County Commissioners will wait for results of CMS investigations

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – The Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners will wait for the results of several investigations into potential financial irregularities in Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools instead of leading their own fact-finding.

County manager Mike Bryant says the county gives CMS around $900 million dollars to support funds for local teachers, payment to charter schools, and instructional expenses.

Charlotte Mecklenburg schools are under a microscope while the state auditor investigates financial irregularities and the SBI looks for potential criminal violations. Most recently, the FBI announced it would be taking a closer look at how federal funding has been used.

The scrutiny comes as the CMS board spent more than $379,000 thousand dollars to investigate Dr. Crystal Hill before reinstating her and firing her six weeks later. The district now owes Hill a year of pay as severance.

A week before she was terminated, Dr. Hill emailed the Board of Education a 200 page document detailing concerns about contracts and conflicts of interest.

In an email moments before she was fired, Dr. Hill warned the county manager the money she’d been questioning in her memo came from the county. County Manager Bryant says he wants to see the outcome of the pending investigations.

“Given all of the uncertainty with CMS at this moment, I have more confidence and credibility in information that I will receive from the state auditor’s office, DPI, and SBI than simply requesting financial information from our CMS colleagues,” Bryant said.

Bryant said he has also been in contact with leaders in Forsyth County where the school district was in more than $40 million dollars of debt that prompted a state audit. Investigation did not find criminal wrongdoing in that case, but he says it did reveal poor money management.

“Be mindful the allegations are associated with alleged intentional mismanagement of funds, so this may not necessarily be a process breakdown, but more of a questionable behavior that oftentimes the best of the best practices may not detect until someone blows the whistle,” Bryant said.

Some commissioners wanted to see the county do its own research on how CMS funding is used, but the board eventually voted to wait for the results of the other investigations.

The county manager will meet with the state auditor on October 21st to discuss the status of the investigation and hopefully get an update on the timeline. He says the auditor’s office will present its findings to the board.