollars, Elizabethtown got about $4,461,381 more state money in 2014-15 than it got in 2006-07. That is a real funding increase of 44 percent.

Even if we only look at the SEEK money and “overlook” the other millions of state dollars that the district receives, Elizabethtown got $8,184,500 in the 2006-07 school year and $10,214,695 in 2014-15. After we adjust the 2014-15 number for inflation, it would still be worth $8,935,190 in 2007 dollars. The extra $750,690 the district got in 2014-15 represents a real spending boost of 9.2 percent just in the SEEK amount alone.

Somehow, the local board member from Elizabethtown doesn’t see that as a real spending increase on the part of the state. Or, maybe he thinks no one else will check his claims.

Or, maybe, Twain really was a prophet.