The reveal in April of a list of an apparent group of expenditures by Jackson-Madison County Schools has been the topic of discussion for many who follow the public education system of the county.
The Republican Caucus of the County Commission met last week, and spending trends by JMCSS Superintendent Marlon King was discussed for about 20 minutes.
Commissioners Gary Deaton, Joey Hale and Kevin Hicks and Mayor A.J. Massey expressed a desire to work with King and to do what’s right in the name of education and the students first followed by the teachers, but the discussion hinged on King’s spending that appears to them reckless.
“I think his spending is too much,” said Deaton, who is the chairman of the County Commission, about the list that circulated on social media last month that included massages, multiple school board trips out of town, frequent large orders for meals and a riverboat cruise. “Someone else may not have a problem with it, and that’s OK if they don’t, but I do.”
King defended the list of expenditures in an interview with The Post on April 27, saying he’s running the district like a business, and one way to make sure a business’ employees continue to produce well is to give them motivation to produce – which is why he preaches things like self-care (massages) and professional development for the school board (trips to New Orleans, Nashville and Orlando for board members in the past year).
Another concern for the caucus was the fact King hadn’t submitted a budget to the Commission before May 1, which violates state law as that date is mandated so the Commission – which is the funding body for the school system – has two months to figure out its budget before the deadline to ratify it (June 30).
King said in an interview on Monday that discussions between him and the Commission’s budget committee was that he could wait to submit his budget requests after an exchange of e-mails with them and County Finance Director Karen Bell dating back to February.
The school board had a special called work session on Tuesday to discuss their budget for the next fiscal year. A special meeting will be called soon after to officially approve the budget to send to the Commission.
The commission’s budget committee has a meeting scheduled for May 18 at 1 p.m. with JMCSS’ budget being the only thing set to be discussed.
The commissioners were also concerned with a growing number of recurring costs JMCSS has incurred in the past three years that have been paid for with ESSER funding the district has received for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Deaton said the district has 42 employees that are paid with ESSER funding, which is set to run out in 2024.
In the school board work session last week, King said the district has lost $416,900 per year when the County decreased its maintenance of effort in 2020, the first time that’s happened for a decrease in enrollment.
Budget committee chairman Carl Alexander said in an interview after the caucus meeting that statement is inaccurate.
“Enrollment has declined each year for years that we never cut their funding for, but when they lost enrollment in COVID, we cut it then,” Alexander said. “Plus we cut down on their Ameresco payment based on a thing they paid for in 2012 that cut down on their payment and pushed back a year’s payment to help them out.
“We’ve done a number of small things like that to help them along. So I think it’s unfair for him to act like we haven’t done anything for the system. We want the school system to be successful, and we want to do what’s needed to do that. But the money needs to be spent wisely too.”
Multiple times in the past month, the budget committee has set a meeting to hear from King regarding the JMCSS budget or to discuss budget amendments for the district that King did not attend.
“There are questions we have about something he may be asking for, and if he’s not there to answer those questions, it shows – to me at least – that there’s a lack of care on his part,” Alexander said. “We actually asked for all department budget proposals by April 7, and he was the only department head we never got one from.
“And when we met with him (on April 20), he didn’t give us a budget. He gave us a wish list. That was frustrating on our part because we’re trying to work his department into the budget, but when all you give us is a list of requests, it’s frustrating.”
King’s presentation on April 20 had a list of proposals including adding on to Thelma Barker Elementary to ease its overcrowding and building an auditorium at Jackson Central-Merry High School, but none of them had a price tag to them.
“He asked us to select a couple of those items to fund, and he said he’d tell us how much they were when we chose them,” Alexander said. “But we’re not agreeing to fund any project like that without knowing how much it costs.”
According to the commissioners during the caucus meeting, the local maintenance of effort – legal minimum the County is required to budget for the school system – is about $40 million. That number fluctuates year to year based on student enrollment, but that number is based on figures determined by Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement (TISA), the school funding calculator used by the state.
Local funding for JMCSS in recent years has been at $48.5 million, so the caucus said King calling the decrease a decrease of maintenance of effort is actually inaccurate. Citing that if they had funded less than that, the County would’ve opened itself up to a lawsuit.
Massey added during the discussion that King’s statement of saving the County money and building a fund balance of $26 million is also an inaccurate statement.
“Look at it like you’re running your household,” Massey said. “Let’s say you budget $5,000 or $6,000 per month to run the day-to-day operations of the house, and you fund that with your take-home pay.
“Then grandma writes you a check for $10,000, and you put it in the bank, You can’t say, ‘Hey look at how I’ve saved $10,000.’ No, you had a revenue surplus, but that didn’t come from savings.”
The equivalent of “grandma’s check” from Massey’s scenario is the ESSER funding that was used to pay for things that JMCSS would’ve probably had to ask the County for money for had there not been hundreds of millions of dollars coming in through three phases of ESSER dollars.
“They’ve gone through nearly half a billion dollars of ESSER funding, and at some point the spending has to slow down because we can’t give him more money than we already are,” said Commissioner Mike Taylor. “They spent money on the building on Vann Drive and then buying Oman Arena last year.
“How much will that affect their bottom line once they’ve spent all these extra federal dollars they’re getting?”
CLARIFICATION: Deputy Superintendent Ricky Catlett clarified JMCSS has not received “nearly half a billion dollars” in ESSER funding. The total was actually $56.8 million. The District has received ESSER funding in three waves. Wave 1 was $3.8 million, all of which has been spent. Wave 2 was $16 million, and Wave 3 was $37 million. All of the first wave has been spent. Wave 2 has had $9 million spent with the remaining $7 million budgeted to be spent in fiscal year 2023-24. Of the $37 million in Wave 3, $33 million is budgeted to be spent in 23-24.
The “building on Vann Drive” Taylor referred to was the building that houses Jackson Academic STEAM Academy in the old Circuit City building they bought from Union University in 2021.
With the backdrop of all those spending concerns going on within the district, the smaller concerns on the list from last month become magnified, even if the commissioners see King’s logic behind the spending.
“I get trying to build a culture, but there has to be a reasonability to go along with the spending,” said Commissioner Joey Hale. “I’m all for giving teachers perks and bonuses when they can, but when we’re talking about public money, there needs to be accountability.”
The caucus is concerned with that as well.
On March 13, King announced the District would be hiring a new finance director, a move that came less than two years after King transitioned the JMCSS finance department under the County finance department and Karen Bell to eliminate a duplication of services and save the County some money.
According to statements made in the caucus, this move came right after an initial meeting regarding the expenditure list before it became public between King, Massey, Deaton, Bell and School Board Chairman James “Pete” Johnson.
King let those in the meeting and others in County leadership that because Bell was the one who put the list together at Deaton’s request, he doesn’t plan to continue using her to handle the school district’s finances. Massey, Taylor and other commissioners mentioned at the caucus meeting on May 10 that the district had sent out a request for quotation for any private accounting services who’d be interested in handling JMCSS’ accounting.
“There’s some private money in the Education Foundation, and their JMCSS Gala raised $100,000 according to what he said, and if he wants to use that money for any of this stuff that we’re questioning, that’s fine,” Massey said. “He can pay his house off with it as far as I’m concerned because that’s not public money.
“But there’s a higher level of accountability when it comes to County money, and it appears he’s trying to get away from that. I’m not saying that’s what he’s doing, but it appears that way.”
The Education Foundation Board governs how the money is spent, but King does have an advisory role in that process.
The next steps in the process are the school board’s approval of the budget King brings to the County Commission and the scheduled budget committee meeting on Thursday.
While the Commission funds the school system, they have no actual oversight in how the money is spent.
A past example is when former Superintendent Verna Ruffin requested money to renovate the football stadiums at North Side and South Side in 2015 that were funded, but neither of those projects happened until 2019 when Ray Washington was the interim Superintendent between Eric Jones and King.
The oversight of the Superintendent comes from the school board. That was discussed when a commissioner asked how the school board feels about King’s spending. Deaton said most of them are “drinking the Kool-Aid,” meaning they support most of what King is trying to do.
When they discussed how to handle that, Commissioner Arthur Johnson had a blunt answer.
“Find new board members,” Johnson said. “It’s what we’ve done before.”
Four of the nine seats are up for election in 2024. The County’s 2023-24 budget has to be approved by June 30, 2023.
“Dr. King says he wants to run the school district like a business, which I understand and am OK with,” Hale said. “But if he wants to run it like a business, we will oversee how that business performs.
“And if customers continue to leave, then that leads to another conversation that needs to happen. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”
Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news
That individual does not know the meaning of running a business. He and his administration need to be removed. The school board needs to be reminded that the citizens of this county voted them in and they can certainly vote them out.