Bibb County Schools Spending: What Is Bibb Buying?

Why I Am Doing This (Against My Better Judgment)

I retired in March with a modest plan: grade nothing, attend no mandatory training, and never again click through a PowerPoint during advisement.

Then the deficit headlines landed. $23.8 million in May. About $15 million in June. $16.63 million in August. $8.29 million after the millage vote. The number changed more often than the weather forecast, and the public was angry. Readers, neighbors, and former colleagues began asking me to bring my magnifying glass to the books.

I said no. Then maybe. Then yes, reluctantly, which is how most bad ideas begin. I had no idea how many hours this would swallow. Investigative journalism is the only job where you work nights and weekends for free and then buy your own reading glasses.

So here we are: six parts, one magnifying glass, and a watchdog named Winston who supervises mostly by napping. The question underneath all of it is the one the public has been asking in about forty different ways: where does the money go, and what do we get for it?

Bibb County Schools Spending: What the $421.7 Million Measures

Open Georgia, operated by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, publishes payments reported by public organizations. I recomputed Bibb’s four annual exports, excluding the SALARY and BENEFITS payroll entries. The remaining payments total:

Source: Open Georgia, Other Expenditure Payments, four annual exports retrieved October 6, 2026. SALARY and BENEFITS excluded; all other reported payee names retained and summed to the cent before rounding for display.

In FY2025 alone, the excluded payroll was $187,935,486.81 in salary and $99,781,343.71 in benefits, or $287,716,830.52 combined. That is a separate pile. Adding piles with overlapping scope is how a spreadsheet becomes a rumor with decimal places.

Some large payments are entirely unsurprising. A bus, a roof, and an electric bill can all be expensive without being boondoggles. Schools operated without them would offer an unusually immersive lesson in weather and walking.

The largest FY2025 payee was a construction firm at $18,220,869.26, followed by bus sales, Georgia Power, Kelly Services, and a bank at $2,880,566.04. A payee name tells us who was reported as paid; it does not explain every purchase behind the name, and the bank entry needs its underlying agreement before anyone labels it a fee, a device lease, or something else.

Three Rules for Reading the Receipts

• Payments are not contract prices. A fiscal-year total can cover several projects or contract periods. Board approval, invoicing, and payment can fall in different years.
• Payee names are not necessarily companies. The list includes individuals, reimbursements, generic labels, and spelling variants. Counts use exact reported names, not a census of unique businesses or contracts.
• A record I did not locate is not a record proved nonexistent. Some board attachments were inaccessible. “I did not locate” describes this review, not concealment or the absence of internal evaluation.

These are management-reported records, and Open Georgia’s data notice does not provide independent assurance of every entry. The calculations were checked against the exports, with amounts rounded to cents before summing. The spending measures below have stated definitions and years; they are not interchangeable.

Those limits do not make scrutiny impolite. Taxpayers do not have to prove a crime before asking whether a purchase earned its keep. “Legal to buy” and “wise to buy” are different questions. The board has to answer both.

The Houston Comparison: Less Spending, Better Measured Results, Higher Teacher Pay

Houston is not a distant utopia run by a committee of educational unicorns. It is nearby, larger, and competes in the same regional labor market. Its mix of spending, results, and teacher pay makes it the sharpest comparison in this article.

Sources: Georgia FY2025 FESR; 2024-25 EOG counts; FY2024 Census school-finance file; Georgia DOE retention dashboard; salary schedules cited below. Years and definitions differ by row; methods accompany the detailed comparisons. Salaries cover 190 days; retention is rounded within-district retention.

Expect the reply about poverty, because it is coming and it is half true. The state’s own workbook splits that $1,189.25 per-pupil gap by source: $1,101.32 of it is federal money; the state-and-local difference is $87.93. Federal dollars arrive with federal instructions, and most of the headline gap is money earmarked for students in poverty. Poverty is a serious argument for spending more where children are actually taught: reading specialists, tutoring, paraprofessionals. It is not an explanation for $322 per pupil in general administration against Houston’s $108, or for $430 per student in web subscriptions and licenses against Houston’s $166. Poverty does not consume software seats, and it does not sit in a central-office chair. Student need argues for money pointed at children. Explaining these gaps requires explaining the overhead, not just the children.

The dates differ: spending and achievement are FY2025 and 2024-25, general administration is FY2024 federal data, and teacher pay uses the FY2027 schedules. Poverty, disabilities, English-learner needs, and fixed costs can also differ, and these unadjusted figures cannot isolate what management caused. What they do establish is that Bibb’s higher spending is not accompanied by stronger results or higher scheduled teacher pay at the points examined.

That is the outrage: the people asked to do the educating see a less competitive salary schedule while an expensive collection of purchases keeps demanding to be called an investment. The burden belongs on the district to explain the tradeoffs. “Our students have needs” should lead to a specific account of the help those dollars bought.

Five Districts, One State Spending Measure

Muscogee, Fayette, and Newton broaden the picture. Their FY2025 enrollments, with Houston’s, run from 18,033 to 29,670; Bibb’s is 20,531.

Source: FY2025 District FESR workbook. These are the state’s included expenditure amounts per pupil; they are not the full nonpayroll ledger or total spending divided by enrollment.

Bibb was the highest of these five districts in all three years shown. Its FY2025 $14,805.61 was $1,189.25 above Houston’s $13,616.36, about 8.7% more.

This is Georgia’s Financial Efficiency Star Rating measure, which excludes food, construction, and costs not assignable to one year.

General Administration Takes a Bigger Bite

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, FY2024 school-finance data, downloaded district file. Calculations use V33 enrollment, TCURELSC current elementary/secondary spending, E08 general administration, and TCURINST instruction. Dollar fields are in thousands; source definitions differ from Georgia FESR.

In the federal FY2024 data, Bibb spent about $322 per pupil on general administration against Houston’s $108, nearly three times as much. Instruction represented 53.1% of Bibb’s current spending versus 61.3% in Houston.

Still, nearly three times the general-administration spending per student deserves an explanation with nouns and numbers. “Supporting excellence” is not a line item. It is what a line item says when it would rather you stop reading.

Administrator Counts and Salaries: Keep the Claim Honest

Sources: Georgia 2024-25 Certified Personnel file (Administrators category; personnel counts and position averages are separate measures) and FY2025 FESR enrollment. Part-time personnel excluded.

Houston has more full-time certified administrators in raw numbers, 168 against Bibb’s 142. Per student, though, Bibb runs about 6.9 administrators per 1,000 students against Houston’s 5.7, roughly 22% more in Bibb. Reported average salaries are nearly even, $111,012.32 in Bibb against $110,290.93 in Houston, with daily averages of $514.57 and $486.66 across different contract lengths. The file reports personnel counts separately from position averages; it does not support a claim that every Bibb administrator is paid more.

The category includes school and district administrators, so it is not a central-office-only count or proof that particular jobs are unnecessary. The stronger case is density plus the general-administration gap. Inflate the claim, and you hand officials an easy number to rebut instead of a difficult priority to explain. Bibb runs roughly 22 percent more administrators per student and still presents its front office as the lean option.

The Teacher-Pay Gap Gets Real in a Household Budget

Sources: Bibb FY2027 certified salary schedule and Houston FY2027 certified salary schedule, school year 2026-27; professional certification, 190 contract days, matched years of service credited by the schedules, before additional stipends or individual adjustments.

At 21 or more credited years, Houston’s scheduled advantage is $6,462.53 for a bachelor’s, $8,263.18 for a master’s, and $11,841.46 for a doctorate. To a district, that is a column in a staffing presentation. To a teacher, it is a mortgage payment, childcare, and groceries. A motivational banner does not pay the electric bill. Stipends, benefits, and individual placement can shift these gaps, but the published difference is plain.

One clarification for readers of Part 1: it cited $48,740 as a new Bibb teacher’s FY2026 starting pay. The FY2027 schedule here starts at $50,789.30. Both districts’ figures in this article are FY2027.

Retention and Results Make the Priorities Harder to Defend

Georgia DOE’s dashboard shows within-district teacher retention of 82% in Bibb and 89% in Houston for 2025, and 81% versus 88% for 2024, about seven more teachers per 100 staying in Houston. Pay is not the only factor, and a FY2027 schedule cannot explain FY2025 departures. But a district with weaker retention should examine pay, workload, and working conditions before assuming what teachers most need is another purchased initiative.

Sources: Georgia’s 2024-25 Milestones EOG file (district All Students/All Grades totals; rates computed from proficiency and distinguished counts rather than adding rounded percentages); 2024-25 graduation file; FY2025 FESR workbook. EOG covers tested elementary/middle grades, not high-school End of Course tests. CCRPI is the College and Career Ready Performance Index, not the financial-efficiency star rating.

For every 100 English test takers in the 2024-25 district totals, roughly 23 in Bibb reached proficiency or distinguished performance, versus 47 in Houston. In math it is roughly 22 versus 49. Houston’s four-year graduation rate was also higher, 93.28% versus 88.97%. The proficiency figures cover tested elementary and middle grades and cannot prove cause. My judgment is about priorities: paying more per pupil while posting much weaker achievement and offering teachers less is a poor advertisement for Bibb’s choices. The district should explain what its additional spending achieved.

Eleven Years in the Circus

Before the receipts, a confession and an opinion, both labeled.

The confession: when Bibb’s budget troubles hit the news, I was not shocked. The opinion: Bibb County Schools has not been run well for a long time, and I do not mean this fiscal year. I mean all 11 years I worked there. That is my judgment as a teacher, not an audit finding, and I hold it the way people hold opinions they earned the hard way, standing in a classroom at 7:45 on a Monday.

What I watched, year after year, was a district that treated education like a spaghetti dinner: throw a handful at the wall and see what sticks. Every August brought a new initiative with a new logo, new acronyms, a new training, and a promise that this one would finally fix everything. By the next August, last year’s miracle cure had quietly disappeared or been renamed, and the new name arrived with the same breathless confidence. Same soup, new can. Teachers learned to nod, click through the slides, and wait for it to blow over. We rarely waited long.

Then there was the phrase “data-driven.” Meetings were full of it. I laughed at it then and I laugh at it now, because in my experience the data we were handed was unreliable. Data-driven decisions only work when the data is right. Driving on a bad map is not navigation. It is a very confident way to get lost.

I cannot audit the classroom data I scoffed at, and I will not pretend I can. The district’s financial data is another matter, because outside eyes have looked. By the district’s own January 15 memo, $7.417 million in salary and benefit costs had been left out or underbudgeted in a budget the board had already approved. The state now classifies Bibb as a moderate-risk district following four audit findings, and the district’s own documents name management oversight as the cause. A district that misses $7.4 million in its own budget is asking us to trust its data-driven decisions. I will let you decide how much trust that buys.

Fairness requires one more sentence: the audit itself received an unmodified opinion, meaning the financial statements were fairly presented, and the findings concern controls and accounting, not theft. Nothing here alleges a crime. A circus can be badly run without anyone stealing the tent.

Keep that circus in mind for the next section, because its longest-running act has a name.

Leader in Me: The Longest-Running Act in the Circus

Leader in Me brings Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People into schools: take initiative, set goals, manage priorities, seek mutual benefit, listen, collaborate, renew yourself. These are agreeable goals. So are eating vegetables and being kind to your grandmother. Their desirability does not make a particular commercial package the best way to teach them. My earlier pieces, Leadership Elixir or Educational Mirage? and Genuine Leadership Training or Expensive Illusion?, lay out my objections. They are critiques, not independent findings.

The Verdict, Up Front

I will save you the suspense. After 11 years in Bibb classrooms, I believe Leader in Me has been a complete and utter waste of the district’s money. That is my judgment, not an audit finding, and I hold it with the confidence of someone who watched the program arrive in his classroom.

Here is the product with the slogans removed. Leader in Me takes Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits, a self-help bestseller written for adult executives, and shrinks it to kid size. Be proactive. Begin with the end in mind. Think win-win. It is a corporate seminar in a school uniform. I call it recycled, because the framework is Covey’s, and I call it garbage, which is my opinion and not a technical term.

Now the part that should bother every taxpayer. The district already employs people whose job is to build classroom materials. In my experience from 11 years inside Bibb schools, the district employs dozens of academic coaches across its schools, with a few more working in the central office. Their salaries are public money, and their job is to design lessons, train teachers, and support instruction. A short unit on responsibility, goal-setting, and getting along with others is not rocket surgery. A coach with a free afternoon and a YouTube account can find more free material on those ideas than a school could use in a decade, and a team of coaches could write something tailored to Bibb’s children instead of a brand’s. That headcount is my account, not a payroll audit, and the board can settle the question by publishing how many instructional coaches and curriculum staff it employs and what they cost. But I struggle to believe a district with that much coaching talent on the payroll had to rent a brand name to teach children to be on time and say please.

One honest complication: the state funded K-3 literacy coaches in each elementary school for 2026-27, and the district’s own May 21, 2026 Budget Brief notes that the state funded those positions at an entry-level salary assumption, with the district absorbing the difference. So part of the coach headcount is state-mandated. That explains some of the count. It does not explain the discretionary rest, and it does not give the vendor a local results report it has not produced.

The question is not whether Leader in Me contains any good ideas. Of course it does. It adapted them from a bestseller. The question is why the public pays a vendor, year after year, for what the district’s own staff could build and the internet gives away.

There Is Research. There Is Still a Local Question.

CASEL’s Program Guide awards Leader in Me its SELect designation and identifies evidence in grades K-5, describing a quasi-experimental evaluation of 154 elementary schools (2009-2015, reported in an unpublished 2018 manuscript) whose reported benefit was a school-level reduction in conduct and discipline problems. The product sells K-12 programming; that evidence summary concerns elementary schools, and the outcome it measured was conduct.

A blanket “no evidence” claim would be wrong. So would treating that evaluation as proof that Bibb’s implementation justified its bill. Picture it in gym terms: a study showed memberships help people exercise. Does that justify paying for one you never use, when a free park sits across the street? The study compared program schools with other schools; it never tested the program against free alternatives. The question was never whether Leader in Me can work somewhere. It is whether it worked here, at this price, against the free options. After 11 years, my answer is no.

In the two Bibb high schools where I worked, I never heard a single teacher praise the program. Not one. Teachers treated it as a joke, and so did the students, especially the older ones. What reached my classroom was not polished corporate training. It was a counselor’s PowerPoint on Canvas, clicked through during advisement, our homeroom period, on the scattered occasions we got to it at all. I never saw it change one school day. That is my account, not a districtwide study, and elementary staff may report benefits I did not see. But a purchased transformation that reaches a classroom as an occasional slide deck is a remarkably expensive way to fill a few minutes of homeroom.

The Payments and the Next Check

Source: Open Georgia, Bibb County Board of Education, FY2022-FY2025; payments to the named payee, not contract prices.

Annual payments fell from $846,564.63 to $409,285.51, and that decline deserves acknowledgment. A watchdog who hides a falling bill because it spoils the punch line is just doing public relations in the opposite direction. The ledger does not identify the product on every line, so I cannot assign every dollar to a Leader in Me contract.

The $2,151,523.69 four-year total includes every reported payment to FRANKLIN COVEY PRODUCTS, and the category detail behind it is mostly consulting and dues: FY2022 included $539,500 in federal consulting and $184,038 in federal dues and fees; FY2025’s largest lines were $236,720 in dues and fees and $119,880 in consulting under the state/other label.

The June 2023 Board Brief disclosed a $342,130 Leader in Me contract using ARP funding. The June 2025 brief approved continued funding for 2025-26 and published no dollar figure for that year. Part 1 of this series said the June renewal carried no public dollar figure. That was incomplete, and the record deserves a correction: the district’s June 18, 2026 Board Brief documents the 2026-27 renewal at $363,759.00 from the general fund. The price is published, in the district’s own brief.

For scale, that documented renewal equals about seven beginning Bibb teachers’ annual base salaries under the FY2027 schedule, before benefits. That is not a claim that canceling the program would fund seven complete positions. It is a reminder that an invoice has an opportunity cost.

I did not locate a districtwide public evaluation connecting the spending to defined Bibb outcomes or comparing alternatives. Calling the goal “culture” should not make the purchase immune to a report card.

Seventeen Lighthouses Still Need a Spending Compass

Bibb’s March 2026 announcement says 17 schools have reached Lighthouse status. (The release lists 16 names; Hartley, recognized in April 2025, reconciles the count.) The recognition may reflect real work by students and staff. But the vendor selling the program also awards the designation. The restaurant cannot settle whether dinner was worth the price by awarding itself five forks. District-publicized academic honors at Carter, Springdale, and Miller deserve acknowledgment; they still do not isolate the program’s contribution from teachers, other interventions, or changes in the students served.

Two newer published studies point the other way, and they belong on the record. A 2023 meta-analysis combined twelve studies and 198,176 students and found a small overall positive effect, d = .20, on school climate and student behavior; two of its authors are FranklinCovey employees. A 2024 AERA Open study matched 117 Leader in Me schools against 348 similar schools and reported more favorable achievement and discipline results for the Leader in Me schools; the design matched schools after the fact rather than assigning them at random. Neither study walked Bibb’s halls or priced Bibb’s renewal. Results somewhere else do not answer what Bibb got for what Bibb paid, and Bibb has published no local results report that would.

The Software Shelf: A Gym Membership With a Login Screen

A January gym membership arrives full of ambition. By April, its most dependable exercise may be the monthly debit. A school license can have the same problem: the purchase promises activity, while the bill proves only that somebody remembered to pay it.

That is a risk to investigate, not a finding that Bibb’s licenses went unused. The reproducible state category is COMMUNICATIONS – WEB BASED SUBSCRIPTIONS AND LICENSES. It totaled $8,831,883.71 in FY2025 and $33,457,079.58 across four years.

Sources: Open Georgia payment detail and FY2025 FESR enrollment. This is a common accounting category, not a comparison of identical products or all technology spending. Districts can classify similar purchases differently or buy through resellers.

Bibb’s roughly $430 per student was 2.6 times Houston’s $166. That is not proof of paying 2.6 times the price for identical software, since scope, resellers, and accounting practices differ. It is proof of a question.

The category includes instructional, administrative, and other online resources, so the 131 FY2025 payee names are not 131 unused apps. For example, FY2025 payments to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt totaled $2,468,605.09, including $2,097,390.75 in licenses, and Renaissance Learning received $1,620,199.76, including $1,432,700.39 in licenses.

Teachers need functioning devices and useful curriculum. They also need time to use them. A cupboard full of overlapping tools can create work while looking like support. The relevant question is which purchase solved which problem and why it deserved renewal.

Usage Can Be Measured. Publish the Useful Parts.

Usage can be measured. Bibb’s SOAR Academy app page routes students through ClassLink to Canvas and other platforms; payments to CLASSLINK INC. totaled $308,330.53 over four years. ClassLink describes resource-use analytics that could inform taxpayers in aggregate without exposing student-level records. Bibb has published usage before: its July 2022 brief reported more than 3,000 Tutor.com sessions from March through June 2022 beside a proposed $528,000 ceiling for 2022-23 (different periods, so no honest cost-per-session can be computed). The June 2026 brief also disclosed a Lightspeed renewal through CDW, a reseller relationship a payee-name search would miss. What I did not locate is a current public inventory connecting each paid platform to seats, active usage, price, purpose, overlap, and evaluated value. Historic usage and individual approval notices help; they do not answer the whole renewal question. The clicks are counted somewhere. They simply never seem to be counted out loud.

A Technology Chief Must Manage Costs, Too

Bibb identifies Kevin Adams as its Chief Information Officer. He should be accountable for explaining the cost and performance of the technology portfolio his division oversees, with evidence teachers and taxpayers can understand, not a vendor brochure dressed for a board meeting.

The purchasing standard still needs demonstrating: competitive unit prices, reliable systems, a disciplined replacement schedule, useful software, and cancellations when use or value falls short. Publish who requested each major purchase, who evaluated it, and who approved it; a payment ledger cannot assign every decision to Adams when curriculum, finance, procurement, and the board all touch the process.

I would have the board commission an independent review of technology purchasing and utilization, with a public summary and an action plan. If leadership cannot meet a measurable cost-and-performance standard, the board should recruit someone with a proven record of managing comparable networks, contracts, and budgets. Students need working technology. They do not need a subscription museum. Mr. Adams gets a fuller hearing later in this series.

The Long Tail: Small Checks, a Very Large Buffet

The large invoices attract attention. Thousands of smaller entries keep the line moving.

In each of the four years, between 2,453 and 2,696 payee names took less than $100,000 apiece, together $14.3 to $16.0 million a year, and between 1,914 and 2,107 names a year took less than $5,000.

Across the four years, 1,697 exact names appear in at least three annual exports. Of those, 1,537 stayed below $100,000 in each year they appeared. Recurring payments do not establish automatically renewing contracts.

Repairs, food, registrations, reimbursements, and supplies can legitimately generate long lists. Nor is $100,000 here a bidding threshold: it is a payee’s annual total. It cannot prove split purchasing or that bidding was required and evaded. The question is whether actual purchasing rules and reviews keep the buffet disciplined.

Two labels particularly need supporting detail: PURCHASE CARD TRANSACTION totals $2,426,790.40 and ONE TIME VENDOR $2,126,611.14 across four years, $4,553,401.54 together. The state export does not identify the suppliers behind those entries. District receipts, statements, and reconciliations may.

That limitation does not establish concealment. It does mean the public ledger alone cannot answer a basic question: who ultimately supplied what? If your household spending app put $4.55 million under “miscellaneous,” you would probably request something more illuminating than a pie chart.

A middle band holds 189 recurring names paid between $100,000 and $1 million cumulatively (188, excluding an unexplained entry under the district’s own name, an accounting item rather than proof the district paid itself).

The largest names in that band are a map for review, not a blacklist: curriculum publishers, testing and data platforms, food suppliers, utilities, and service companies. They cover different services and may deliver excellent value. Effective oversight should connect recurring payments to purpose, approval, price, and renewal decisions. A parent should not need a forensic-accounting apprenticeship to follow the money.

The board has taken a useful step. Its July 16, 2026 brief votes to make district credit-card statements publicly inspectable and to post supporting documents at least five days before action on items of $150,000 or more, with emergency and board-waiver exceptions. That may help explain generic entries in future exports. Follow-through matters.

Measured the same way, Houston reports more raw payee names than Bibb, 2,785 against 2,584, though fewer per 1,000 students because Houston enrolls more children. That complicates any claim that Bibb simply has “too many vendors.” Counts can reflect reimbursements and reporting practice; spending discipline must be judged by the purchases behind them. A haystack that size is not the scandal. Declining to look for the needle is.

AIOS: The Wi-Fi May Be Invisible. The $15.32 Million Is Not.

AIOS GROUP LLC received $15,322,908.35 across FY2022-FY2025. It deserves a public explanation proportionate to the bill: contracts, equipment quantities, unit prices, installation, warranties, and how the work performed. “The network is better now” answers one question. It does not answer what it cost to make it better.

AIOS describes its networking and related services and a Macon business address. Cisco lists it as an authorized Georgia contract reseller. That is a legitimate business role; it does not identify Bibb’s procurement route or establish competitive pricing. Cisco lists it as an authorized Georgia contract reseller. That is a legitimate business role and available purchasing channel; it does not identify Bibb’s procurement route or establish competitive pricing.

Source: Open Georgia, Bibb County Board of Education, FY2022-FY2025; payments to the named payee, not contract prices.

The Projects Are Documented

• July 21, 2022: Phase 1 network-switch upgrades at ten schools, $3,267,299.84 in ESSER funds; three phases were anticipated at roughly $10 million.
• December 15, 2022: Phase 2 approval with AIOS, with no amount in that brief.
• May 18, 2023: Phase 3, not to exceed $3,150,064.49, including $2,910,124.08 in ESSER and $239,940.41 in ESPLOST funds.
• June 15, 2023: Wireless access-point replacement through AIOS, $2,913,628.28 in ESPLOST funds. Bibb described an aging, failing network under increasing demand.

ESSER was federal pandemic-relief funding for schools; ESPLOST is education sales-tax funding for eligible capital projects. The projects help explain the payment peaks. A failing network needs replacement, and necessary infrastructure does not become a boondoggle because it is costly.

There is a quieter question underneath the peaks. ESSER and ESPLOST paid for the hardware: $3.27 million in ESSER funds for Phase 1 switches and $2.91 million in ESPLOST for wireless access points. The relief money has expired. The hardware has not. Switches and access points demand licensing, monitoring, maintenance, and eventual replacement, and Bibb’s ledger shows only $26,359 in license payments and $20,480 in maintenance booked to AIOS for FY2025, so the tail booked under that name so far is small. The open question is who pays it as the boxes age out, at what price, and whether the board budgeted for that tail before the relief checks stopped. Ask it now, while the boxes are young.

The December 2024 brief also approved an elementary interactive-panel refresh without naming a vendor or price. I will not assign later AIOS payments to it just because the dates align.

Clarke’s Bid Sheet Puts Millions on the Table

Clarke County’s published evaluation for RFP 24-1106 (Switch Infrastructure Upgrade, E-Rate FY 2023) lists AIOS millions above competing proposals. DSI Tech’s Cisco proposal was $4.38 million lower, and AIOS had the lowest score of the four shown. Across all nine proposals in the worksheet, AIOS was the highest-priced entry on the sheet. This is Athens-based Clarke, and these are proposals to Clarke, not prices offered to Bibb.

Source: Clarke’s signed evaluation worksheet; four of nine proposals. Costs include E-Rate-eligible and ineligible items; scores sum three reviewers. SureLock was highest-ranked in this evaluation.

Different equipment, quantities, support, and contract terms require comparison, and the worksheet is Clarke’s Phase I evaluation, not a final executed contract. Clarke’s proposal results are a pricing benchmark, not a direct audit of Bibb’s specific scopes: installation labor, switch port configurations, and manufacturer maintenance terms can vary significantly between districts. The benchmark cannot convict Bibb’s prices. It gives Bibb a pointed question: what alternatives did you compare, and what made AIOS the best value for your projects? Taxpayers deserve the worksheet behind the explanation. “Trust us” is a remarkably expensive pricing method.

Different Years, Different Purchases

The category detail shifts with the work. FY2022 was mainly consulting ($115,479.35) and other fees ($51,661.40). FY2023 and FY2024 were almost entirely equipment and computer purchases; FY2025 was about 97.9% equipment across its equipment-related categories ($2,365,180.39 of the $2,416,177.14 total).

These category labels do not tell us models, quantities, or unit prices. Nor can we subtract a few announced project approvals from four years of payments and label the remainder “missing money.” Different periods and incomplete project lists make that subtraction invalid.

I did not locate a complete public reconciliation connecting these payments to contracts and itemized delivery. That is a reporting gap in this review, not proof of overcharging. Publish the reconciliation, the procurement basis, and the price comparison, including any lawful state or cooperative purchasing arrangement.

Procurement: Stop Shopping With Somebody Else’s Wallet

Taxpayers can follow Bibb’s payments and headline approvals more easily than they can assess the district’s choice of price, supplier, and scope. That deserves scrutiny beside repeated budget gaps. A purchasing department should be where a sales pitch meets resistance. The taxpayer’s wallet should not be the softest object in the room.

Bibb’s posted procurement manual makes purchasing staff responsible for negotiating with suppliers and retaining records, and generally calls for competitive bidding at $50,000 or more while allowing cooperative and state-contract purchases. Those posted rules, reviewed in October 2026, do not establish which route governed any earlier AIOS purchase, and a state-contract reseller listing does not by itself prove Bibb used that contract.

For a competitive award, publish the solicitation, all responsive prices, evaluation criteria, scores, and selection explanation. For a cooperative, state-contract, or sole-source purchase, identify the authority and explain how the price was checked. Require an itemized comparison of equipment, licenses, installation, support, and future costs. Keep public summaries separate from sensitive network-security details.

Paying More Requires an Explanation

Fayette supplies a useful counterexample. Its March 2026 notice of intent to award selected MGT: $1,230,299.68 versus AIOS’s lower $914,105.00. MGT scored 91 to AIOS’s 80, chiefly on a much higher technical score, 30 to 10. Integration was tied at 25 apiece, and AIOS actually won the cost category, 35 to 26. The notice was preliminary, not a completed contract.

That is the point of publishing the evaluation: readers can see why a higher price won. The cheapest proposal may fail a legitimate requirement, and the familiar supplier may cost too much; neither assumption replaces the paperwork. Bibb should show the reasoning behind its own result.

My prescription: an independent review of major awards and renewals, routine price comparisons, and negotiated discounts wherever the rules permit. Check quantities, bundled services, change orders, renewal escalators, and replacement cost before the board votes. A discount percentage means very little until somebody checks the price it came off.

The Degree on the Wall Does Not Balance the Books

As I argued in Part 1, Bibb needs stronger financial management at the top. Georgia State identifies Superintendent Dan Sims as a 2015 EdD graduate. That establishes his degree. The financial record is where his administration must demonstrate its ability to manage public money.

The district’s own January 15, 2026 amendment memorandum presented $7.417 million in previously unbudgeted salary and benefit costs. Its breakdown included $2.030 million correcting an attrition assumption and $577,000 for previously approved positions omitted from the budget. Those are documented budgeting problems. They are not missing cash or findings of theft, and the memo does not assign each error to an individual.

To me, approving jobs and leaving them out of the budget is a basic management failure. The taxpayers should not have to finance remedial arithmetic after the vote. A degree can hang on the wall. The omitted payroll still lands on the ledger.

I would give demonstrated budgeting, negotiation, and financial-control experience, including serious MBA or CPA training, far more weight in senior hiring and performance reviews. An MBA cannot guarantee sound judgment, and an EdD does not prove its absence. Require educational leadership and financial competence, with a CFO and purchasing staff empowered to challenge recommendations. The superintendent and board remain accountable for the result.

Kelly Services: When the Temporary Solution Gets a Permanent Appetite

Kelly Services received $17,874,267.49 over four years. FY2025 payments declined to $3,716,821.58, still a substantial recurring bill. Agencies can fill real shortages; a large payment is not evidence that the work was unnecessary.

Source: Open Georgia, Bibb County Board of Education, FY2022-FY2025; payments to the named payee, not contract prices.

The July 2022 brief disclosed a FY2023 Kelly renewal for substitutes and additional paraprofessionals, capped at $5 million using general and federal funds. That establishes a published approval and a scope broader than substitute teaching alone.

The July 16, 2026 brief brings the question into the current budget: a one-year Kelly renewal, capped at $4.5 million from general and federal funds, covering substitute management across roles including paraprofessionals and custodians. The cap is not a completed payment or an amount the district could save by doing without the workers.

The full agency bill is not its profit or markup. It includes compensation and services. A proper comparison with a district-managed pool needs worker pay, hours, agency charges, fill rates, screening, insurance, and administration. The available records do not support a savings estimate.

I did not locate a published cost per filled assignment or a full direct-hire comparison. After four years and $17.87 million, “the agency handles it” is an answer only if the next sentence explains the cost and performance. Otherwise it is a shrug wearing a purchase order.

Bibb’s June 2025 brief separately names Cross Country Education, Amergis, and Sunbelt in staffing approvals. Different roles and contracts should be evaluated without pretending they are all one substitute-teaching bill.

Source: Open Georgia. FranklinCovey includes FRANKLIN COVEY PRODUCTS in Bibb and FRANKLIN COVEY CLIENT SALES INC/INC. in the other districts. Kelly combines INC and INC. spellings. Zero means no matching payment row, not proof that a district used no comparable program or agency.

Houston, Fayette, and Newton show no matching Kelly payment rows over the four years. Muscogee reported $70,385.32 in FY2022. A zero under this name does not mean another district used no comparable agency or program; it means no payment row matched the stated search.

AIOS and Kelly together received $33,197,175.84. Their services and funding differ, and the total is not a waste estimate. It is enough financial scale to insist that both relationships be evaluated carefully rather than treated as scenery.

ACE: A Local Challenge to the Bigger-Budget Excuse

Macon’s Academy for Classical Education is a public state charter school, not a miniature county district. Its scale and enrolled population differ from Bibb’s. Its results nevertheless deserve attention whenever spending more is presented as an answer in itself.

Sources: FY2025 district FESR file; FY2025 school FESR file, ACE row; the 2024-25 EOG count file and graduation file, district ALL records. ACE is a single state charter, not a matched county district. State PPE excludes specified expenditures and does not mean total revenue or total budget.

Under Georgia’s FY2025 measure, ACE spent $11,894.08 per pupil, $2,911.53 or about 19.7% less than Bibb. This is lower included spending, not a claim about total funding, all capital costs, or debt. The state places state charters in the school file because they report directly to the state, with no district allocation added.

ACE’s 2024-25 English and math proficiency rates were 65.3% and 70.1%, calculated from the same count fields used for the district comparisons. All 117 members of its four-year graduation cohort graduated. Those are strong reported outcomes at lower measured spending.

The State Charter Schools Commission’s 2024-25 evaluation rated ACE as exceeding academic standards and meeting financial and operational standards, yet reports that ACE did not meet the value-added impact standard in any of the three grade bands. That measure considers student characteristics and school composition, so high achievement does not, by itself, prove the school adds more learning for otherwise similar students.

ACE accepts applicants from across Georgia, with a lottery when seats are limited; applying families are not a random sample of Bibb’s population, and needs, mobility, scale, and services can differ.

These qualifications make the comparison honest. They do not make it disappear. ACE is a local example of strong achievement with substantially lower spending under the state measure. Bibb should ask what it can learn from its curriculum, classroom practice, and allocation of resources. A useful lesson costs less than another excuse.

Cut the Contract Before the Classroom Gets the Scissors

The pressure predates this year’s headline. Bibb’s posted FY2025 and FY2026 recommended budget schedules planned General Fund outflows above annual anticipated revenue by about $9.35 million and $20.77 million, respectively, including transfers out. Those are the spending plans on the schedules, not audited losses. Part 1 follows the amendments and changing projections.

For FY2027, the May 21, 2026 discussion of the proposed budget cited a $23.8 million deficit. That was a dated planning snapshot, not the current October estimate; a watchdog should not bark at a budget number that has already moved down the street. The June 25 adopted budget put the General Fund gap at about $15 million and included a reduction of 77 K-12 instructional positions. The board restored salary-step increases in July. The August presentation reported by 41NBC projected a $16.63 million gap before the millage decision and $8.29 million afterward. The board adopted 14.674 mills on September 9. The $8.29 million is a projected operating gap, not an audited year-end loss.

Holding that nominal rate still meant 9.33% above the rollback rate, with about $8.34 million in additional projected revenue compared with rollback. Teachers and taxpayers should not be asked to accept that pressure while every familiar contract enjoys diplomatic immunity.

My order of operations is simple: make central-office overhead and discretionary purchases defend themselves before cutting the people who teach, supervise, feed, transport, or support children. An organizational chart does not become sacred scripture because somebody printed it in color.

The Differences Are Big Enough to Demand a Plan

Apply Houston’s FY2024 general-administration spending per student to Bibb’s enrollment in that same federal dataset: Bibb’s spending would have been about $4.57 million lower. Do the same calculation for the FY2025 web-subscriptions-and-licenses category, using that year’s Georgia enrollment: Bibb’s category total would have been about $5.42 million lower.

Author’s benchmark calculations from the FY2024 federal district file (E08 and V33) and FY2025 Open Georgia category payments with FY2025 FESR enrollment. Each calculation holds Bibb’s enrollment fixed and substitutes Houston’s rate. These are separate historical benchmarks, not an audited savings estimate.

Do not add those figures into a promise of $9.99 million in available savings. They concern different years and accounting scopes, are not confined to today’s General Fund, and do not adjust for all service needs or purchasing differences. Some costs may already have changed. No spreadsheet gets to travel through time merely because the author is annoyed.

But the scale matters. These comparisons identify millions to examine, not a few conference pastries. My judgment is that cutting unnecessary administrative layers, ending low-value purchases, lowering avoidable agency charges, and demanding better contract prices could substantially shrink Bibb’s recurring shortfalls. The board should publish a costed plan showing whether it can close the rest while protecting classroom services.

Where to Look First

1. Put Leader in Me on notice at its next lawful renewal point. The documented 2026-27 price is $363,759, published in the district’s June 18, 2026 Board Brief. Require a credible local evaluation and a comparison with teaching the same goals through existing staff and materials. Nonrenewal could avoid a future bill; current-year savings depend on obligations already incurred and termination terms.
2. Review central-office jobs and layers individually. Eliminate genuinely unnecessary vacancies, merge overlapping duties, and review supervisory spans, compensation, and consultant substitutes. Protect payroll, special-education compliance, safety, and school support. Moving administrative work onto principals and teachers merely changes who gets the headache.
3. Stop renewing verified unused seats and redundant platforms. Require paid-seat counts, active use, classroom purpose, overlap, and contract terms before another purchase. A subscription is a gym membership with a purchase order: the bill proves enrollment, not exercise.
4. Compare agency staffing with a fully costed district pool. Seek competitive rates, negotiate avoidable fees where permitted, and measure filled assignments. The avoidable expense is a demonstrable cost difference after keeping staffing reliable, not Kelly’s whole $4.5 million authorization.
5. Rebid and negotiate where the rules and contract terms allow. Compare equivalent scope, quantities, unit prices, service standards, renewal increases, and full future costs. Keep historic AIOS capital spending separate from recurring General Fund savings.
6. Scrutinize discretionary consulting, travel, conferences, and replacements. Require a deliverable and a lower-cost alternative; defer optional equipment where useful life permits. Separate necessary repairs, security, and mandated training. An old ESSER or ESPLOST project cannot simply be canceled today and poured into teacher salaries.

Officials have already considered some of this. The May 21, 2026 Budget Brief worked from an approximately $20 million reduction target for FY27, put eliminating non-essential vacant positions ahead of cutting filled ones, and had central-office furloughs under consideration. The adopted FY2027 budget did book $1.5 million in operational expenditure reductions and 77 fewer instructional positions. What no brief has published is the itemization: which of the promised options were finally adopted and what each one saved. Publish that, with the net effect, and do not count the same reduction twice. The documented Leader in Me price is only about 4.4% of the $8.29 million gap. It is one candidate, not the whole rescue plan. Four years of vendor payments cannot become one year of savings through the magic of indignation.

An $8.29 Million Assignment, Before Closing a School

Here is a concrete assignment for the board: test the following savings targets against the projected $8.29 million gap. They put the burden on overhead, contracts, and discretionary spending, with no school closure or reduction in classroom staffing included. The targets balance a proposed package on paper. They do not establish that these cuts are achievable or that the district’s budget is already balanced.

Illustrative targets assigned by the author, not a district forecast. The reference points show how large each target is relative to the benchmark or authorization it is compared with; the fourth target is a balancing figure. Only additional, net General Fund savings realized in the budget year can close that year’s gap. No particular position or contract reduction in this table has been verified as available.

Leader in Me contributes zero assumed savings here because its current obligations need review. If it cannot be canceled this year, do not count next year’s nonrenewal against this year’s deficit. A calendar is not a minor inconvenience to accounting.

Require current costs, funding sources, effective dates, and school-service effects for every line, net of termination fees, replacement services, and cuts already adopted. If a target fails, publish the shortfall and a replacement option. Houston’s historical differences justify the investigation; they do not guarantee this package.

There is your zero-closure savings assignment, Bibb. You’re welcome. Now do the part taxpayers are paying you for: show which dollars can actually be saved, on what date, and without handing the work to an already overloaded teacher. Keep the relief on the classroom side of the ledger.

An Open Offer to the Board

To any current board member reading this: you are welcome to check every fact, figure, and source above. The links are right there. Use my ideas freely, no attribution required. In my opinion, this budget was never as impossible as it has been made to look. I think the process made balancing it far more complicated than it needed to be, and a board that honestly tests the targets above could close the gap without closing a school or cutting a classroom teacher. The table is my arithmetic, not a guarantee, and verifying it is exactly the work I am inviting.

And if it works, I will happily send you my bank account number so you can wire me $329,789.84, a bargain for saving a gap that the two benchmarks above put at roughly $10 million on paper. Why that number? Because $329,789.84 is the exact FY2025 salary Open Georgia reports for Superintendent Dan A. Sims, the man paid to do the homework this article just did for free.

Consolidation Can Still Be Wise, for the Right Reasons

I also believe merging selected underused schools may be wise. Bibb’s May 2026 budget brief cites enrollment-related funding pressure and reviews of under-enrolled sections; recent state figures are roughly flat districtwide (20,476 students in FY2023, 20,531 in FY2025), which does not answer utilization at individual schools. The district paused its earlier consolidation scenarios on September 11 and began a new advisory process, so the point here is method, not a particular building. Each proposal should show school-level enrollment, usable capacity, facility condition, and a credible forecast; net operating savings after transportation, renovations, and transition costs; and effects on families, travel times, and class sizes. A sensible merger can remain sensible after vendor contracts receive scrutiny. An empty seat is worth examining. So is an empty software license.

Five Questions Before the Board Feeds the Next Renewal

1. What exactly are we buying? Publish a contract inventory showing scope, term, annual and total cost, funding, renewal provisions, purchasing authority, and the responsible office. Include resellers.
2. What did it accomplish here? Publish delivery, aggregate usage, intended outcomes, overlap, and alternatives. For Leader in Me, separate implementation certification from independently assessed local benefits. Publish how many instructional coaches and curriculum staff the district employs, at what total cost, and what comparable materials they could build in-house.
3. Why did this supplier and price win? Connect AIOS approvals to bids or the applicable purchasing authority, evaluation scores, contracts, invoices, quantities, unit prices, warranties, and performance. Show the comparison behind the choice.
4. What does outsourcing actually add? Compare agency costs and reliability with the full cost of a district-managed pool. Separate worker compensation and agency charges where the records permit.
5. Why do these choices beat investing in the classroom? Explain the Houston gaps in administrative spending, administrator density, teacher pay, retention, and results, accounting for student needs. Put net current-year and recurring savings beside the remaining budget gap and a specific classroom plan.