Don't play games with taxpayers' money -- or with Wayne Dolcefino. Too bad the folks at the Spring Independent School District have been doing both.

The district has coughed up about $400,000 in the name of teaching chess to the kiddos. Unfortunately, as Dolcefino reports at KTRK's Web site, most of that money didn't go toward chess or education at all -- it went to take a whole crowd of Spring ISD employees on a cruise where they spent a few hours on chess and, we reckon, spent the rest of their time doing cruise-stuff.

When Dolcefino asked folks with the school system about it, he got phony-baloney answers like "call our PR people." Yeah, right. Call your PR people so you, who screwed up and have now been caught on television screwing up, don't have to answer for your actions.

I would go off on a tangent here about government-funded PR people using tax dollars to spin the public about wasteful taxpayer spending, but there's no need for me to get worked up about it in this case -- from the looks of Dolcefino's story, it looks like Spring ISD can't even do that right.

As for me, I love chess. My dad taught me to play an eon ago. Hey, Dad, did anyone ever take you on a cruise for that?

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