Tate County and Indianola School Districts Face Likely Takeover

Tate County and Indianola School Districts are headed toward emergency status. MPB's Lawayne Childrey reports how they ended up in such dire conditions.

Records show that the Indianola school district has a deficit in excess of 2 million dollars. k-12 Superintendent Hank Bounds says the bottom line is years of over spending and poor management.

“The state auditor’s office handles audits, the department of education does not. And those audits are always lagging by a year and we just received about three weeks ago a letter that said the 2007 audit was a disclaimer audit which basically means that the records were in such poor shape that they couldn’t audit them.”

The $500 thousand dollar deficit at Tate is also the result of mismanagement. There Bounds says the district built more schools than a bond issue allowed for.

“they had to use their local operational dollars to finish the building and then to make matters worse they did not close down the third high school. And this is a school district with about 1600 students and clearly there is no need to have three high schools in a county that has a student population that small.”

Yesterday during a special call meeting, the Commission on School Accreditation recommended that the state board allow a conservator to take control of the districts day to day operations. Jean Massey of the office of accreditation, A explains why.

“Indianola is desperate, they cannot make payroll at the end of the month without assistance. Tate County may not be as serious at the immediate time but it is coming about. So we had to do both of these in order to get the funding into the district in order to move them forward.”

The State Board is expected to accept the recommendation next week and ask the governor to declare the two districts in a state of emergency. For MPB News, I'm Lawayne Childrey.