Sumner County school board urges county commission to consider repaying booster-club debts after Westmoreland field‑house loan

The Sumner County Board of Education voted unanimously Feb. 18 to approve a nonbinding resolution encouraging the Sumner County Commission to pay off outstanding athletic booster‑club debt across the county.

The board’s action follows a public comment from Rick Duffer, principal of Westmoreland High School, who described how parents and community members personally guaranteed loans so the school could replace a condemned field house and add lights. “Ten people at $36,000 each … some of which did HELOCs, home equity line of credit, so that we could build a facility for our kids,” Duffer said, and later summarized that Westmoreland’s boosters still carry roughly $325,000 in debt related to those projects and that the boosters still owe about $49,000 on the baseball‑field lights.

Board members spent more than an hour discussing the scope and language of the…