From champagne toasts to backyard fireworks and New Year’s Eve ball drops, Wednesday, January 1 ushered in the promise of new beginnings.
But for the Alamance-Burlington school system, 2025 likely represents a continuation of trying to dig out of the muck and mud in which ABSS was mired throughout much of 2024.
Just two months into 2024, ABSS became the center of scandals that were punctuated by a legislative investigation into its finances; threatened layoffs and a school closure; the abrupt departures of then-superintendent Dr. Dain Butler and several other high-ranking school officials; and criminal cases filed against current and former school employees.
Then-chief financial officer Kim McVey was the first high-ranking ABSS administrator to jump ship in mid-February. McVey is said to have submitted her resignation, effective immediately, on Friday, February 16.
Other ABSS officials gave a different account of McVey’s departure, saying Butler had rejected her resignation and instead terminated McVey on Sunday, February 18, appointing his second-in-command, deputy superintendent Lowell Rogers, as the interim CFO the following day.
To date, the only explanation of the circumstances leading to the departure of the longtime assistant finance director and CFO was given by her husband, Rick McVey, a Caswell County commissioner, during the public comments portion of the school board’s February 26 meeting. “I want to say that she has been made a scapegoat for this school system here in Alamance County,” Rick McVey told the board that evening. “Kim gave you 14 years with a total of 33 years in [school] finance.”
Based on Rick McVey’s account, McVey had offered to resign – and turn in her school system-issued cell phone and building keys – during a February 16 discussion in which Butler had criticized her lack of preparation for a budget discussion at a work session three days earlier. She left the Central Office to retrieve her phone and keys, returned to the building, where she was met at a side door by Rogers, who told her she’d need to schedule a time to turn in those items.
The day he was appointed as the interim CFO, on February 19, Rogers, 48, white, male, of 2326 Marlow Drive, Burlington, was charged by the State Bureau of Investigation the same day, February 19, with failing to report a crime against a juvenile, which North Carolina classifies as a misdemeanor.
A criminal summons that the SBI issued for Rogers on February 19 alleged that he had failed to immediately report a sexual offense “that the defendant reasonably should have known was committed against” a seven-year-old male. The court file did not specify whether the alleged victim in the case had been an ABSS student.
Rogers was placed on paid suspension from his job with ABSS on February 20 and remained on paid suspension until his resignation took effect on June 30, based on a semi-monthly personnel report that school board members approved on June 11. He continued to receive his salary, which annually totaled $173,055, according to payroll data furnished by ABSS.
In late July, the charge against Rogers was dismissed “as a result of additional information” that came out during a separate investigation by the Alamance County district attorney’s office, D.A. Sean Boone said at the time in an interview with The Alamance News. Boone pointed to the fact that Rogers was no longer employed with ABSS as part of the basis for the dismissal of the charge, as well as what the D.A. described as “information that showed there may be an explanation that might influence the direction of the case.”
Rogers later filed a petition for expungement, which also appeared to have been granted in late July, based on Alamance County records. He has since been hired as the executive director of human resources for Rockingham County schools, according to an August 2024 announcement by that school system.
Meanwhile, the evening of Friday, February 2, Butler announced his intention to recommend the elimination of 23 vacant positions; reducing months of employment for 20 positions; and eliminating 25 other positions – which were filled at the time – in order to close an estimated $3.7 million deficit in the state-funded portion of the budget for ABSS for the upcoming 2024-25 fiscal year that began July 1.
Those cuts and/or reductions in months of employment would’ve taken effect this spring but wouldn’t have altered the bottom line for the 2023-24 fiscal year, ABSS administrators revealed at a school board work session in mid-February.
State investigation into ABSS finances
On February 5 – just three days after Butler’s announcement the night of Friday, February 2, about the planned job cuts – state senator Amy Galey announced that she had asked the General Assembly’s Legislative Commission on Governmental Operations (“GovOps”) commission to investigate the school system’s financial decisions and policies.
That legislative inquiry ultimately forestalled the job cuts that Butler had announced on February 2; but then, on February 22, the superintendent announced in a written memo to staff that the Alamance Virtual School would need to be closed to save on expenses, setting off yet another firestorm among staff, students, and parents.
Butler resigns
Following a series of special-called school board meetings in which school board members met in closed session but took no action after reconvening the open portion of those meetings, school board members announced on March 4 – one day prior to the 2024 primary election – that they had agreed to accept Butler’s resignation.
Ten months after they had awarded him a $20,800 annual pay raise, the board voted to pay Butler severance equal to his yearly salary ($218,400), albeit in two installments, the second of which was made contingent upon the completion of the financial audit for 2023-24 and the availability of funding.
The first severance payment, $102,038, was to have been paid immediately; the second, a financial footnote in Butler’s resignation agreement, called for him to be paid the remaining $116,362 “only after the financial audit for the 2023-2024 school year is completed and it is determined that there are sufficient funds to pay the settlement amount.”
A presentation on the results of the financial audit for the 2023-24 fiscal year – a two-month delay of which has been attributed to the absence of a CFO – is currently scheduled for the school board’s meeting in late January, according to the school system’s new finance officer, Tony Messer, a former CFO for Chatham County schools who started work with ABSS on October 28.
Butler’s exodus on March 4 ultimately capped a series of high-profile missteps that included his June 19, 2023 revelation – during a budget public hearing – to Alamance County’s commissioners that he had secretly recorded conversations with each commissioner in his office during which, he claimed, they had each agreed to fund an increase in the county supplement for ABSS teachers.
Butler later backpedaled – when The Alamance News filed a public records request to review the recordings – saying he had destroyed the recordings. Nor did he apologize to the commissioners, as some had asked, for seemingly trying to pigeonhole them into granting an 11th-hour request for $867,930 in additional county funding for ABSS for 2023-24.
Butler’s tenure as superintendent was also marred by public outcry over his firing of the popular Southern High School football coach, Walter (“Fritz”) Hessethaler in November 2023, just hours before the Patriots’ first playoff game.
On November 30, 2023, he set off criticism again, over a press conference at Cummings High School in which he accused the county commissioners of having underfunded ABSS for decades.
That accusation was leveled again in January, after a series of heavy rainstorms rolled through the county on January 9. Later the same night, ABSS issued a press release blaming the commissioners for years of inadequate funding, which they attributed to subsequent roof leaks at seven schools. A report issued by the county commissioners revealed that, while the commissioners had allocated more than $15 million for roof repairs since late 2019, only $4.3 million (28 percent) had actually been spent by the school system.
PIO announces resignation
Other departures from the ABSS Central Office included the March 25 resignation of public information officer Les Atkins.
Atkins – whose tenure coincided with Butler’s tenure as superintendent, starting in July 2022 – had previously served as the PIO for the Roanoke Rapids Graded School district in Halifax County, before and during Butler’s five-year tenure as superintendent for that school system.
The veteran newsman, whose career in public relations and broadcast news had spanned more than 30 years, told The Alamance News in March that his resignation was in no way related to the turmoil in ABSS.
Rather, Atkins told the newspaper at the time that he’d accepted a similar marketing position with a private company and planned to focus on a budding career as a children’s book author. His first book in that genre, Brave to Be Lee, was published this summer. He and his wife Stacy Atkins, an accountant, have continued to live in Burlington since he left ABSS.
Harrison returns for a six-month encore
Two weeks later, on March 18, school board members voted to hire former ABSS superintendent Dr. Bill Harrison for a six-month encore as the interim superintendent.
In June, school board members unanimously approved Harrison’s recommendation to eliminate several support positions, and trim months of employment for three other positions, though those job cuts did little to plug the multimillion-dollar deficit that ABSS had been projected to end the fiscal year with on June 30.
The results of the legislative investigation into the school system’s finances were also released in June.
Most notably, the GovOps commission concluded that the school board and ABSS administration had violated multiple state laws, including the North Carolina School Budget Control and Fiscal Act, in awarding nearly $30 million in no-bid contracts for mold remediation in August and September 2023.
ABSS officials defended their decision, both in the fall of 2023 and following the release of the GovOps report, citing the fact that the contracts had been awarded during an emergency: the discovery of mold in 33 ABSS facilities that delayed the start of the 2023-24 school year by two weeks.
The GovOps commission, however, concluded nothing in state law permitted ABSS to enter into the no-bid contracts for mold remediation. The report stated, “Nothing [in the state’s public education laws or the state’s purchase and contract laws] removes the Board’s obligations to follow state statutes and board policies in the proper discharge of their duties in times of emergency,” and that no rationale was given for selecting those companies chosen to perform the mold remediation, Sasser Companies and Builder Services, other than the need to complete the work quickly.
The handling of the mold contracts likely ran afoul of statutory requirements to adopt a budget ordinance, or amendment, appropriating funds for the expense and to perform a “pre-audit certification,” verifying that funds were available to cover the costs of the contracts, among other violations of state law and ABSS policies, based on the GovOps report.
In late July, the search for a permanent successor to Butler resulted in the hiring of Harnett County schools superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming, a two-time regional superintendent of the year who took over on September 18.
Compared to the broadsides that punctuated Butler’s 21-month tenure, Fleming’s first three months as superintendent of ABSS have been tepid but not entirely without unsettling developments.
In September, a 15-year-old Cummings High School student and football player, Malik Mebane, collapsed and died at football practice. The cause of death has not yet been determined, according to his death certificate.
Also in September, seven-year-old ABSS student Mason Jenkins was fatally injured when he was struck by a stray bullet while sitting outside of his apartment at Beaumont Apartments in Burlington.
In mid-December, Southern High School’s wrestling coach, James (“Jim”) Giannotti, who is employed with the Alamance County sheriff’s department as a school resource officer at E.M. Holt Elementary School, resigned as the Patriots’ wrestling coach.
Giannotti’s resignation as the wrestling coach at Southern High School came halfway into the season and allegedly stemmed from a failure to report a concussion that an underclassman on the wrestling squad had sustained during a practice on December 3.
The results of an investigation into those allegations – which is said to be the target of a separate investigation by the SBI – remained pending at press time.
No criminal charges or civil lawsuit regarding those allegations have been filed in Alamance County’s court system.
Looking ahead
Several other high-profile criminal cases involving sex offenses and assaults allegedly committed by current and former ABSS employees in 2023, as well as in late 2024, remain pending but have not yet been scheduled for trial in Alamance County’s court system.
School board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves said told The Alamance News in a brief interview Monday that she’s nonetheless optimistic about the coming year for ABSS.
“With Dr. Fleming’s leadership, we will sharpen our focus on instruction and student data to ensure academic improvement across all grade levels,” the school board’s chairman said Monday. “Our work with county leaders to prioritize school safety and healthy facilities will continue into 2025. As we move beyond past financial challenges, we must be certain every dollar is spent wisely.”
