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If blame were peanut butter, the debacle at Wilkes-Barre Area School District could be spread from here to Harrisburg.

The school board’s vote last week to suspend four popular, educational programs has sparked passionate appeals, calls for the ouster of all nine members and morning-long student protests.

The vote came on the same night that the board’s members passed a preliminary budget for next year, which increases taxes the maximum allowed by state law, and started the process of borrowing up to $150 million for construction projects.

Who’s to blame?

The school boards of the past hold the heavy weight of inaction. When the idea of consolidating this district’s three high schools was rejected in 2002 – 14 years ago – then-Superintendent Jeff Namey warned: “We can’t sit back and wait three or four years. We simply don’t have the money.”

School boards past also bear the burden of creating maintenance-free school zones. There exists a stack of reports, dating back a decade, citing serious problems with the older buildings. The can-kicking ended with this board’s directors for a simple reason: They ran out of road.

But the district does not bear all the failure. It worked with a tax base perpetually eroded by population decline and nonprofits gobbling up property, taking it off the tax rolls, yet rarely offering something in lieu of money lost.

Harrisburg is hip deep in this cornucopia of culpability. Remember the 2001 public pension boost? One of the fastest-growing costs for local districts comes from covering the $50 billion-plus shortfall in the Public School Employees’ Retirement System.

The Legislature also has played politics with education funding for decades, doling out money with little connection to each district’s actual costs, creating inequities that make the quality of a child’s education contingent on his or her ZIP code. Harrisburg’s haphazard oversight of charter schools compounds the conundrum.

As noted by a new advocacy group, Citizens for Fair School Funding, a nonpartisan commission last year had determined 170 districts are underfunded; that includes Wilkes-Barre Area, shortchanged by $29 million annually.

Do you want to blame unions? Considering the complexity and importance of teachers’ jobs, criticism of their pay seems often misplaced. But when state money got tight and then-Gov. Tom Corbett urged unions to agree to pay freezes in 2011, the Wilkes-Barre Area’s teacher union said no. And this is the union that brought you sabbatical abuse – remember Elise Mosca’s “Bachelor” leave?

Then there are administrators who accepted raises months before cutting programs.

But there is one other culprit: inattentive district residents. In May 2009, for instance, they gave board member James Height 600 votes in the primary election even after he had been charged in a federal corruption crackdown, resigned and agreed to plead guilty.

And while board meetings lately have become crowded affairs, thanks to proposed high school consolidation and program cuts, any person angry at recent events needs to ask: Why, for more than a decade as these woes festered, were the audience chairs at school board meetings so very, very empty?

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