A snip here, a snip there and pretty soon, you’ve got a county budget hairstyle that’s much shorter than last year’s.

But as any good barber will tell you, one slip of the scissors and you can wind up with an ugly situation on your hands and an unpleasant customer in your barber chair.

That’s a lesson the Adams County Board of Supervisors has learned the hard way this week.

In their cut taxes or die trying budget session, one of the line items they snipped were the two school crossing guards that work near Morgantown Elementary School.

Supervisors used what seemed to be common sense logic in making their cuts: the schools should pay for school-crossing guards.

It made sense to them so they whacked them. The problem is that they didn’t bother to communicate on this with the school district, whose office is just half a mile from the supervisors’ office.

Since then, they’ve learned that state law prohibits the crossing guards from being employed by the schools and working on county roads.

Oops. Just a little egg on their faces over that one.

Fortunately, the crossing guards have continued to keep working every morning since the Oct. 1 announcement that they’re no longer officially employed. Otherwise, something tragic could have happened, all because supervisors were quick with the scissors and slow with their heads.

Communication could have eliminated what eventually became a dangerous situation.

The supervisors should now bend over backward to reach a compromise that keeps our children safe.