By DAVID WARGO

tneditor@tnonline.comI have mixed emotions about the current happenings at my alma mater, Panther Valley. Twenty-eight years have passed and the faces have changed, but the games appear to remain the same.First let me point out that school board members are the only local officials who are totally volunteers. School board members serve many, many hours of work each week if they are sincerely serving with total commitment.I'm not an expert on the school district, but from what I understand, even if you were to take away the salaries of every person who worked in the school district, it still is a lesser line item in comparison with the other expenditures of the school district.Custodians, secretaries and teachers and what they earn are not the major player in this area's tax rates. The games that the state and federal governments play with creating regulations, requirements and rules that cost money to enforce are far worse consumers of tax dollars in a school district budget than salaries.I can understand that the school board is concerned with getting students out of the modular trailers and into classrooms. What annoys me is that the majority of this school board and its predecessors for the past 30 years have misrepresented the circumstances of the swimming pool to the taxpayers.I called them on the carpet about it in a letter to the editor 26 years ago when they closed it, supposedly because of major structural issues which were exaggerated fabrications.Yes, there were some cracks in it from neglect, but it was nowhere near the subsidence that board claimed it to be. The proof is that the pool was reopened in the 2000s without much issue.I do not recall the school district spending major amounts of money to fix these so-called problems. The problem was the attitudes of the boards who could not be bothered.Let us fast forward to this board and its members. They point fingers at a renter who leased the pool because the board didn't want to take responsibility for running it as a school district asset.They did nothing to advertise the pool as being an available asset to the community. It was the best-kept secret in this area in recent years because they did nothing to support or help the people who were attempting to run it. In my opinion they wanted it to fail again.They claim it is too costly to support, yet I wonder how many decades you can run a pool with $4 million. This school district is in financial straits and it agreed to borrow $4 million dollars to cover up an area of the high school that would have purpose and generate an income if administrators and officials in this district were not so dead-set against it.How quickly we forget that the reason we are in financial trouble is not the petty squabbles of its board. The real issue is the state and federal governments.Let's not forget how Ed Rendell managed to lift millions of dollars off the property tax reform that we were supposed to get in return for legalizing gambling. Let's not forget about the stupidity of the Congress and the Legislature to rest funding for schools squarely on the backs of immature children's test scores.It is criminal that our children are deprived of a rich, well-rounded education while teachers struggle to make sure they pass tests instead. Education is about leading children to personal enrichment, not about the power games of ignorant politicians.I would admire any school board that has the guts to stand up and speak out until people start to listen. You are there to protect us, the taxpayers. Until you start sounding that message loud and clear, volunteer or not, you are not living up to your commitment.