CARLTON FLETCHER: Dismissal of Dublin School Board should ring local warning bells

“How many nights you think that you can do what you been doin’? Who you foolin’?”

— Paul Simon

If elected officials – on school boards and in city and county governments – in our part of the state didn’t feel a bit of unease after the news coming out of Dublin surfaced Monday, they are self-delusional.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp suspended all seven members of the Dublin School Board Monday over claims of financial mismanagement. State law authorizes the governor to do so if evidence indicates a district’s accreditation is at risk.

The private agency Cognia downgraded the Dublin City School District’s accreditation to one step from full loss last spring, and that board apparently has done little to address issues of concern. Among them are failure to make employer contributions to the State Health Benefit Plan (to the tune of $5.6 million) and the state Labor Department’s report that the board owed just short of a half-million dollars in back taxes.

The Dublin board also failed to submit required yearly audits for the last four consecutive years.

Kemp has appointed a committee to recommend nominees to replace all seven members of the school board.

Why does all that matter, you might ask, to officials in southwest Georgia?

For starters, check out Herald reporter Kathryn Crockett’s recent story about issues in the Terrell County School System. The system’s chief financial officer left recently after only six months on the job to take a similar position in another system. Crockett talked with TCSS Superintendent Shereca Harvey about the issues that plague the system, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that those issues are very similar to the ones reported in Dublin, unfinished audits and financial mismanagement among them.

Truth be told, there are other school systems in southwest Georgia reportedly facing some of the same concerns, including failure to complete audits and financial discrepancies.

But it’s not too difficult to speculate that the state might consider taking similar drastic action when it comes to a number of elected governmental boards and individual officials across the region. Like the former city of Edison clerk who was arrested by the FBI recently and charged with misappropriation of city funds, so many reports of similar mismanagement across the region have arisen that it would not be a complete surprise to see sanctions ordered against a number of local officials.

Citizen complaints of mismanagement and misuse of taxpayer funds, as well as misconduct, by officials in Terrell, Lee, Calhoun and Dougherty counties, have been leveled in recent months. Some of those complaints obviously are sparked by the anger of a growing number of disgruntled individuals. But others have been directed at officials whose actions have led to reports of severe loss of funds that have been allocated to benefit individuals who are either unqualified to receive those funds or too inept to complete the work the funds paid for.

Yes, there are definitive steps that must be taken before individuals who are part of local government boards are in danger of either being replaced or being arrested by state officials. And, it’s also true that in most cases, the powers that be in Atlanta are only aware of regions of the state south of Macon when a specific issue arises.

But as the circumstances surrounding the Dublin School System clearly show, even those whose misdeeds go unpunished for years are susceptible to sanctions that could land them in prison or out of a job.

Email Carlton Fletcher at carlton.fletcher@albanyherald.com.