The DeKalb County School Board agreed to settle a lawsuit from a former, now deceased, chief operating officer who alleged that district officials were misusing funds.
D. Benjamin Estill II found that district employees were being paid for hours they didn’t work, that district officials failed to properly oversee and conduct critical building inspections and that there was a $135 million discrepancy in the district’s accounting for its sales tax funds, among other concerns, according to the complaint. Estill was fired less than a month after reporting some of the more serious violations, the suit stated.
Estill was fired in July 2021, after serving as the district’s chief operating officer for less than a year. He filed a lawsuit in state court in March 2022, alleging the district violated the Georgia Whistleblower Act. In September 2022, he died in a car crash in Michigan, Decaturish reported. He was 55.
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The settlement, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution via an open records request, is not an admission of wrongdoing by the district. A total of $57,500 will be paid to the law firm representing Estill in the suit, and $6,000 to a mediation firm. The school board approved the settlement during a closed-door session on June 20.
Since the lawsuit was filed, similar issues to the ones brought up in Estill’s complaint have been confirmed by other agencies.
Though Estill’s complaint was specifically about employees in the operations division, state audits of the district’s finances in general confirmed that district employees have been paid for hours they did not work and, in some cases, received bonuses for which they were not qualified. Additionally, the Georgia Department of Education intervened last year after noticing dysfunction in how the district manages its facilities. And the district is spending more than $1.6 million on two outside audits of how it spends federal pandemic aid and sales tax collections.
A district investigation into Estill’s conduct during his tenure substantiated allegations that he had acted unprofessionally and bullied and harassed people, WSB-TV reported after obtaining a summary of the investigation.
The lawsuit references a letter from then-Superintendent Cheryl Watson-Harris telling Estill he is expected to act professionally and “falsely suggesting that Estill committed a handful of minor violations of Watson-Harris’s ‘expectations.’” The letter did not involve disciplinary action, the lawsuit states. Watson-Harris told Estill he was terminated “because his chemistry was no longer a good fit,” according to the lawsuit.
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