The Marlboro County School District did not end up in the red for 2025, as was projected.
The District School Board held its first meeting of the year on Monday, where it heard the results of a financial and compliance audit by Columbia-based accounting form Mauldin & Jenkins. That audit reported that the district’s 2025 end-of-year fund balance was $4.9 million.
Last summer, the district’s projections signaled a $6.9 million budget shortfall; the district had to borrow $1.4 million from its general fund to make up for shortcomings in its $45 million budget. In fact. the financial picture last summer was so bleak that the state Department of Education took financial oversight of the district in July. It remains the district’s financial overseer.
Despite having a $4.9 million operating budget to end 2025, that’s a 2.4% drop from the operating budget a year earlier -- but still better than the 4.6% drop that had been projected.
The budget came out in the black, in other words, just not as far into the black as it had been.
“So, better than budgeted, if you look at it from a big picture point of view,” said Brian Nicholson, who led the audit.
The audit (which was not a forensic audit of all the school’s expenses, but a general audit of the district) was a welcome breath of air to members of the school board.
“ All the false narratives have been proven wrong,” said Board Vice Chairman Michael Toms, referring to the highly public conversation that centered on Marlboro’s financial woes last year. “No loss of funds.”
The district also has 10% of its surplus set aside for emergencies. The state requires at least 8.3%, which means Marlboro is compliant but cutting it close.
“It’s definitely something to keep an eye on as you go forward,” Nicholson told the board.
The district still faces uncomfortable fiscal realities. It is looking to save money, through cutting positions and potentially consolidating schools -- two other remnants of summer 2024 discussions.
On Monday, Interim Superintendent Michael Thorsland floated the idea of moving the fourth and fifth grades out of Bennettsville Intermediate School, or BIS, to Blenheim Middle School of Discovery.
That’s about eight miles away and it’s where district students go to sixth grade.
The move, Thorsland said, would consolidate about 200 students into the existing 370 at Discovery, which is built to hold 900.
Thorsland also said, “ I'd like for the district office, the annex across the street from the district office, and possibly even the alternative school to all relocate to the BIS building.”
Such a consolidation, he said, could save the district a half-million dollars, mostly in salaries.
“ By moving BIS students down there, we no longer have a lot of those single positions that you see at each school,” Thorsland said. “It'd be one less school administrator, one less librarian, one less SRO, one less nurse.”
He said: “ We are looking at trimming some of the district staff. But we're going to do that regardless of which office we're in because that's going to be required to get a balanced budget.”
Personnel make up almost 90% of the district’s expenses, Thorsland said.
He also said that the consolidation makes sense from a transportation standpoint, as children from different parts of the county will have shorter bus trips. He called his idea “a minor tweak.”
The plan, which the board expects to revisit in February, is a much-scaled-down version of consolidation that was proposed in Marlboro last year. But there remain questions about Clio Elementary, which was on the chopping block last summer.
Students from Blenheim attend grades 3 to 5 at Clio. Were Blenheim children moved out of Clio, Toms said, attendance in that school would drop to below 100.
Thorsland said he does not want to close Clio and will look into what to do about the elementary school.
