ABSS’ Fleming, Messer outline plans for more financial transparency
Alamance-Burlington school system’s top two administrators say they’re taking a hard look at the school system’s past funding mistakes and posting all of its financial statements on a new financial dashboard on the ABSS website in order to show the public where its money is going.
This appears to be the first time in recent memory that ABSS has made a vast amount of its financial information, including monthly “check registers” that show where every dollar goes, easily accessible. ABSS officials likened the new dashboard, though much smaller in scale, to the dashboard created earlier this year by the federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“I really want them to see where the needs are and what we need to appropriately care for our schools,” ABSS superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming said Monday in an exclusive interview with The Alamance News.
Meanwhile, Alamance County’s commissioners voted last week to adopt a resolution requesting that ABSS post detailed information about how all county funds had been spent by mid-October of each year (or about 90 days after the fiscal year ends on June 30).
Posting all of the school system’s financial documents to the website is a practice that Fleming said he started during his seven-year tenure as superintendent of Harnett County schools. “The commissioners did it,” Fleming said, referring to that county’s practice of making its financial statements publicly accessible.
“When I started in Harnett, there was a lot of distrust between the two boards,” Fleming recalled this week.
At the same time, the school system’s chief finance officer Tony Messer described a granular approach to tracking where every dollar goes and trying to prevent a repeat of financial missteps by the previous ABSS administration.
Messer, a former auditor-turned-public school finance officer who came to ABSS from Chatham County schools in October 2024, pointed to the results of the school system’s financial audit for 2023-24, which was presented in January and outlined multiple state budget violations, findings, and questioned costs incurred by the school system’s previous administration.
Though the auditor, Dale Smith of the Rockingham accounting firm Anderson Smith & Wike, had told the school board that his team hadn’t “run across anything that looked fraudulent,” budget violations totaled $3.2 million in 2023-24 and contributed to the $1.6 million deficit in state funding that will need to be repaid to the state by June 30, 2025.
“As an auditor I look to uncover inefficiencies; I’m basically an auditor sitting in a CFO position,” he said. The dual role means that Messer is overseeing the day-to-day financial operations for ABSS, while also analyzing compliance with a complex web of state and federal school funding formulas and regulations. Compliance with those regulations is where some public school CFOs run into trouble, Messer said.
Not long after taking over as the CFO, Messer said he began doing a deep dive (what he terms a “program review”) to find and eliminate problematic spending.
ABSS failed to sunset temporary positions funded by fed. stimulus
Among the problems that Messer came across were that ABSS had continued to fund temporary positions created at the height of the pandemic, which he described as “nurses and social workers hired to assist kids coming back from Covid,” that had been funded by a portion of the approximately $83 million that ABSS received in federal Covid-19 stimulus relief between March 2020 and March 2021.
Those positions should have been allowed to sunset, the CFO explained Monday.
Instead, ABSS extended those temporary positions and paid for them with its state funding allotment, Messer told the newspaper.
All U.S. public school systems had been given a deadline of September 30, 2024 to budget funding from the federal Covid-19 stimulus packages, and most had been warned against using those non-recurring funds to pay for recurring expenses.
“Crisis money leads to crises,” Messer added, noting that similar financial missteps occurred in N.C. public school systems following the two federal stimulus packages (Race to the Top) in 2009 and 2012 that had been meant to mitigate the impact of the worldwide economic downtown that began in September 2008, commonly termed “the Great Recession.”
Superintendent: Covid stimulus funding could’ve been used for repairs
Messer and Fleming, however, insisted in the interview Monday that the federal Covid stimulus relief funding (known formally as Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER) could have been used for repairs – contrary to what their predecessors in ABSS had said.
The school system’s previous administrators had told school board members in 2021 and 2022 that the stimulus funding couldn’t be used for building repairs that weren’t specifically tied to minimizing the spread of Covid-19.
Now, ABSS and county government officials have said that millions of dollars worth of roof replacements and new equipment will be needed, as outlined in part by a study that Alamance County’s commissioners requested and funded in the fall of 2023, which was presented to the commissioners on February 5, 2024.
“I do wish more of it went to brick and mortar [buildings],” Fleming said of the Covid-19 stimulus relief funding that ABSS had received at the height of the pandemic.
Harnett County schools, where Fleming previously served, used a portion of its Covid-19 stimulus relief funding for building repairs and maintenance, and “we got a clean audit,” the superintendent pointed out.
Other findings
During the early stages of his “program review,” Messer discovered problems he later told the school board he hadn’t previously encountered during his experience as a CFO, including the failure to budget for operating expenses once the new high school, Southeast, opened in August 2023. He also found ABSS had overpaid up to 30 school bus drivers who’d been employed in dual positions, possibly since 2017, although the exact financial impact couldn’t be determined, Messer said.
More recently, Messer said that he has identified “inefficiencies as far as our insurance procedures.” Though ABSS has a risk manager to help minimize those costs, the CFO said, referring to higher premiums and claims related to on-the-job injuries.
Workers’ compensation claims have cost close to $2 million since the fiscal year began on July 1, 2024, prompting ABSS to put all of its insurance policies out for bid and to establish a safety committee, Messer said Monday.
“I anticipate quite a bit of savings from that,” Messer said, though he estimates it will take another 24 months “to get rid of those higher expenditures related to these issues we’ve had.”
State law requires some ABSS positions to be county-funded
Maximizing how every dollar is spent sometimes means that expenses need to be shifted between the three main funds that ABSS manages – county, state, and federal – in keeping with the state’s school business rules, the CFO explained.
That’s partly why the number of ABSS employees whose positions are funded by Alamance County government fluctuates throughout the fiscal year. Messer says ABSS currently has about 75 employees whose positions are funded by Alamance County; data compiled by the state Department of Public Instruction earlier in the fiscal year calculated 180 ABSS employees as being funded by the county.
As Messer explained it, those “county-funded” positions are initially funded by the state allocation but are later moved to county funding. That allows ABSS to invest a portion of its county funding and to “maximize the return on investment,” he said. As the fiscal year progresses, and state funding is spent down, those positions are shifted back to being county-funded, he said.
“The auditors will write us up, and that goes against us [if every dollar of state funding isn’t spent],” Messer said. That information goes into a report that’s initially submitted to the Local Government Commission within the state treasurer’s office and subsequently forwarded to the General Assembly.
“I’ve been here five months and just finished my sixth audit,” Messer said, including one that he described as the “quiet” phase of the annual comprehensive financial audit by the school system’s external auditing firm, Anderson Smith & Wike. “We’ve had zero findings,” he added.
State law also requires some public school positions to be funded by county government, the CFO told the newspaper. “The only personnel you can’t pay from state [funding] is maintenance,” Messer said, because state law delegates the responsibility for overseeing and funding the construction and maintenance of public school facilities to the county government in which they’re located.
No job losses this year
Shifting expenses between the county, state, and federal funding has also helped fend off the type of financial crisis like the one ABSS faced last spring, according to the superintendent and CFO.
In fact, the 2025-26 county budget request for ABSS that school board members voted 6-0 to approve Monday night and forward to Alamance County government aims to restore about a dozen positions that ABSS eliminated from its budget this year (see related story).
The previous ABSS administration had recommended cutting dozens of jobs and/or reducing months of employment in late February 2024, based on what then-superintendent Dr. Dain Butler had projected would be a $3.2 million budget deficit this fiscal year, prior to his resignation on March 4, 2024.
A month after starting a six-month encore as interim superintendent, in April 2024 former ABSS superintendent Dr. Bill Harrison recommended eliminating four director-level positions; a vacant position for an executive director of middle schools; a lead nurse’s position; an internal auditor’s position; and “realignment” of months of employment for an unspecified number of assistant principals, bus coordinators, teachers, and student support specialists.
In an initial interview about his “program review” two weeks ago, Messer said there’d been a brief pause in a federally-funded elementary literacy tutoring program in late February. “The funding was getting ready to run out,” he said, adding that some of those positions were vacant prior to the pause.
“They were told we were pausing everything until we could [identify funding],” said then-assistant superintendent of academics Revonda Johnson. “It was just an evaluation and making sure [funds are available],” Johnson told the newspaper two weeks ago. (She has since resigned and announced plans to retire.)
For his part, Fleming said that ABSS and Harnett County schools are the only two school systems that he knows of in North Carolina that publicly release more financial information than state law requires.
The financial dashboard is being updated almost daily and will soon be expanded to include detailed information about county funding for ABSS, the school system’s chief communication officer Emily-Lynn Adkins told the newspaper Monday.
The financial dashboard can be viewed at: https://www.abss.k12.nc.us/o/abss/page/budget-dashboard
