Creative ways to fund our schools

Jeffery Mitchell / Culpeper Star Exponent
Published: February 17, 2008

To my way of seeing, lean revenues and daunting costs are the best time to look for really creative solutions.

For example, I support the supervisors in their investigation to convert county trash to energy. With that creative spirit in mind, I think there are a myriad of smaller steps that we could take as well:

For starters, look at our high school parking lots. Acres of county property are dedicated to parking spaces for students who choose to drive to school.

Think about this for a moment. This land is exempt from taxes and requires regular maintenance: snow removal, lighting, resurfacing and more. In effect, county taxpayers are subsidizing student parking spaces.

Taxpayers are simultaneously paying for a school bus system that runs from these students' neighborhoods. Talk about double taxation. If students choose to drive to school, they should pay for the privilege of parking there.

That brings me to my next idea: a demolition derby for retired school buses. Periodically, school buses are retired and sold at a fraction of the original cost. Consider "saving" a few buses and use them to recycle student angst. Charge students to whack the bus with a hammer, egg the bus and dump paint on the bus.

The fundraising possibilities are endless.

The real revenue would be in the demolition derby. I believe that the school could raise far more money through sponsors, vendors and gate receipts than just selling tired buses. Don't forget that you would still have the scrap metal value in the buses too.

I am not done with school buses yet. Today, the majority of school buses run on increasingly expensive diesel fuel. However, the same diesel engines can be converted to run on vegetable oil. So what-

Area restaurants pay to have their used vegetable oil recycled. What if the county collected used vegetable oil for free and then used the oil to run the school buses- Over time, I think such a local program would be less expensive than buying diesel fuel from Saudi Arabia.

No matter what, there are a number of creative ideas to make a budget work. For my tax dollars, I would like to hear how budgeting can be done better and cheaper. Slashing children's educational programs is not the only way to balance a budget.