We got a request to look into DeKalb County School District in Georgia, a county-wide system of about 92,000 students just east of Atlanta, and it is, to use the technical term, the bonkersest one we’ve done. As always, there are two layers here: the wonkery (how the money actually works) and the bonkery (the saga). In DeKalb the wonkery is its own thing. The bonkery is off the charts. We wrote it all up here. (And you can listen below!)

↓ Jump to the full DeKalb briefing (appendix)

Two indicted superintendents

As we recorded, DeKalb’s former superintendent Devon Horton (2023–2025) was in federal court over a kickback scheme from his previous job running Evanston/Skokie School District 65 in Illinois — no-bid contracts routed to companies tied to him, with cash handoffs. The allegations were publicly reported before DeKalb hired him (first surfaced on the Evanston governance Substack FOIA Gras), he resigned after the indictment, and his fraud trial was set for this fall. (As we recorded the episode, he pleaded guilty to three counts and faces a likely 7-12 years.)

If that sounds like a one-off, it isn’t. Back in 2010, DeKalb superintendent Crawford Lewis was indicted on racketeering, bribery, and theft charges tied to — what else? — construction contracts, and he later took a plea deal. The district was placed under state scrutiny for board dysfunction and spent years working its way back to full accreditation. The requester counted six superintendents since 2019. That kind of instability at the top is exactly the condition under which expensive mistakes get made.

The main course: an ESPLOST boo-boo

In Georgia, school districts raise money for buildings with an E-SPLOST — an Education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, a one-cent sales tax voters approve to fund capital projects (roofs, HVAC, new schools, buses). Districts number them with Roman numerals, like sequels. DeKalb’s current one, E-SPLOST VI, passed in 2021 with an overwhelming ~81% yes and had collected roughly $617 million by April 2026.

But immediately, things went wrong. When a new E-SPLOST starts, the district has to file a certificate of distribution with the Georgia Department of Revenue, choosing a formula (an FTE-count formula or a local-legislation formula) and the percentage split among the school systems that share the county — in this case, DeKalb County Schools, City Schools of Decatur, and Atlanta Public Schools. DeKalb never filed a new certificate for E-SPLOST VI. So the state kept paying out on the old E-SPLOST V percentages for about four years, which meant DeKalb quietly took more than its share and stiffed Decatur and Atlanta. Decatur is the one that figured it out. Now DeKalb has to pay back about $11.9 million, which means delaying projects it had already planned — including buying new buses and upgrading fire-alarm systems. A paperwork error, with fire alarms as collateral.

A wonky-but-important footnote for anyone checking the data: a lot of Georgia SPLOST borrowing is nearly invisible in the standard federal finance numbers. Debt service can show up as roughly zero because it runs through a county authority and the SPLOST fund rather than conventional district bonds — so the federal profile understates how leveraged a district really is. If you’re eyeballing a Georgia district’s debt and it looks suspiciously clean, look at the SPLOST.

The numbers are people

Also, in a thing that almost never happens when digging into spreadsheet mistakes, three people connected to this story have died in the past few years. A whistleblower in the district’s operations and business-services office filed a suit alleging a $12 million overdraft and a $135 million discrepancy in the SPLOST fund and said he was pushed out for raising it; he was later killed in a car accident, and the case closed. Michael Torres, a 24-year-old worker, died after leaning on a faulty skylight and falling through a roof during HVAC-related work at Henderson Mills Elementary. And the forensic CPA, Elaine “Barry” Thompson, who audited the books and corroborated that same ~$135 million discrepancy, died in a motorcycle accident in 2025. We make some dark jokes on the show, but the real point is the one we come back to constantly: the numbers on these documents are more than numbers. They are people’s lives.

The state context is getting worse for everyone

None of this happens in a vacuum. Georgia funds schools through the Quality Basic Education (QBE) formula — enacted in 1985, now 40 years old, and chronically under-funded through the austerity years. Layered on top are two property-tax constraints doing a lot of damage:

  • A 20-mill cap. Georgia caps school operating millage at 20 mills, but districts already above it were grandfathered in at their higher rates. DeKalb levies about 22.98 mills (2023) — one of the highest rates in the state, just behind Muscogee, and above Atlanta and Decatur (~20.3–20.5). See the county’s own 2026 millage hearing presentation and local coverage of the rate.
  • HB 581, the “floating” homestead exemption. Passed in 2024, it freezes taxable homestead value to inflation off a base year and strips localities of the ability to opt out. DeKalb’s finance staff estimate it could cost about 10% of revenue over the next several years. Because of the 20-mill cap, the district can’t just raise the rate to make up the gap — which is exactly what pushes districts toward sales-tax devices like SPLOST. See DeKalb’s board discussion of the opt-out, the county government’s opt-out move, and a plain-English HB 581 FAQ.

But this is part of a larger pattern – in Georgia and across other states, as well. States keep finding ways to under-contribute to school funding (whether by miserly funding formulas or by simply underfunding adequate formulas) and pushing reliance back onto local sources. Under the best of circumstances, this kind of move entrenches inequality — your local school budget ends up determined by what your neighbors’ houses are worth. In DeKalb the mix already leans local, partly because of that grandfathered millage (roughly 53% local / 37% state in our most recent comparable year, versus about 46% local / 42% state statewide).

But homestead exemptions and other similar state-level mechanisms also restrict local capacity to adequately fund schools (as well as other municipal bodies). Insufficient state support is one thing, and bad; but insufficient state support coupled with state prohibitions on local revenue authority simply amounts to a deliberate asphyxiation of public governance.

In this process, we're witnessing the birth of a new thing – the unfundable mandate. Education supporters have long criticized state governments for requiring that schools do certain things without providing the resources to do it. That's the classic "unfunded mandate." But now, states are starting to foreclose local avenues for revenue-raising, too – while still requiring schools to deliver an ever-expanding array of services and results. We won't be providing the necessary funding for all that, states seem to be saying. But also, we won't allow you to raise the necessary funding from any other source, either! Good luck with the whole "failing schools" discourse!

But back to DeKalb County and its situation specifically.

Enrollment has fallen from about 98,800 students in 2019 to roughly 91,800 in 2024 — a steeper pandemic drop than most of its neighbors, with a slower recovery. And the loss isn’t even: families are moving toward schools in the north of the county while the south empties out, leaving something like 20,000 more seats than the district needs, and unequally distributed in space. That mismatch is what drove the “transformation” / consolidation plan that floated closing 27 schools, got revised, and ran into fierce community resistance over the finances.

What’s on the ballot November 3

DeKalb voters get to decide on E-SPLOST VII — up to $946.8 million running July 2027 through June 2032, with authority for up to $500 million in SPLOST-backed bonds. The proposed project list includes roughly $175M for Druid Hills High, $165M for Clarkston High, and $100–120M of HVAC work at about 20 schools (the full pitch is here). The board also just named Dr. Norman Sauce III the sole finalist to lead the district permanently.

Our bottom line is the same one we landed on in the episode: the district genuinely needs the money — this is a vote-yes situation, even if you have to hold your nose. School buildings don’t fix themselves, and the kids in DeKalb didn’t cause any of the bonkery. But the people — or more precisely the offices — in charge of that money haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory, as we said in the episode. If you’re organizing here, don’t just aim at the superintendent or the board. Find the office that actually fills out the certificate of distribution, that actually moves the SPLOST dollars — the planning and business-services roles — and push there. You’re targeting a place in the structure, not a person. That’s where the wiggle room is.

This is a companion to our DeKalb County episode. Want us to dig into your district’s budget? Send us a tip. Further reading: Ballotpedia on DeKalb County School District, and the invaluable local reporting at Decaturish.

Appendix: The DeKalb County budget briefing

Below is the full Budget Committee briefing we built for this episode — the numbers, the millage and revenue-share breakdown, the enrollment trend, and the source notes, all in one place. It’s embedded exactly as we distribute it. ↑ Back to top