Michael Thorsland, interim superintendent for Marlboro County School District, tells the State Board of Education about improvements the district has made during a meeting in West Columbia on Tuesday, June 2, 2026. (Photo by Skylar Laird/SC Daily Gazette)
WEST COLUMBIA — The state will take control of the Marlboro County School District after a report found the district misspent and owed more than $7.3 million over five years.
The State Board of Education’s unanimous vote Tuesday marked the second district to come under the state agency’s control during Superintendent Ellen Weaver’s tenure. The state took the reins in Jasper County last summer, after another inspector general’s report found possible criminal activity.
Two other school districts, Allendale and Williamsburg, remain under state control from previous takeovers, though Williamsburg County is moving back to local control.
SC Board of Education OKs financial takeover of Pee Dee school district
Inspector General Brian Lamkin found potential criminal activity in a Monday report about the 3,200-student district in the Pee Dee.
The 22-page report detailed unsanctioned bonuses board members gave themselves, personal purchases on employee credit cards, and unpaid penalties and fees the rural district owed to federal and state agencies.
Department of Education officials pointed to the report repeatedly Tuesday before the board voted to take over the school district. That is at least a six-year process and means firing and replacing the school board, as well as selecting a new superintendent.
The state has controlled the Marlboro County district’s finances since last July, following several months under fiscal emergency, the highest level of concern for struggling districts.
The board was looking to consolidate schools before the school year started in an effort to fill a $7 million hole in the budget. The department also requested the investigation over suspicious purchases at that time.
Last month, with help from the state, the district’s spending plan balanced its revenues and costs for the first time in eight years, according to the state’s K-12 education agency.
“This progress demonstrates an important truth: Marlboro County’s challenges are not insurmountable,” Weaver wrote in a Monday letter to district officials. “The students, educators, principals, and staff of Marlboro County are capable of success when supported by stable leadership, sound governance and fiscal practices, and a relentless focus on student outcomes.”
But that wasn’t enough, Weaver told the state Board of Education on Tuesday.
Board members weren’t cooperating with the state board, and the inspector general’s report raised concerns officials needed to address, she said.
“We cannot leave (students’) futures up to chance, or, worse yet, a game of chicken filled with irresponsible rhetoric, division and the self-dealing agendas that were surfaced in the state inspector general’s report,” Weaver said.
The report dealt only with a portion of the district’s finances, pulled from five years’ worth of records between 2020 and 2025, said Henry Gunter, an agency attorney.
Because the inspector general’s office sampled transactions, the nearly $7.4 million the report found in potential misspending and debts is likely much lower than the actual total, Gunter told the board.
“This is the type of pervasive failure that rises to the level of a structural issue,” Gunter said.
The district’s situation has improved with the state’s help on crafting a budget, said interim Superintendent Michael Thorsland, who the board hired in December while searching for a permanent leader.
But recovering from years of losing money is going to take a long time and a lot of help to fix, and that will require more resources and a board that cooperates with state officials, Thorsland said.
“A school district budget is not a jet ski that you turn on a dime,” Thorsland said. “It’s more like a ship that you have to keep turning. The ship’s turning, but we’re way in the deficit position right now, so we’ve got to gain some ground to get back to a healthy financial situation.”
Board chair Michael Coachman did not respond to a call from the SC Daily Gazette requesting comment.
Staffing was a major concern the state department raised when taking financial control last year of the rural district in northeast South Carolina.
In September, the district’s administrative office had 45 employees, far more than the typical 25 or so in similarly sized districts, Thorsland said.
As of Tuesday, that number was down to 29, he said.
Lamkin’s report raised questions about how much the school board spent on its own pay.
Board members gave themselves five bonuses between November 2022 and November 2024, totaling more than $4,000 for each of the nine members.
They were provided as part of one-time bonuses given to district staff, though which other employees received them is unclear. The school board didn’t publicly give specifics about the bonuses during budget discussions.
Board members additionally increased their salaries in June 2024, from $7,500 to $12,000 annually — putting Marlboro County among the state’s highest-paid public school boards.
Only board members in Horry and Greenville counties received more. Those are respectively the state’s third-largest and largest school districts by student population.
That salary increase came with no public discussion and flew in the face of a board policy barring members from raising their own pay.
After 18 months of the increase, board members sliced their salaries back to the previous amounts, Lamkin found.
However, several board members continued to violate the board’s policy prohibiting members from working for the district. The report found at least five instances of school board members receiving stipends for coaching.
The former superintendent’s pay also raised red flags, Lamkin wrote.
In July 2023, following a $32,500 job hunt, the board rehired Helena Tillar, who resigned from the position in 2018 after a year on administrative leave for what the board called a personnel issue, Lamkin wrote.
What happened is unknown. The board at the time gave no public explanation, according to meeting minutes.
Tillar did not respond to a call requesting comment to a number believed to belong to her.
When she resigned in 2018, the board approved a departure package that included $150,000 and a district-owned Dodge Durango, according to the report.
Tillar’s second stint as superintendent lasted just over two years, before the board again fired her in November 2025.
The district had yet to hire a permanent superintendent to take her place.
In her letter Monday, Weaver pointed to that as a symptom of the district’s dysfunction.
A permanent superintendent is vital, since that role oversees day-to-day spending in a way that isn’t feasible for the board itself, Gunter said.
Despite the state’s control over the district’s purse strings, Tillar continued hiring employees without consulting the Department of Education, according to the report. Pressure from the agency led to her firing.
During Tillar’s tenure, she never moved from her Santee home to Marlboro County, despite that being a requirement of her contract.
The commute from Santee to the district’s offices in Bennettsville is roughly 110 miles each way.
Anything the district paid her after the Jan. 31, 2024, deadline for her move — a total of $326,250 — was improper, Lamkin wrote.
Also questionable was the purchase of a car for Tillar’s use, the report said.
The board bought Tillar a new car after she was involved in a crash that destroyed the old one, spending nearly $36,000 from the district’s funds along with the $16,000 check from the insurance company.
The board approved the spending during a closed-door meeting, potentially violating the state’s open meetings law, which allows discussion but no decisions or votes out of public view, Lamkin wrote.
Paperwork also posed a major issue for the district, according to the report.
District employees misspent at least $696,000 using the district’s purchasing cards, often called p-cards, based on receipts the inspector general’s office scrutinized. The biggest issue was paperwork without the right information, or missing approvals for spending.
In six cases, dated between November 2020 and August 2022, employees spent a total of just over $5,100 on expenses that were clearly personal, Lamkin wrote. Three times, employees used their cards to pay for dental work, totaling nearly $5,000. The remaining amount came from trips to Labcorp, a laboratory company used for certain health tests.
Because of concerns over use of employee purchasing cards, the district changed its policy to add more layers of approval, Lamkin noted.
Missing and incomplete paperwork also accounted for violations of the district’s policy for purchasing software and equipment, totaling nearly $701,000. None of the 18 contracts the inspector general’s office reviewed followed the district’s policies for buying equipment, the report read.
The most concerning of those, Lamkin wrote, was the purchase of a $73,000 training software the district never actually used, “which represented a waste of funds.” The report urged the district to better review purchases and find a training system that actually fit employees’ needs.
Missing paperwork also led the district to fail to comply with federal grant requirements, the report found. The district failed to keep and report accurate records of spending under COVID-19 relief grants for schools, leading an audit to find the district should pay back nearly $477,000, Lamkin wrote.
In 2022, the district failed to file certain insurance forms with the federal government, which could have prevented employees from receiving all the forms they needed to accurately file their income taxes, Lamkin found.
For two years, the federal government warned the district it needed to file the correct forms. When that never happened, the federal government imposed a penalty that snowballed from an initial nearly $93,000 to more than $1 million as of April 13, Lamkin wrote.
As of the report’s writing, the district had yet to file those forms or contact the IRS about plans to pay the fine, he wrote.
The district also failed to pay the Public Employee Benefit Authority more than $726,000 for employees’ health insurance and retirement benefits, the report found. School districts that participate in the state-operated benefit program must pay a portion of the amounts or risk losing coverage for employees, Lamkin noted.
As of the report’s filing, the district still owed that money, which Lamkin recommended officials prioritize paying back so employees didn’t lose their health insurance or retirement accounts.
“You have a widespread, long-term failure to responsible and reasonably manage the district’s financial affairs,” Gunter said Tuesday.
Under the direction of the state education department, the district plans to fix all the problems the report detailed, Thorsland said.
“Obviously, our intent is to correct the errors that were made and move forward in a positive direction where there will be no need for inspector general’s reports for many years to come,” Thorsland told the Daily Gazette.
Courtesy of South Carolina Daily Gazette
