Crosby ISD approves additional audit after owing millions

“The real story is really great, 99 plus percent of the time everyday kids show up and go to school here in Crosby ISD,” says Superintendent Dr. Scott Davis.

During Monday night's special board meeting the district's budget was discussed. Right now, Crosby ISD owes more than $5.5 million and officials say this is because of a lack of cash flow and a need to pay construction expenses.

Separately, for this school year if you take all the money coming into the district and subtract payroll, the district has just $5.9 million for operation expenses. The year before, the district had spent just over $12 million for those costs.

The district also calculated out of last years operations costs, which included things like utilities, fuel, school resource officers, insurance and legal fees, it added up to about $6.2 million. Dr. Davis says even if the district cut costs like paper and pencils, they still would not have enough money to pay for everything.

Monday night, the board voted to approve an additional $20,000 audit, as well as another measure that stated that if anything illegal was found, that it would be fully prosecuted.

“I’m for it. I want to know what happened to the taxpayers money,” says Angela Hayes. Her husband Orrin Hayes says, “that’s a lot of money to disappear really quickly so whoever is responsible for, if there is criminal charges, I believe they should be prosecuted for it.”

A reason why the superintendent says he is asking all the schools to cut back as much as possible and that the district may have to have layoffs starting as soon as Christmas.

“The complexity of it all continues to unfold as we work day by day by day and I have never forgotten and will never forget this is still about peoples lives and that I can never forget. It keeps me up at night. It keeps us all up at night and it should, so, I want to make sure we get this right so it does not have to happen again,” says Dr. Davis.

There will be another special meeting to discuss this issue further on October 8.