Not so fast ...

No offense, but anyone that's carefully observed the American public education scene will have noticed that first, there is zero correlation between the money school districts spend and the results they achieve. In fact, the super could easily have said we're going to have to forego painting all the gymnasiums and teacher's lounges for the next two years as blather about spending money that could pay 20 teacher's salaries. You will have noticed he didn't say they had planned to hire 20 teachers, only that discharging their obligation could pay twenty salaries. This is another way of saying, we'd rather spend that money on something else. Since money's fungible, there's no reason that their having to pay bills they incurred represents any hardship whatever. One must ask, why is this school district's failure to budget or spend properly the burden of IBM's stockholders? The second thing to consider is the quite obvious point that they knew 14 years ago they'd have to pony the dough up. Any intelligent budgeting would have started making allowance for this back then and this would have zero impact because they'd already have the money. In fact, they could have discharged their debt earlier instead of later.