Dorsey Responds to Grand Jury Report

Stephens County School Superintendent Bryan Dorsey said there were no surprises in his mind in the grand jury report released Tuesday regarding the financial problems that have plagued the Stephens County School System.

Dorsey said everything that the grand jury said in its report is what he expected to hear.

“I think it was exactly what we had been saying happened,” said Dorsey. “Just a lot of mismanagement and some serious errors that had been caused under the previous administration and we know we have a lot of correcting to do,” said Dorsey. “We never believed any of the evidence showed any criminality so it was not a surprise that there were no charges.”

The grand jury began investigating the school system in September after it was discovered earlier this year that instead of having a positive fund balance, the school system was actually more than a million dollars in the hole financially.

In that report, the grand jury made a host of recommendations to try to ensure this never happens again.

Dorsey said that all of the recommendations are worth considering and in some cases, are already being done.

He said for one that staff is attending as much training as is possible, a major emphasis of the grand jury report.

“The current finance director had gone to some training already,” said Dorsey. “I had been in multiple trainings already before coming to Stephens County.”

According to Dorsey, there are some recommendations he would like to implement, but cannot because of the financial constraints the school system faces.

He said, for example, cross-training finance personnel is challenging because of staff limitations.

“The bottom line is we are so thin right now, especially in our finance department, that cross-training opportunities do not exist just to meet the current demands on the people that are here,” said Dorsey.

Dorsey said those constraints financially are also preventing the school system from hiring an official Assistant Finance Director, as the grand jury suggested.

“Prior to the Grand Jury or any recommendations from the audit department, we knew we needed to increase the size of our financial department, but with the current financial structure and having been into a large deficit, we have not been able to justify having those expenditures when we are struggling to meet our current demands for staff,” said Dorsey.

Another grand jury recommendation centered around getting the audit for Fiscal Year 2014 completed this month by the state.

Dorsey said that was the school system’s intent.

However, he said the state of the financial statements for Fiscal Year 2014 will prevent that from happening, it appears.

“We were in hopes of being able to hire a private consultant to assist in the preparation of those financial statements,” said Dorsey. “However, when they (the consultant) reviewed them, they realized they were in such a mess, similar to the FY 13 statements, which is no surprise since basically the same process had been followed. We are now going to have solicit the state to help prepare those financial statements. I am sure that is going to delay the process.”

Dorsey did say he is hopeful that state auditors will start working on those financial statements this month and get the process started as quickly as possible.

Also, Dorsey said that the school system already has some form of a corrective action plan in place, as the grand jury requested, because of state requirements and will have to create other corrective action plans because of requirements.

Overall, he said he appreciates the grand jury looking into the problem.

“I hope it provides some assurance that there was no theft,” said Dorsey. “We will continue to do our best to restore the trust of our community.”

In its report, the grand jury said it found no evidence of any fraudulent activity related to the school system’s financial situation.