Ratepayer funds should not be granted to support school teaching material, no matter how needy the school or how worthy the cause.
Under the New Zealand system, schooling is funded by central government and supplemented by parent and school community fundraising.
Sometimes members from the local community might help and rally round. Money is also sought from trusts and through sponsorship.
While community help is voluntary, using Dunedin City Council money fundamentally is not. Ratepayers have no choice but to pay their rates, and council money, even via community board discretionary funds, should not be used for teaching material and teaching resources.
The Waikouaiti Coast Community Board this week approved $500 for further educational resources required to ''raise achievement in maths'', as the principal put it, for Waikouaiti School. Who is to blame him for seeking extra funds? The community board, though, did not have to agree.
Community board chairman Alasdair Morrison is reported as saying that after initial misgivings he was happy to support the school.
If, however, this is good enough for Waikouaiti School why shouldn't other schools put their hands out? Why doesn't every school in Waikouaiti Coast apply for money? Or, for that matter, why don't schools across the other boards, Otago Peninsula, West Harbour, Saddle Hill, Mosgiel Taieri and Strath Taieri apply?
And if it is good enough for schools in community board areas to receive grants, why shouldn't schools in the rest of Dunedin receive money?
Being geographically in a community board area would appear to be advantageous, not just through having an official board to lobby council and act as a conduit for opinions and information but also through access to additional funding.
While the amounts are small, a principle is at stake. Because of the way they are set up, community boards in Dunedin City have little power, unlike in Central Otago, for example .
The council mother ship is in ultimate control of decisions and finances, apart from discretionary funds of only $10,000 each. While that amount can have significance in the smallest population areas of Strath Taieri and Waikouaiti Coast, the money will not go so far in Mosgiel Taieri or Saddle Hill.
Schools and pre-schools have received community board grants in the past, and there seems to have been a few for teaching materials, including one for computer tablets.
Most grants to schools have had wider benefits - through the likes of school pools, beautification projects, cricket nets, playgrounds. That is the way it should be. Any community board ''community'' grants to schools should encompass community benefits.
Special son of the South
Hurrah for rugby player Ben Smith's decision to stay for another four years in New Zealand and the South. The fullback, and sometimes wing, is one of the stars of world rugby, the vice-captain of the All Blacks and the co-captain of the Highlanders.
Smith (30) has turned down massive money to play rugby in France and come to an agreement with the New Zealand Rugby Union.
He is without doubt a special son of the South, Dunedin and Otago, much-liked and much-respected as player and person. He has shown that good guys can win, that modesty and even a period of self-doubt need not stand in the way of rising to peak performance and that a boy from Green Island can rise to be among the best on the planet.
Smith shows, too, the value of consistency, of rugby field awareness, of wide-ranging skills. The people of the South now have the pleasure of watching him display these attributes at Forsyth Barr Stadium for the next three or four years.
