Unlawful Deficits at Lauderdale County Schools

We've published guest blogs from this author before. Now "The Lauderdale Luminary" joins us for the long term. It promises to be a bumpy ride for the Lauderdale County Board of Education...

Lauderdale County Schools continue to post unlawful athletic operating deficits. This condition has existed for many years but only in the last two routine annual audits have the Alabama Examiners of Public Accounts chosen to cite the Board for this practice, apparently out of frustration from having their informal recommendations ignored for the better part of two decades. Despite the urging of the district's former and current CFO, the unwillingness of school administration to impose budgetary discipline on athletic staff and the unwillingness of the Board and district administration to address the issue on either a funding or policy enforcement basis has only allowed the condition to fester and metastasize.

The bottom line to all of this is that the athletic operating deficits throughout the district serve only to encumber school funds raised for other purposes such as classes, clubs, and other extracurricular activities, so that the balances in these ancillary accounts are not fully available for the purposes for which they were collected, raised, or otherwise received.

In simple terms, the entire balance of the scholar's bowl fund is not available to that group because the football team is using some or all of the scholar's bowl's balance to offset their own red ink. The Board and the district's executive administration have been repeatedly and strenuously advised by past and current financial administrators to use appropriations to eliminate the school athletic deficits and to thereafter impose budgetary discipline upon the various athletic programs. The Board would apparently prefer to remain in violation of Alabama law as cited in its 2016 and 2017 audit reports.

Sadly, all these admonitions have fallen upon deaf and apparently obtuse, incompetent ears. It seems that the Board has priorities superior to the solvency of its schools' athletic programs, like an unnecessary land purchase that more than doubled the size of the Board's administrative office campus, or like surrendering a quarter of a million dollars a year of TVA tax revenue to the ill-conceived Ag Center Consortium in order to guarantee pocket lining for related land owners, developers, and contractors, or like wasting taxpayer funds defending against a gender equality lawsuit the Board will obviously lose, rather than doing the right thing and settling the suit. Oh well, we shouldn't expect many intelligent decisions from this dim-witted wad of flotsam, most of them are "educators" after all, without an ounce of real-world business acumen among them.

Humbly submitted for your consideration by,