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THE COUNTY EDUCATION AUTHORITY.

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THE COUNTY EDUCATION AUTHORITY. We must confess we have no sympathy with the St. Davids Parish Council in the view the members of that body take of the appointment of a clerk of works to the County Education Authority. It is possible the councillors of the ancient city possess some exclusive, information not open to us; and in the absence of that we can only base our views upon what we know of the present, and can surmise of the pros- pective, work to be done in this county in the matter of the building and repairing of schools. No business man would embark upon, say, half-a-dozen different building schemes, at places widely apart, without making some pro- vision for seeing that he had value for his money. Yet that is exactly what the mistaken cheese-paring, of the good people of St. Davids apparently wish to be done. The architect to the authority is admittedly too full-handed to give his personal supervision of the work, as is shown by the fact that plans have been too long delayed, as in the case of Fishguard, for example. It would be an act of sheer folly to place economy before efficiency as, apparently, the St. Davids people desire. The county appears to have got an excellent servant who, if we mistake not, will be a terror to the slip- shod contractor, and of real service to the rate- payers, by seeing that they get value for their money. The action of the authority in the matter of the Puncheston non-provided school is much less satisfactory. We are not the apologists for the Puncheston managers, but they seem, though somewhat tardily, to have at last resyocteu the wishes of the education authority. Tnat being so the authority would have been doing no more than justice in with- drawing tne ban placed on the school, it would, at any rate, have been better than the undignified and heated personal feeling shown by the chairman in "forbidding" the dis- cussion of the subject. In another matter, we can congratulate the county upon the prospect that the injustice hitherto done to intermediate education in the Principality is about to be redressed. Thanks to th i. much- abused body, the Central Welsh Board, interme- diate education in Wales has been brought \o such a high state of efficiency that it is the envy of our Saxon neighbours; but hitherto the "pre- dominant partner" has had a much larger share of the money given from the National Exche- quer than we have had. We are now promised that that inequality shall be remedied, and in that case the increased grant will mean a great deal to some of the county schools which at present barely make ends met. Apparently the County Education Authority has at last realised, what we have been trying for some weeks to make clear, that the enforcing of the provisions of the Act to provide for the medical examination of all children in the elementary schools of the icounty will be, if a necessary, most assuredly a very expensive matter. We have shown why this must necessarily be the case. To medically examine some 13,000 or 14,000 children at the outset, and of a third of that number annually must, under any cir- cumstances, entail a heavy burden upon the ratepayers, who have long been crying out against heavy and increasing rates. It is too heavy a financial drag upon a relatively poor and struggling community such as ours, and if it is borne by Imperial taxation some share of the burden may be divided between sturdier shoulders than our own. In asking that this should be an Imperial tax the county authority have decided wisely. «.

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COUNTY NOTES. -

ON THE SQUARE.

"¡:-THE RURAL EXODUS. -