Dear Editor:
I wanted to bring to your attention that contracts for Girl Scout and Boy Scout events have been reneged on by school board personnel three days before their events were to be held this year. A School Board employee called the event coordinators and told them they would now have to pay, relatively large fees, to have the events held at a school.
This has happened three times that I know of. The first was the Father/Daughter dance for Girl Scouts given by one of the local troops in January. Three days before the event they were told that it would cost $350 to hold their event at the FIHS cafeteria, even though the girls would do all the set-up and all the clean-up afterwards.
It was too late to find another location for this highly anticipated dance for about 250 girls and their fathers. Then the local Boy Scout troop planned and coordinated a "Blue and Gold" dinner at a local school only to be told three days prior of the change in the billing. Then the younger Girl Scouts planned a "Thinking Day" (an interactive day where the girls teach each other about foreign lands customs, food, landscape and such) at Thunderbolt, only to be forced to find a new location three days prior. Obviously this requirement should be discussed when the location is booked, but definitely a few weeks before the event takes place! What happened to the original written agreement? Many of us feel that the school locations should be available for educational non-profit, non-religious events for a very small fee (if any) to pay for power and any clean-up that the group does not perform. But it seems a little expensive to make some girl scouts pay $350 to use a cafeteria for an educational/scouting activity... Are we going to charge the "Relay For Life" (An all night fund-raising walk to find the cure for cancer) some exorbitant fee for using the field? This will probably lead to some upset taxpayers and residents, especially if you only give them such short notice. We the taxpayers already pay for the school properties! We realize there are some tighter fiscal restraints, but these are still "common" properties.
The issue here is the way this situation was handled. Who would like to be organizing an event and three days before be strong-armed into charges you had no idea you would be responsible to pay?
Was this really necessary to treat these organizations that try to help our children and community this way? The other underling issue is we the taxpayers (who pay for the schools) should have access to use the schools for a nominal fee.
Virginia Collins
Orange Park
March 10th 2010 - 3:24PM