S.C. Sen. Arthur Ravenel, R-Mount Pleasant, last week depicted a local bill to change the makeup of the Georgetown County Board of Education as a ploy to offset Republican gains in last year's board election. So it's understandable why he killed the bill, which would have changed the Georgetown board from a nine-member body elected countywide to a seven-member body elected from districts.

Ravenel's purely political view of the proposal, however, highlights what's wrong with the S.C. method for determining the structure and power of local school boards: Such matters are subject entirely to the whims of the General Assembly.

As Gov. Mark Sanford has argued, this time-worn tradition of legislative control over local affairs should pass unlamented into history. Yet here was the Georgetown delegation last week deciding the fate of a measure aimed at making the board more responsive to perceived local needs.

Involved in the decision were four legislators: Democratic S.C. Reps. Vida Miller of Pawleys Island and Bubber Snow of Hemingway, Democratic Sen. Yancey McGill of Kingstree and Ravenel. By virtue of a Senate rule giving members single-handed veto power over any bill, Ravenel's kill decision is unappealable.

So it's no wonder that board members, who pitched the bill to Miller for consideration as a local bill, now see the GOP-run U.S. Justice Department as their only hope of a fair hearing - because a 1970s desegregation order is still in effect.

Georgetown school board Chairwoman Charlesanne Buttone and supporting board members hope to persuade the Justice Department that the at-large system is discriminatory because current board membership includes no one from certain parts of the county, including the Waccamaw Neck.

We look askance at Buttone's reasoning, on two grounds:

That all at-large school board members seem capable of keeping the educational interests of all county schoolchildren at heart. The parochialism of the district system could create new problems for educational governance in Georgetown County.

That federal intervention, if anything, is more objectionable than legislative meddling. Two black Democrats may have lost to white Republicans in last fall's election, but that says nothing about racial discrimination - at least in the short term.

But in good-government terms, what we think is as relevant to the situation as what Ravenel thinks: not at all. All that should matter in this debate is what Georgetown County voters think would work best for the county's public schools.

The seven-district board structure some board members were envisioning is permissible under S.C. law. It well might work better than the current setup. So board members should be able to initiate a structural revamp themselves - without legislative permission. A board-initiated vote of the people should be all it takes to reinvent the school board.

If Sanford is looking for a poster child to illustrate why legislative control of local affairs is bad for South Carolina, the Georgetown County school board situation is made to order.