Superintendent responds to concerns over school system spending

JACKSON, Tenn. — A list of expenditures has recently come out regarding how roughly over $80,000 was spent by the Jackson-Madison County School System.

This list has raised quite a few questions because of the large amount of spending or how they money was spent. We were able to go through this list with the Superintendent, Dr. Marlon King.

“Since my tenure — I’ll put it that way — we have made strong investments in our employees,” said Dr. King. “We’ve made investments into everybody, teachers, support staff. It’s been about $11 million that we have made an investment, and what is so exciting about that is we have not requested any funding from our county legislative body.”

Several items on the list included thousands of dollars in luncheons, ranging from a few hundred dollars to several thousand per event. We wanted to know what Dr. King had planned for these luncheons and why they were important.

“And one of the things you’ll see is it’s around professional development, something that we believe,” Dr. King said. “So when you have professional development, you feed people, and that’s what we’ve done. We have leadership meetings every week where principals engage, we’ve done really good work there, and they have a meal and they’re appreciated. And that is my way of showing them that I appreciate them so.”

One of the biggest questions regarding the list was an expenditure of about $7,000 for a riverboat cruise in Memphis, and around $1,700 for massages for principals.

“The thing is this expenditure is no more than what we’ve done. I mean it’s nothing any different,” Dr. King said. “You invest in your employees, you invest in professional development. Everything on that list, the majority of things on that list is around professional development.”

Dr. King goes on to say that they receive a lot of donations. He says that the rainy day fund has been raised by $7 million. Dr. King also says that he has seen many benefits during his tenure from investing into the employees.

Dr. King says he plans to continue to invest into the employees.

Dr. King also provided us with an itemized list of the the expenditures, which he says took place not during a single school year, but over a three-year period. Click here to view the list.

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