Keep Athletic Departments Accountable

This editorial appeared in the Chronicle-Tribune on May 21, 2015

We are both grateful and concerned about the effort to plan spending for the Marion High School athletic department. Last week Athletic Director Jamy Bechler came to the school board and said he has been working in the past year to clean up the spending of funds that fall outside of the overall school budget.
“I had a stack of bills numbering about $15,000 and we did not have the money to pay for that when I came in,” Bechler said. “What we did is we tried to stop the bleeding. We tried to stabilize the athletic department and we tried to modify some behaviors in terms of making sure we put into place an expenditure process.”

Other than paying for the transportation of sports teams, public schools don’t use tax money to fund athletics, Bechler said. The department relies on donations and event ticket sales to provide much of the money that goes for things like uniforms and paying officials to referee games.

“The data we have currently goes back to 2006 where we had a CD (certificate of deposit) of $95,000,” Bechler said. “That was essentially our savings. We had a checkbook for $31,000 in 2006. Eight years later when I took over, we had $30,000 in our savings and $6,300 in our checkbook. Over the course of eight years, we lost nearly $90,000. Essentially we are living beyond our means.”

Bechler was appointed director last spring. We are grateful he had the courage to do something to fix the problem while there was still time. He has shown leadership, even though those used to spending on a whim will now have to adhere to a budget. Bechler has instituted a spending process to increase accountability and the fund now projects a surplus balance of $12,000 at the end of this year.

Thank goodness Bechler did the right thing.

But we can help but wonder along with School Board Member Pam Hutchison that if the unchecked spending without a budget went on for so many years, perhaps there are other areas of school finance the board should check and make sure matters are being handled correctly. It might not be tax money, but the athletic department money is public money. We need to have a handle on it.