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OPINION: Compton was the right choice for school board budget chair

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Harvey Walden's ascent to the chairman position of the Jackson-Madison County School Board provides an intriguing dichotomy of the public perception of the district as a whole.

Now that a political conservative is the chairman of the board and there are six Republicans on the Board, it's amazing to see the positive comments about the district local conservative people are making when three months earlier the same people were decrying how the 13,000 students of the district were headed south in a handbasket.

And the other side of the political aisle, Democrats and liberals who've supported the school system and Superintendent Marlon King ever since he took office in 2020, haven't had as stark a reversal on the district itself, but some seem to have turned a 180 on the direction of the district.

To keep tensions from getting too hot between the sides, Walden needs a few quick wins within the realm of the Board.

Fortunately, he got one last week.

We'll have a full story about the new committee appointments for the school board next week, but the main one that needed to happen did happen.

There was some chatter behind the scenes leading up to the work session and board meeting last week that some of Walden's friends on the right were encouraging him to make a change for the chairman of the budget committee.

But that would've been a huge mistake. Jason Compton's performance as chair of the committee last year was the biggest reason there wasn't a lot of negative back-and-forth between the school system and the county commission like there was the previous year.

There were other changes that helped that too like putting Mike Taylor in the commission chair seat instead of Gary Deaton and King's apparently understanding the schedule and deadlines for the budget process better than he did in 2023.

The first thing you'd want in a budget chair is someone experienced in handling finances, and if Pete Johnson hadn't been the board chair the past five years, his professional experience would've made him the best person for that job the past two years and now.

But something else to consider is the purpose of the district's budget committee. The committee - nor the district itself - has virtually no say so at all in how much money it gets for anything.

The county commission is its funding body.

Compton served on the commission for a handful of years before running for a school board position in 2022. He was on the commission's budget committee and was the vice-chair.

So he knows how the budget committee thinks, how to answer its questions and a lot of times this past spring, that was all that was needed.

If the committee had a question about a budget item or an amendment request, Compton being in the room, available to answer questions more times than not and then being willing to track down an answer when he wasn't sure and get it back to Carl Alexander, the chair for the commission's budget committee.

That communication should continue this year with Compton in that role once again.

Brandon Shields is the managing editor of The Jackson Post. Contact him at brandon@jacksonpost.news. Follow him on X @JSEditorBrandon and on Instagram @editorBrandon.