A catered lunch, and a canceled workday

  
Column by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

“I could understand it if somebody donated the lunches. Maybe that happened, I don’t know. But it just seems to me to send the wrong message. I mean, they’re facing a $2 million shortfall, $3 million, whatever, and they’re having a catered lunch? Something doesn’t add up there.”

The hot tip was called in to me on Friday – that the Waynesboro school system had served catered lunches to teachers and staff apparently across the city’s seven schools, which, if that was the case, would be a head-slapper of a dumb move for a school system that is indeed facing down pretty substantial budget cuts in the 2010-2011 fiscal year.

I got in touch by e-mail with School Superintendent Robin Crowder, who quickly got back to me that he wasn’t aware of any school luncheons on Friday, and further explained that schools occasionally provide refreshments or lunches for staff on workdays and parent-teacher conference days.

A little later, I was contacted by Renae Deffenbaugh, the principal at Westwood Hills Elementary School, who identified her school as a host of a catered lunch on Friday. As Crowder had indicated, the lunch was related to a planned parent-teacher conference day, which had originally been on the schedule for Friday across the city school system. Read more