The Beaufort County School District has spent a lot of money on legal fees associated with a new high school, but elected school board members seem to have ignored responsibility for the expenditures.

The legal fees thus far associated with the north area high school aren't exact. Data show that between 2000 and 2004, the district spent $282,000 on legal fees regarding the high school. The district drained its 2004-05 fiscal-year legal budget of $350,000 in the first six months of the year. That comes after having overspent its $270,000 budget for legal fees the previous year by $198,700. And it comes as the school district launches a legal challenge to a county board's denial of permission to build the school on the chosen site. Ground has not been broken on the controversial $28.7 million school approved in the 2000 referendum package.

All of the $350,000 spent in this fiscal year certainly was not spent on the high school's legal fees. But any way one calculates the expense, it is large, even though one school board member seems to be nonplused. The district's Columbia law firm billed county taxpayers 1,841 hours, nearly the equivalent of a full-time employee. The person would have been a highly paid employee, though.

If one examines the money in terms of academics, and uses only $600,000 of the legal fees as a calculating point, that is the equivalent of 15.8 teachers who could earn about $40,000 a year. Get the picture? Pretty soon, the district could finance a large number of tutors.

Of course, a school district, or any local government or business, couldn't operate without some legal expenses each year. But someone has to be more accountable for the expenditures.

Under the "policy governance" system, the school board leaves the daily operation of the district to the superintendent and his deputies and staff. The board in recent years has adopted the cavalier attitude that a yearly review of legal fees and issues is acceptable.

As of last week, some sense of responsibility seems to be returning. Newly elected Sun City Hilton Head board member David Chase said, "There is no way to justify it." He is correct, and longtime Hilton Head board member Rick Caporale admits that the board may be to blame. Caporale also rightly says that the school location process was poorly planned from the beginning.

Finally, someone has seen the light. The county has a planning process. Building a school where infrastructure doesn't exist and near a chemical plant doesn't make sense. Spending enormous sums of money on the questionable location of a school also doesn't make sense.

Chase also has it correct when he says, "It's time for a change. Our credibility is at stake. ..."

School board members must take responsibility for the north area school, the legal fees and individual actions. The district's long-range planning consultants have presented them with options. The board should take some of them and avoid sending huge sums of money to lawyers.