Don’t be fooled by the excuses and high fives. The hits just keep on coming. And trust us, there’s more.

Well …

It seems the chairman of the Wayne County Board of Education is not too happy with us.

Chris West said he doesn’t read what we write. But boy, during and after Thursday’s school board meeting it sure seemed like he has — or someone else has and told him about it.

We don’t know if he is reading what you have been writing, either, but we suspect he has. You know, just a hunch.

But let’s, for the time being, take him at his word.

West was a little worried that we might twist what he said and report inaccurately any answers he gave to the questions we asked after Thursday’s BOE budget session.

So, while we stand by every bit of the reporting and commentary we have published so far — and would remind you and West that he has only granted us one interview since the WCPS debacle began the first week of June — we are going to be extra, extra careful about how we discuss what we asked him and his response.

So, let’s get started.

We asked West about why the board failed to act as a check on former Superintendent Dr. Michael Dunsmore — why board members were “shocked” to learn about a FOUR-YEAR financial nosedive.

Well, West wants you to know that the Board of Education has rules to follow — and that includes staying out of the day-to-day operation of the district. In fact, he said he and the other board members went to “training” to learn about those limits.

We assume that includes not meddling in things like, for example, whom the district hires and in what positions.

Oh, and stuff like budgets and spending, too.

In the interest of full disclosure, we admit, we have served on boards before, so we know that there are rules about messing around in the day-to-day operations of the organizations those boards oversee.

But the boards are charged with something else, too — helping to ensure the organization or entity they serve is financially healthy and adhering to the mission to which it has been tasked with accomplishing.

And that means keeping a close eye on the CEO, in this case, the superintendent, and the finances of the organization, in this case, the school district.

And yes, that applies to government entities, too. Just ask the Wayne County Board of Commissioners.

Oh wait. We did.

Commission Chairman Ray Mayo said the county’s financial health is Job 1, and he and his board ask a lot of questions, and they look at audits and financial statements.

In fact, as soon as audits are completed, a meeting is called between county leadership and the auditor to discuss the findings.

Maybe they had a different training session?

But West deserves the opportunity to explain the board’s role and why the district has gotten into the financial mess it has under his watch.

And since he didn’t do that at the end of Thursday’s session when given the chance — and instead used his time to laud the district’s pricey, out-of-town attorney — we gave him another shot after the meeting was adjourned.

Basically, he told us that the board was going to wait until all the information was out and then those findings would speak for themselves.

<Crickets>

Okkkaaayyy.

We also asked West why he took the time to commend Schwartz & Shaw for its legal representation and the firm’s “hard work” in the midst of public criticism over the $400,000+ price tag for nine months of work — a figure more than $125,000 more than the county paid for its three-person legal team during the same timeframe.

West said he could not comment on specific cases or billings — and he is right, he can’t as a party to the lawsuits as chairman of the board. But he did say that this is a different world and that the district has had to pay a lot of fees because of the number of cases and issues it had to deal with — some of which required state-level expertise.

We wanted to know why no local firm, which would have kept the money in the county, was hired.

Both West and vice chairman Jennifer Strickland, who happened to be in the area when this question was asked, said the board interviewed a number of firms, and that Schwartz & Shaw seemed to be the best fit.

He was worried about saying this, but West is right about one thing: You either pay at the beginning or pay at the end, which means a quality firm with good credentials saves you in court fees, etc. 

But here’s the thing.

Schwartz & Shaw specializes in education law, so calling in an expert for complex cases might be advisable. School boards do it all the time. 

Just ask Tyrell County Public Schools. You know, Dunsmore’s former district. Schwartz & Shaw represented that district’s Board of Education — and Dunsmore — in a defamation suit a few years back.

But $400,000+ in nine months when your financial house is crashing down? We’re not sure that is justifiable or fiscally responsible. 

And in the interest of transparency, we’ve talked to some attorneys. They were just as shocked as we were.

But we will wait to see the bills from April, May and June to see the whole picture. We know there was some pretty significant legal work happening during that timeframe, too. Our guess is that price tag is even higher. By a long shot.

Thursday’s meeting wasn’t all bad, though.

More than a couple of board members — specifically, Len Henderson, Patricia Burden and Ven Faulk — did not just sit there and take in the information Interim Superintendent Dr. James Merrill presented as gospel.

They asked questions. And Faulk was more than a little concerned about the implications of the findings so far — you know, that staff cuts and increased class sizes would be necessary to balance the budget — and what those cuts would do to the quality of education in this county.

Strickland spoke up, too.

She was still “mad” about the situation — and said increased class sizes could affect classroom management, and could prompt parents to send students to charter schools or Johnston County.

But like West, she failed to take even a little ownership of the lack of oversight that got WCPS to this point in the first place.

By the way, parents, students and WCPS employees are mad, too. Don’t believe us? You clearly haven’t been following this saga on social media.

But the difference between them and several longtime members of the board is that they know there is plenty of blame to go around.

In other words, they find it hard to believe that Dunsmore and former Finance Director Michael Hayes were the only ones who knew about the district’s impending financial doomsday.

And there was something else that happened that we found troubling, too.

There was a bunch of praising going on — for the Central Office staff who “have worked so hard” and who have put their heads together to solve the problems and to manage the potential fallout from the district’s staggering deficit.

But what we did not hear were any significant cuts in the Central Office portion of that budget — even though higher-than-recommended salaries in that very area were among the mentions in the most recent “mystery” audit that no one on the BOE seemed to know about.

We know what board members will say. More than $400,000 worth of cuts that will help balance the budget came from Central Office — or, as Merrill put it, “our own back yard.”

But reducing the amount of money spent on travel, training and supplies seems like a meager sacrifice when inside local schools, teachers and administrators are about to be asked to do a whole lot more with a whole lot less in the middle of a global pandemic.

And even though it looks like the budget includes cuts to contract services, there are still some big questions to be answered about that area and everything else that has been going on in WCPS as a $7 million fund balance became what is increasingly looking like an $8 million budget deficit when you consider that mystery $3 million fund transfer from the Food Service Fund.

That’s right. Merrill told the board that money had to be paid back. 

And don’t forget about the money borrowed from the state to make June payroll and fulfill the district’s commitment to pay teachers their stipends. That is “new debt,” too.

There are still so many issues to address here, but one that stands out is that once again, this county is relying on consultants and an outsider to fix the problem.

And by the way, we apparently have a new audit firm, too. Nice to know.

The bottom line is that no matter how you spin this, the people who will be paying for what has been what we can only characterize as a complete dumpster fire are the teachers and the students.

The district is promising to do everything it can to avoid cutting staff and class offerings. We suspect that there will be more than a couple board members who will have something to say about those decisions should they come up.

But keep in mind that this mess did not happen in one year — and it won’t be fixed in that amount of time either.

The judgment will come as we see how closely the board watches this latest crew of consultants — and the new interim superintendent — how insistent they are that they get information and what they do with it when they get it.

And more judgement will come at the ballot box for years to come, when voters decide whether or not they want to continue to support longtime board members who are, at best, completely clueless, or, at worst, complicit and negligent in a 4-year financial meltdown that Merrill acknowledged would forever change education in Wayne County.

Didn’t catch that part of the meeting? Merrill said once you cut staff — once you scale back to the state allotment level which he acknowledged was not good enough by most educators’ standards — it was hard to get those positions back.

So, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. We just walked up on the aftermath of a train wreck.

But for the board members who were in office when Dunsmore was hired — and those who voted for the extension of his contract (or, you know, decided not to vote and got counted as a “yes”) — to act like heroes because the fixers are washing away the carnage reeks of the same old political gymnastics we should be rejecting.

We would be more impressed if they just plain admitted they screwed this up — that they failed to place the check on Dunsmore and his cabinet they were elected to provide.

But, as West said, the findings will speak for themselves. 

And we have plenty more to show you.

So, get ready for another round of shock and awe in the coming days.

At this point, you know we will be watching carefully. And we know you will, too.