By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com

Lee County’s two governing bodies took a couple concrete steps last week aimed at improving a breakdown in communications that’s festered for the better part of a year.

The Lee County Board of Commissioners and the Lee County Board of Education agreed on March 19 to allow direct communications between their appointed finance officers and to further investigate a model for regular, in person meetings between the two boards. The decision came at a joint meeting aimed at squashing differences between the boards – the third such meeting in nine months.

The boards have been at odds for years now over the question of funding, particularly how much the Lee County Schools district gets in county tax dollars, and the division seems to have grown over the past 12 months. Additionally, a political groundswell from the school district’s classified employees in recent months – those like instructional assistants, library and office staff, maintenance and custodial workers (many of whom pull double duty as bus drivers) – over compensation has increased the tension.

The classified employees have said they feel they’ve been punted back and forth by the commissioners and school board alike, with each side pointing toward the other as the one most responsible for the employees’ pay.

What’s at stake

The two previous joint meetings mostly consisted of PowerPoint presentations from each side, designed to deal with issues that involved trust as a major component. But little, if any, progress was made. Breakfast meetings with the two chairs, Commissioner Chair Kirk Smith and School Board Chair Sherry Womack, were likewise unable to produce fruit. Republicans hold a four seat majority on the board of commissioners, and all seven seats on the school board, so the divide isn’t partisan in nature.

Many of the issues that put the two boards at odds were longstanding grudges that went back for at least four years. The school board felt the commissioners were choosing to ignore the list of expansion items they bring to the table each year, giving the schools a much smaller piece of the funding pie.

Those dollars allocated have come with no-strings-attached directions from the commissioners, allowing them to be used as the school board sees fit. But those funds are insufficient for addressing the most critical of its needs, exasperating school board members and district office staff.

For their part, the commissioners have felt the amount and type of data provided by the school board has been confusing, changing from year to year, and difficult to connect with the commissioners’ own strategic plan. Historically, that data has varied in quantity – at times as thin as few sheets of paper, and at others as many as 43 pages. They’ve also expressed sentiments of being uninformed about issues facing the district until they become crises, particularly the need for new schools over the next five to 10 years and where they might be located.

And perhaps most importantly, the commissioners have felt leadership on the school board itself is either unaware or dismissive of the limitations of Lee County’s revenue reserves. In short, commissioners have felt the school board has developed tunnel vision when it considers the amount of funds the school board will need in the new budget year. They see this type of thinking as a potential threat not just to the county’s checkbook, but also to the greater goodwill between county agencies that has grown over years.

An olive branch fails

As Wednesday’s meeting began, the commissioners and their staff were seated on one side of the room, directly across from the school board members and their staff. One of the first items discussed was the proposal put forward by the commissioners during the second half of 2024 for a joint maintenance facility and school bus garage that could possibly be located on land owned by the school board that for years was the site of Jonesboro Elementary School until it burned in April 2023.

The county then approached the school board in the spring of 2024 with what first seemed to be a win-win proposal – to create a shared facility similar to one operating in neighboring Chatham County. After visiting that garage, the commissioners proposed a new facility to serve both county vehicles and school buses from a single location.

But several school board members saw the plan as a ruse. Their perception was that an olive branch was being extended to the school board to bury the hatchet, but that the commissioners would go back to shorting the board of education each year as soon as it got what it wanted.

No matter how the plan was sweetened, none of the seven school board members showed any interest. And with that, any suggestions for a jointly operated maintenance facility disappeared.

Five-on-Five group proposal gets some traction

At a winter meeting of the North Carolina School Boards Association, Lee County Board of Education Chair Sherry Womack heard a presentation made by Dare County Manager Bobby Outten and invited him to address the two gathered boards on Wednesday.

Outten spoke about about the novel way his county and the school board there among some of the most expensive real estate in North Carolina had opened a channel between the two, with improved communication among the members and staff, and Womack felt the model was one that could work in Lee County.

The concept is called Five-on-Five because both the county and the school board contribute five members equivalent in job functions. The thinking is that if this idea can work in a region of 37,000 year-round residents (a number that swells to 350,000 for six months of the year), it could produce similar results here.

The goal of the Five-on-Five group is to most efficiently use the available funds and to get as many projects accomplished as possible in any given year. The groups meet at least once every three months, sometimes with a formal agenda and sometimes with no set topics.

Outten said there’s real conversation between the bodies about what pending priorities will be – perhaps an urgent jail replacement versus a new football field for the high school, for example. The key to working out how to get a handle on these projects is communicating, Otten continued. He was quick to stress that there were no immediate results in their process.

“Success is the product of collaboration,” he said. “And there are no shortcuts.”

To get there, Outten said “the key to this whole process is communication. And sometimes, establishing that level of trust that you need to make this whole process work takes a long time. And a whole lot of lot of patience. My first challenge was to get the school superintendent and the finance director to trust me. That’s something that had never been done before. It took several years for it to happen, but it eventually did, and now if I call and I give him a number or series of numbers, he knows that what I am telling him is the absolute truth.”

No future meetings have been scheduled, and only two actions were taken during the meeting. The first was to allow the chief finance officers of the county and the board of education to open a dialogue that might eventually produce the first fruits of a better relationship that now, though distant, can be be visualized on the horizon. The second was made in a motion from school board member Chris Gaster, to investigate how the Five-on-Five model might work in Lee County and come back to the board with some concrete suggestions on how to get it off the ground.

In the scheme of things, the actions aren’t much. But they’re indications that the county commissioners and school board have stopped, at least for the moment, blaming the other for their impasse. Now, they’ve agreed on a couple of actions that could lead to a resolution of differences and a smoother road for future boards to travel.

It won’t take long to find out whether these actions are indeed the long-awaited restart of the good relations between the two boards, or whether it was simply good political theater.