The Salt Line, Vol. 152: A Schoolhouse Waits for a Verdict, and the Coast Outsources Its Report Card
Minutes of the Friday session of the Committee on Matters Already Decided Elsewhere. The chair presiding, the coffee lukewarm. Four rulings follow.
Ruling One: In the Matter of the Former Gibson School
The record shows that Pensacola leaders are debating the future of the former Gibson School now that repair estimates top $6.2 million. The proposed path is phased: $2.8 million first, simply to seal the building from the weather, then $2 million more to fix the damage and bring it up to code. A decision, the report notes, looms.
The committee finds the phrasing instructive. A decision may loom, but the weather, which holds no office and attends no meetings, votes every day. Every season a roof is undecided is a season the rain gets to be the swing member.
The committee does not dispute that the building matters. Old schools hold a town’s memory in a way a plaque never will, and a city is entitled to want to keep one. What the committee objects to is the structure of the choice. The first $2.8 million buys no reopening, no ribbon, no photograph for the annual report. It buys the absence of further deterioration, which is the least photogenic product a government can sell and the one that most reliably saves money. Preservation is the only public expense whose success looks, to the untrained eye, exactly like nothing happening.
On the Gulf Coast we know this arithmetic. We live on it. Salt air, humidity and storm season treat every deferred decision as a line item with interest. The committee therefore rules that the weatherproofing phase be understood not as the first step of a restoration but as the cost of having already waited, and that whoever votes next remember that the building has never once been neutral about the delay. Whatever the city decides, it should decide before the next season of weather decides for it. Motion carried, as most motions about roofs eventually are, by the rain.
Ruling Two: On the Matter of Baldwin County’s First A
Baldwin County Public Schools earned its first A on the state report card, a 92, up three points from last year’s 89. The committee congratulates all concerned and notes that a single letter can be quoted by a realtor without a footnote, which is more than most brochures manage.
Families choose coastal addresses partly on the strength of this one document, which makes the grade a form of local currency, and the committee approves of currency that is earned in classrooms rather than printed in marketing departments. Ruling: the A is real, the work behind it belongs to teachers, and the committee will believe in the system’s long-term health the day the next report arrives and nobody feels the need to frame it.
Ruling Three: In Re the Retirement of Superintendent Wilkes
Orange Beach City Schools Superintendent Randy Wilkes announced his retirement at Thursday’s regular school board meeting, effective at the end of his current contract. The committee notes the courtesy of the format: a retirement announced in public, at a regular meeting, with notice built in, in a town where most departures arrive by email at 4:55 on a Friday.
The committee observes that in a small city system the superintendent is part administrator, part weather vane for the town’s mood about itself. The search for a successor is the board’s real test. Ruling: let it be done in the open, take the time the contract allows, and resist the temptation to hire someone whose chief qualification is resembling the last one.
Ruling Four: On the Tourism of Sport
The SEC has extended its women’s soccer championship in Pensacola for two more years, following record opening-day attendance, per Pensacola Sports. The committee will not comment on the soccer. It will comment on the strategy, which is the sensible one: a Gulf Coast town in November has beds, restaurants and mild air, and a tournament is a way of renting all three to people who would otherwise be somewhere else.
Ruling: the off-season is a product like any other, and a coast that books its shoulder months with visitors who arrive for something specific has a better year than one that waits for the weather to do the marketing. The committee would add only that the visitors will eat dinner early, because everyone does here in November, and a smart restaurant already knows it.
Adjourned. The committee finds that most of civic life is the first $2.8 million, the unglamorous phase, and that the coast would be a better-run place if it were as eager to pay for the weatherproofing as it is to cut the ribbon.
— Chris
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