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Coffee County board votes to keep school fees in place after heated discussion
Summary
After more than an hour of debate about equity and cost, the Coffee County Board of Education voted to keep the existing secondary school fee structure and not eliminate fees districtwide, following the director of schools' recommendation to 'leave it as is.'
The Coffee County Board of Education on Tuesday voted to maintain the district’s current school-fee practices for its secondary schools after a lengthy discussion about cost, equity and how waivers are handled.
Director of Schools Hargrove recommended the board “leave it as it is,” noting that last year the district collected roughly $12,000 in fees from the three secondary campuses (middle school, Raider Academy and the high school) and that covering every requested fee across K–12 could total “$80,000 to $100,000” if every request were honored. “If you collected all the fees that were requested, you’re talking about 80 to $100,000,” Hargrove said.
Board members split over the practical and moral implications. One board member said, “I think it should be free to go to public school and you should not have to pay fees,” arguing that eliminating fees would remove a social burden on families. Business Director April Nelson and Hargrove explained that the district already budgets fee waivers and various lump-sum allocations to schools; Nelson described the current process of allocating a lump-sum waiver amount by school enrollment and warned that a sudden districtwide promise to cover every fee could produce a large, hard-to-predict demand from staff and programs.
Board members also debated whether all staff file fee requests on time and whether some teachers pay out of pocket instead of submitting requests; Hargrove said the current $12,000 figure reflects what schools actually collected last year, not the larger amounts initially requested by programs.
After discussion, a motion to accept Hargrove’s recommendation to continue current practice passed on the board’s roll call by the reported tally of 5–3. The chair directed staff to examine the numbers more closely and asked that a committee and the fall retreat address a longer-term plan for whether and how the district could cover more fees in future years.
The board did not adopt a timeline or immediate budget transfer to cover additional fees; the vote keeps the current procedure of collecting fees with existing waiver rules in place for families who cannot pay.
What comes next: Board members asked administration to bring clearer, itemized numbers to a future retreat and suggested forming a committee to explore options for next school year.
