Terrell schools CFO exits after six months as district continues financial overhaul

DAWSON — Six months after Tony Lowe joined Terrell County Schools — and just over a year into Superintendent Shereca Harvey’s tenure — his departure as chief financial officer comes in the middle of an overhaul Harvey says is confronting years of financial and administrative practices rooted in a district culture where relationships often took the place of formal systems.

What began with updating policies has since exposed unpaid bills, payroll and benefit problems, and gaps in financial controls, leaving Harvey’s administration trying to rebuild the systems behind the school district while simultaneously changing the culture that shaped them.

Lowe, who joined Terrell County Schools as finance director in February and was promoted to chief financial officer for the new fiscal year, recently resigned to take a position with the Sumter County School District.

While the departure may have appeared sudden publicly, Harvey said it was not entirely unexpected inside the district. Lowe told her around July 7 that he had been approached about the Sumter County position and was considering the opportunity.

“When you have good people, there are always opportunities,” Harvey said. “I want him to do what’s best for him.”

Lowe’s move also reflects the competition for experienced financial leadership among districts facing similar challenges. Sumter County, like Terrell County, had been operating without a permanent CFO, and Harvey noted that both school systems have been classified as moderate-risk districts by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts.

His exit nevertheless creates another transition for a Terrell County finance department that has spent much of the past year rebuilding.

Lowe arrived as Terrell County was navigating significant turnover, addressing financial issues uncovered after Harvey became superintendent and preparing for multiple audits. His previous experience with the Dougherty County School System and accounting firm Turner & Jones gave him a school finance background Harvey said proved valuable as the district worked to rebuild its financial operations.

“He came in at a time where it was very tense, overwhelming,” the superintendent said.

Rather than immediately putting another CFO into the same environment, Harvey said the district plans to bring accounting and consulting firm Mauldin & Jenkins back to help stabilize the financial operation, assess what remains to be corrected and help identify Lowe’s eventual replacement.

“I’m bringing in a group so that the next CFO will not be overwhelmed,” Harvey said. “They’re going to clean things up, get us where we need to be.”

She described the arrangement as a “bridge” between the transition that began last fall and the financial structure she wants the district to have going forward.

Two of the three members of the district’s finance team remain, Harvey said, and Lowe has continued working with the district to finish some outstanding matters.

A finance office already under pressure

Lowe inherited an operation that had already undergone substantial upheaval.

Harvey said a series of personnel departures in finance began last fall. As the dust settled, the district discovered some vendors had gone unpaid for extended periods, including bills that predated her July 2025 move into the superintendent’s office.

“We worked to just cut vendor checks to try to get a hold on those things,” she said. “Most of those have been cleared up.”

Other discoveries raised more serious concerns.

Harvey said the district found open payable transactions related to employee benefits and later received notification from the Teachers Retirement System of Georgia that money was owed for certain current and former employees.

“The concern was monies were taken out of individuals’ checks, but they were not paid,” Harvey said.

Those concerns helped lead the district to seek an independent review.

A payroll performance review by Mauldin & Jenkins subsequently identified widespread documentation deficiencies, benefit discrepancies and weaknesses in internal controls. The firm reviewed 36 pay periods dating to 2023 and identified, among other issues, 18 off-cycle payrolls issued between January 2023 and June 2025.

Harvey said some of what emerged from the review was not surprising because district officials already knew problems existed.

“The off-cycle paychecks were surprises,” Harvey said.

The district has since eliminated the practice, she said, adding, “You can’t just walk into payroll and say, ‘OK, I need a payroll check cut today’.”

From relationships to systems

For Harvey, the financial problems are part of a larger institutional issue she says she began trying to address before officially becoming superintendent.

Harvey, who previously worked in the Terrell County School System from 2009 to 2014, was familiar with the district when she returned to its leadership. She said relationships had historically played a significant role in how the system operated.

She does not necessarily characterize every old practice as improper when it began. Instead, Harvey said laws, regulations and expectations changed while some of the district’s internal practices failed to change with them.

“The system operated off of what were known as best practices at one time,” the superintendent said. “But as things evolved and changed, the systems did not evolve and change.”

After being selected to lead the district, Harvey said her first focus was policy. She had district policies reviewed and updated and brought outside professionals in to examine departments, including human resources and payroll.

That process uncovered compensation discrepancies among employees with similar jobs, including differences that did not appear to correspond with experience. The district subsequently commissioned a compensation study.

Harvey said the larger objective is to build an organization that operates through established procedures rather than depending on particular individuals or longstanding relationships. Turnover, she said, did not create all of the district’s weaknesses. It exposed them.

“People left,” Harvey said. “I think thinking, or hoping, in some regards, that things would fail. They, in my opinion, didn’t fail. It exposed what was not in place.”

She said her administration is now doing the harder work of establishing policies, procedures and expectations that can survive changes in personnel.

Budget would have required $393,000 from reserves

The financial overhaul is also changing how Terrell County spends its money.

Harvey said projections developed by Lowe showed the district would have needed to pull approximately $393,000 from its fund balance if officials had not made adjustments to the Fiscal Year 2027 spending plan. The Board of Education ultimately adopted a $13.2 million general fund budget, approximately 9.3% smaller than the previous year’s budget, while maintaining nearly $10.8 million in unreserved general fund reserves.

Harvey said the district’s circumstances also prevented officials from following a conventional budget-development process.

In a typical school system, departments may begin developing spending requests months before a new fiscal year, she said. Terrell County’s finance staff was instead simultaneously dealing with audits, rebuilding internal operations and preparing a budget.

“We did not have that option,” Harvey said.

The resulting reductions were spread across administrative positions, staffing and programs.

Some vacant positions were left unfilled, including a special education specialist and dual enrollment coordinator, with those responsibilities absorbed by remaining staff. The district eliminated the assistant superintendent of plant operations position because Harvey said its responsibilities duplicated services available elsewhere in the district.

The director of assessment and accountability position also was dissolved, with its duties divided between the chief academic officer and director of student services. Several employees previously working 230-day contracts were reduced to 220 days.

At the elementary level, the district eliminated some part-time positions held by 49% employees. Cursive writing is now incorporated into English language arts instruction rather than offered separately, and a STEM exploration class is not being offered this year.

The district also stopped paying the employee portion of health insurance benefits for part-time retirees, a practice addressed during the financial review.

Cutting a position does not always cut the cost

Other expenses are proving more complicated. Harvey said one example involves employees who serve in multiple roles. Some bus drivers also work in school security or custodial supervision, while some paraprofessionals and secretaries work as bus monitors.

Because nonexempt employees must receive overtime for qualifying hours beyond 40 in a work week, combining jobs can sometimes cost substantially more than the salary attached to the secondary position alone.

Harvey estimated that work budgeted at roughly $4,600 for a bus monitor could ultimately cost approximately $9,000 when performed by an employee whose combined responsibilities push the employee into overtime.

Those expenses illustrate why Harvey says rebuilding the district’s finances involves more than simply looking for individual line items to cut.

After policy, she said, one of her priorities is examining staffing plans to determine whether the district’s staffing formulas align with the funding generated by the students it serves. That has become increasingly important as enrollment declines.

Earlier budget projections showed Terrell County anticipating a $1.36 million decline in revenue for FY 2027 amid enrollment losses and reductions in state and federal funding.

‘Not everything is about money’

Harvey said the financial overhaul does not mean the district will simply choose the least expensive way to educate students. She pointed to gifted education as an example. Different service models may allow a district to serve students at different costs, but Harvey said the decision also has to account for whether exceptionally advanced students are being appropriately challenged.

A fourth-grader performing math at a ninth-grade level, she said, needs opportunities beyond the standard fourth-grade curriculum just as a struggling student needs remediation.

“Not everything is about money,” Harvey said. “It’s about providing a service so that the student who is gifted, who’s in fourth grade performing on a ninth-grade math level, can be exposed to advanced concepts.”

“We can’t just focus on those who need remediation.”

That philosophy provides the other side of a financial restructuring that has eliminated positions and reduced spending: Harvey says the objective is not simply to make Terrell County Schools cheaper to operate but to remove inefficiencies so available resources can be directed toward students. The district’s larger challenge is doing that while rebuilding systems that Harvey says should have been in place long before the current administration.

Payroll problems affect the budget, she said. Budget problems affect staffing. Staffing affects what happens in classrooms.

“When you operate within a system, even if you look at cars and wheels, if one piece is not turning properly, it impacts so many other systems,” Harvey said.

Making it ‘hard for parents to choose’

Just one year into her tenure as superintendent, Harvey said the ultimate measure of that work will not be an audit report or a balanced spreadsheet. It will be whether families believe Terrell County’s schools can compete with the alternatives around them.

“I want to make it hard for parents to choose,” Harvey said. “No school should be a bad school.”

She says she wants Terrell County and neighboring districts to be strong enough that families are not forced to decide where to live based on escaping a poor school, she said. For Terrell County, that means changing expectations inside the school system as well as its financial practices.

The district’s WAVE commitments — work together, act with integrity, value excellence and empower students — reflect the culture Harvey says she is trying to establish. The district publicly introduced those commitments when she began her tenure in July 2025.

For now, however, one of the most immediate tests is back in the finance office. Lowe helped carry the district through audits, financial cleanup and development of a new budget. The next phase will now continue without him.

Harvey said her plan is to make sure the system no longer depends on any one person to keep it working.

“I’m doing the hard work of leadership now,” she said, “helping my team to understand systems, processes and how we follow policy.”