Earlier this spring when the gravity of the budget shortfall facing Cobb's schools was becoming apparent, school officials assured the public that "nothing was off the table" when it came to balancing the budget. Many suspected that was not true - and their doubts were confirmed, in spades, at Tuesday's school board meeting.

That was when the board voted 5-1 against member Alison Bartlett's motion to end a long-standing, lucrative perk for upper-echelon school officials and principals - the practice of letting them roll over unused paid vacation days from year to year, then get a lump-sum payment for the accrued time when they leave the district or retire. Some 605 central office employees and 115 principals are eligible for the benefit, which in effect pays them twice for the same vacation day.

So as it turns out, contrary to earlier reassurances, something is on the table, immune from budget discussions, presumably because it benefits the top brass.

Bartlett's proposal would not have stripped any days away from those who have already accrued them; just prohibited them from stockpiling further such days. Indeed, letting employees pile up unused vacation days for later compensation is a dwindling practice in the government sector and has been virtually junked in the private sector, where the "use it or lose it" approach rules the day.

Bartlett explained that her attempt to end the roll-overs would have capped the system's liability for funding those payments at $8 million - a tidy sum at a time when it just announced that it is laying off 579 teachers in order to meet a $137.7 million shortfall (although it was also announced at the meeting that the size of the deficit has now been scaled back to $126.7 million).

So rather than everything being "off the table" and everyone sharing in the budgetary "pain," the school board on Tuesday indicated that there are two apparent classes of employees of the school district: the "Chiefs" - who stand to keep making out like bandits; and the "Indians," who are under grave threat of falling under the budget axe.

Typical for this board, it voted after barely a cursory discussion of the matter at hand. There was no debate of the pros and cons of Bartlett's idea, just a rush to kill it.

Meanwhile, an estimated 100 of the 115 principals in the system crowded into the meeting room to cheer lustily for the board after it voted to protect their perk. Their attendance was supposedly voluntary and spontaneous - but we suspect a more accurate description would be that it was a "command performance."

The whole episode is just further evidence of the culture of deception and deceit at the highest levels of the Cobb school hierarchy, and additional evidence of how clueless they are. They think the public doesn't see through them.

But they are as wrong as they can be.