The St. Louis County School Board needs to stop making decisions in the dark.

On Monday, the board majority voted to close the Orr School at the end of this school year and bus the students to Cook. School district business manager Kim Johnson asserted to the board that the move would trim expenses next year by $399,000.

Back in December, of course, Johnson informed board members that closing just the high school portion of the Tower-Soudan School would save $2.164 million. That’s despite the fact that the district will still have to operate the bulk of the Tower-Soudan school for elementary students, will continue to provide food service, and will run even more buses in Tower-Soudan than before. So closing an entire school with 200 students saves $399,000, but closing half a school of the same size and bussing the students even further saves $2.164 million. By Johnson’s logic, the school district should keep the elementary operating in Orr and quintuple their savings.

You might think that school board members would be scratching their heads at the obvious logical inconsistencies inherent in Johnson’s claims. And to be fair, Troy Swanson and Zelda Bruns have certainly raised questions, but the four-member board majority that voted to close the Orr School this week appears content to operate in a world of make-believe.

Board members, be they in charge of a school district, a corporation, or anything else, can’t make good decisions without good information. Yet the information upon which the school board is routinely relying is so flawed, it’s shocking.

Take the financial data provided to the board by Business Manager Kim Johnson at last Thursday’s study session on the proposed Orr closure. Every single line item on that spreadsheet included errors or questionable assumptions, many obvious with even minimal examination.

When questioned by board members, Johnson admitted some mistakes. She had shown the number of teachers increasing, for example, while projected costs dropped. She included $50,000 in savings for the Orr principal, even though Orr has a principal in name only and that principal will be paid the same regardless of what happens in Orr.

When a board member requested to see the worksheet Johnson used to justify her cost saving claims, Johnson told the board member she didn’t think she could release it because it includes the names and salaries of staff members. Never mind that a school board member has access to all school records, even those covered by privacy rules. The fact is, all of the information on Johnson’s spreadsheet is public under the law. We all have a right to see how much any public employee is paid. It’s our money, after all.

But seeing what employees are paid isn’t the point here. Board members and the public have a right to know how district officials derive the information upon which important decisions are made. Johnson has since provided that information in response to an data practices request from the Timberjay, but the fact that Johnson initially did not provide that information, especially to a board member, is troubling.

Just as troubling, of course, is that even if you accept Johnson’s figures, they don’t square at all with those produced by Johnson Controls. In their master spreadsheet, JCI projected savings of $1.25 million from the Orr-Cook consolidation, or more than three times the $399,000 claimed by business manager Johnson.

School board members need to wake up. They need to stop accepting numbers that clearly don’t make sense as justification for taking drastic actions that will inevitably affect students and communities, and not for the better. They need to quit breaking promises, as they have been doing since the day after the referendum vote. They promised voters in Orr that they wouldn’t close their school until a new one was built. They promised voters in Tower-Soudan, they’d work with the new charter school. Both of those promises have been broken, and in each case the district digs a deeper political hole for itself. They’ve stopped listening to the public and, instead, make decisions based on little more than happy talk dreamed up at the district headquarters.

It’s putting the school district at risk. Parents and students have more educational choices than ever before. And with a reckless school board majority running the show, making uninformed decisions, don’t be surprised to see students exercising those options.