The Bentonville School Board is demonstrating the hard work isn’t done just because voters fi nally approved funding for a second high school.

No one could blame school leaders if they wanted to take a little break from the intensity of the last few years. It took a tremendous amount of work to convincesupport the second high school, which will be built in Centerton.

Construction is slated to start in July.

It might be tempting to just sit back for a while andenjoy seeing that vision for the community’s educational programming come to fruition.

But an advisory committee of 17 district administrators, principals and teachers, along with school board member Grant Lightle, has met several times to begin the process of fi nding cuts in the district’s operational budget.

With a budget of nearly $135 million, the Bentonville School District has signifi cant revenue, but there are also signifi cant expenses in running an organization that sees to the educational needs of more than 15,000 students.

The committee’s goal, according to Lightle, is to reduce the budget by about $2.5 million.

Achieving that goal will not be easy, but it may be one of the most important issues the School Board can work on. The biggest cost to the district is personnel, largely teachers.

But they are also the most important - far beyond walls and ceilings - component of the educational system.

The district, according to Superintendent Michael Poore, is under fi nancial pressure in part because of health insurance cost increases and, soon enough, the estimated cost associated with a second high school once it’s complete. Lightle said the district doesn’t have the option to continue spending “growth money” - funding from the state to help deal with student population growth - on day-to-day operation.

“This year we’ll have to use growth money just to pay operating expenses. If your goal is not to go back to the voters every time you have a capital need, that’s not where you want to be,” he said.

And we suspect the community, fresh from a battle over the district’s millage, doesn’t want to be there.

We appreciate the School District’s efi ort to work out these details now rather than waiting for a crisis, although one could certainly debate how far ahead of the game they are. Having spent years in debate over a second high school, the district is still behind the curve in meeting its capacity issues today.

The committee’s goal is to complete its research and make a recommendation to the School Board within the next few weeks.

We wish them the best. Budget cutting is a dift cult task, but carefully monitoring expenditures for any governmental organization is the only way government can instill a sense of trust and accountability with the people it represents. Through this task force-style approach, perhaps the district’s result will be a constructive belttightening that maintains education as the focus of all efiorts and doesn’t cause any long-term damage.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 11/06/2013