South Carolina school boards have been wasting a tremendous amount of our tax dollars because it was easier to do that than to live with their mistakes — or even just be upfront about those mistakes.

Buying out superintendents’ contracts is similar to what colleges do with losing coaches, but it’s worse, because it’s deceptive and it doesn’t even pretend that it’s not using public money to make bad decisions go away.

The waste and deception come in two forms. Several districts apparently had cause to fire superintendents without any payments but instead pretended they were parting amicably and sent them on along with a generous tax-funded going-away gift. In Jasper County, that just cause for firing was obvious, but the school district made a payout anyway; fortunately, that school board has since been disbanded, and replaced by the S.C. Education Department.

Even more school boards pay superintendents to leave because they had no legitimate cause to fire them. These payments were usually made after political changes on the board, which decided it just didn’t like its perfectly competent superintendent, or even a personality clash with new board members.

The boards don’t admit they displayed poor judgment in hiring the superintendent, and they rarely even admit they’re squandering our tax dollars for reasons that have everything to do with politics and nothing to do with performance.

Instead, they keep their bad choices officially hidden by paying superintendents to pretend it was their decision to leave — as was painfully clear when the Charleston County School District paid Gerrita Postlewait nearly half a million dollars to pretend she just up and resigned one day, and when District 5 in Lexington and Richland counties paid the then-S.C. superintendent of the year $226,000 in 2022 for an even less-convincing performative resignation.

Regardless of the competency of the superintendent, it’s certainly quicker and easier to pay superintendents to stop working than to go through a lengthy administrative process or risk a court fight, and it might look from board members’ perspective like a good deal: They can convince themselves that they’re saving the district from the disruptive effect of a protracted administrative or court battle.

But it’s almost always a bad deal for the public.

So we’re encouraged that the House and Senate are a quick, easy step away from limiting those payouts. The House and Senate both added language to the state budget that says beginning July 1, districts won’t be allowed to enter a “mutual dissolution of the contract” worth more than the lesser of a single year’s salary or the amount remaining on the contract. Budget negotiators still have to decide whether this applies only to superintendents or to all district employees — a difference that doesn’t seem particularly important to us.

In either event, the new language won’t prevent school boards from firing superintendents who violated the terms of their contracts. It also won’t affect how much a district would have to pay if it fired a superintendent without cause.

What it will do is make it harder to fire superintendents without cause. It also will make it harder to coerce fired superintendents into pretending they’re leaving voluntarily. That is, it reduces deception and forces school boards to live with the consequences of their decisions — which is one of the most important lessons grown-ups are supposed to teach children.

It’s a good start to curbing deception and wasteful spending. But it shouldn’t be the end of this discussion.

Next year, lawmakers should ban all of these mutual/deceptive contract buyouts. If board members want to fire superintendents for no reason, they should write that into their employment contracts — and good luck finding a competent superintendent they can afford who would agree to work for them.

If the contract requires the board to prove the superintendent is unfit, we’ll see a lot fewer mid-year firings, with all the turmoil that creates. Such a requirement would provide that important lesson to school board members about living with their decisions.

That legislation should also give our lawmakers — and the public — an opportunity for a do-over with this year’s effort, by holding public hearings and a full public debate on the details.

That didn’t happen this time because, instead of asking the Legislature to pass a stand-alone bill, S.C. Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver took her usual shortcut: asking legislators to tuck this important change in state law into the state budget, where it didn’t get that debate because most people didn’t even realize it was included.

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