During the Alamance-Burlington school board’s meeting Monday night, chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves asked the attorney “to clarify for us in regards to the agreement we reached with Alamance County’s commissioners Friday afternoon and whether any additional vote is required” to accept the agreement by which the commissioners agreed to allocate an additional $4 million to ABSS for the fiscal year that begins July 1 (see related story, this edition).
Jason Weber, an education attorney with the Tharrington Smith law firm in Raleigh who was filling in for school board’s regular attorney, Adam Mitchell, told the board Monday night: “The short answer is no; there’s nothing else for the board to do.”
“You announced the terms of that agreement in open session, so there is nothing else for the board to do,” Weber said.
ABSS superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming pointed out Monday night, “We do have to get a funding letter to our auditors by June 30. It will state the old [budget] numbers.” The funding letter will also state the pending “settlement amount,” he said. “Then we will get a new [funding] letter” with the new budget numbers after the commissioners vote on the settlement agreement on July 7, the superintendent said.
Ellington-Graves told the newspaper separately on Monday that two provisions in the agreement reached on Friday – numbers 11 (Authority to Execute) and 15 (Effective Date) of the agreement – eliminate the need for an additional vote by the school board, which she said was her understanding, based on the advice of the board’s attorneys.
The provision in the state law that governs the procedure for a resolution of a dispute over county funding for the local school systems and triggers the need for a formal vote by each board pertains only to an agreement that is reached in an official mediation [115C-431(b)], which wasn’t needed in this case, according to the school board’s chairman.
Later during the meeting, school board members thanked the commissioners for the extra infusion of funding that they had agreed to allocate to ABSS last Friday afternoon.
Near the conclusion of the meeting, school board member Tameka Harvey voiced her appreciation “to the county commissioners, getting their budget passed and helping us out.”
“Sometimes you have to give people a chance – it’s a new board,” said Harvey, who began her first term on the school board in December 2024. “It’s about every student who touches the pavement, walking into every school. This is why we’re here. Thank you to our community for showing up when we needed you. I just want to say, give us a chance.”
School board vice chairman Dan Ingle said Monday night, “Thank you, county commissioners. It was one of the better budget years. It’s a great thing that everybody’s treating everybody with respect and dignity. The way it was, back in 2004 when I became a county commissioner, [there] was very little information that went from the school board to the commissioners, in terms of how they spent their money. That’s not the case anymore; you can go online and look at all of it now and that’s the way it should be.”
The school board’s chairman echoed that pledge to ensure that ABSS is accountable for how it spends its funding.
“Thank you to our commissioners for your work and your collaboration with the board as we navigated budget season this year,” Ellington-Graves said Monday night. “We certainly welcome the accountability; hold us accountable; make sure that we are spending every penny wisely and the way that we should.
“The financial dashboard [on the ABSS website that] you’ve heard me talk about since February – it’s out there,” Ellington-Graves added. “Take a look at it; if you have questions, call or email any of us, and we’ll be glad to find you an answer if we don’t have it. If there’s something you want to see that you don’t see [on the dashboard] let us know, and we’ll see if we can put it out there. Our goal is to be transparent, and I am hopeful that this is going to be a new era next year for these boards. Together, I think we can move our county forward.”
The financial dashboard is located on the ABSS website at: https://www.abss.k12.nc.us/o/abss/page/budget-dashboard
Read the newspaper’s editorial page views on whether the two boards need to vote on the agreement: https://alamancenews.com/approval-with-no-votes-huh/
