The Fog Around the Winston Salem/Forsyth School District | Eastern North Carolina Now

The Fog Around the Winston Salem/Forsyth School District

BY: HOOD RICHARDSON

The North Carolina State Auditor blew a lot of the fog out of Forsyth County last week. He released his report based on information he obtained from “the State Auditor’s Tip Line”. Someone called and reported an estimated 46-million-dollar deficit in the Winston Salem/Forsyth School System on July 29, 2025.

This deficit accumulated over three or four years, however annual deficits during the past few years had grown larger each year. The 2024-year deficit was $15,406,607 and the partial year deficit for 2025 is already $14,298,593.

It looks like most of the deficit spending involved salary and benefits for employees. The total salary and benefit expense for the year 2021 was $8,176,896 and the 2024 expense was $23,731,686. That is an average increase of 63 percent per year. Alarming even in this time of severe inflation.

It is a lot worse than 63 percent per year during the two years between 2021 and 2024. The increases are astounding. Salary and benefits went from $8,176,896 in 2021 to $56,208,645 for the year 2022 and the salary expense was $49,843,474 for the year 2023. The records show “bonus pay” in the amount of $32,178,772 was paid during the year 2022 and $19,644,918 was paid during the year of 2023. These are astounding numbers. The source of this information is the State Auditor’s Report.

The reason for the bonus pay was because of COVID and the money came from the Federal Government. I am confident that John Q. Public was not aware this kind of excess pay was being handed out during COVID. I am now aware that our present inflation was caused by the Federal Government’s mishandling of the COVID epidemic by flooding the nation with unearned money.

Examination of the State Auditor’s Table 2 spreadsheet on ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund) expenditures is alarming. Expenses in this fund alone went from $491,686 in 2020 to $27,028,945 in 2021 to $90,741,547 in 2022 to $96,668,189 in 2023 and then $51,562,337 during 2024. Included in these numbers are the bonuses discussed in the above paragraph.

This school system has a 2025 enrollment of 50,550 students and 6,783 full-time equivalent employees. Their entire budget is several hundred million dollars (maybe as much as 600 million).

The State Auditor makes the point, several times, that the school system never adjusted staffing and expense to actual conditions. That is, as revenues fell, the system failed to adjust the number of employees. They failed to spend within the amounts of money they had been appropriated.

The following is one of the paragraphs in the Winston Salem/Forsyth County Schools’ reply to the State Auditor. The statement defines the problem and points to the solution. The solution is to clean house and start over. However, it looks like all those responsible will keep their jobs whether they are competent or not.

Statement from interim School Superintendent:

“WS/FCS maintains, and we believe the Auditor’s report confirms, that the current financial crisis which WS/FCS is experiencing was not the result of any illegal misappropriation of funds or fraudulent behavior on the part of any member of its Finance Department or district leadership. It was the result of years of poor accounting practices and lack of financial management. WS/FCS accepts accountability for its financial mistakes and will take all necessary steps to restore the financial health of this district.”

With this statement, can those who were incompetent to run the system be the same people to fix it? I am not sure the statement is believable that there was no fraudulent behavior. With this amount of money and the lack of financial controls there can be considerable fraud. The State of North Carolina requires the financial officer of certain government organizations to certify that funds are available and budgeted before certain purchases may be made. Violating those laws could be called fraud. The Auditor has only been working on this since July 29, 2025.

The audit report does not address whether or not the system is paying its bills on time. The Forsyth Board of County Commissioners met last week and appropriated an immediate amount of approximately 8 million dollars to the school system.

All information presented in this article came from the report by the State Auditor and newspaper articles. The Audit report was not indexed on the Auditor’s web site as of Saturday August 16. Try this portal for the audit:  https://www.wsfcs.k12.nc.us/o/wsfcs/page/community-budget-updates. This report is interesting to anyone interested in government. There are multitudes of unanswered questions.