Navigating the Wild West of student and ECA fees: Spotlight on DeKalb Country Central United School District

If you’ve ever tried to track down where a student activity fee “actually” ended up, which account it landed in, whether it was receipted, or whether the right building got credit for it, you already know why we called this webinar “Navigating the Wild Wild West of Student and ECA Fees.”

We sat down with Gina Buhr, Director of Business Operations at DeKalb County Central United School District, and KEV’s Danny Gibson to talk through what extracurricular activity (ECA) fees and student activity fund management really looks like in Indiana districts, and what changes when a district decides the “wild west” era is over.

The Gap Between Collecting Money and Accounting for It

Danny opened with a poll: how is your extracurricular accounting managed today? Options ranged from completely centralized through the treasurer’s office to completely decentralized, building-by-building. Unsurprisingly, most districts land somewhere in the messy middle: mostly centralized with pockets of building-level autonomy, or mostly decentralized with bookkeepers at each school doing things their own way.

That mix is exactly where problems start. As Danny put it, after 30 years working with K-12 finance teams, the same pattern shows up again and again: there’s a gap between collecting the money and accounting for the money. The dollars get collected just fine. It’s everything that happens after collection, before it shows up cleanly in the district’s books, where things get murky.

The Signs Your ECA Process Needs a Second Look

That gap tends to show up the same way in districts of every size:

• Manual processes. The controls live in someone’s head, not in the system.
• Paper trails. A receipt in a drawer. A running total on a sticky note.
• Inconsistent practices. Every building does it a little differently, which means the district office is reconciling five different “systems” instead of one.
• One person doing it all. The same person collects, records, and deposits funds, with no second set of eyes on any of it.

None of these signs mean anyone is doing anything wrong. They just mean the process was never built to scale, and it’s quietly costing the district time, accuracy, and peace of mind.

The Real-World Impact

Those signs add up to a familiar set of headaches:

• Information arrives late, so leadership is always looking at last month’s picture, not this month’s.
• Every question about a fee or a fund becomes a phone call, because nothing is self-serve.
• Audit prep turns into a lengthy scramble instead of a quick pull of existing records.
• Without early warning, small errors don’t get caught quickly. They compound into big problems.

Meet Gina: A Firsthand Look at What Changed

This is where Gina brought the DeKalb County Central perspective into the conversation. Danny asked her to walk through what a typical month looked like for her team before they made a change, and what finally made it clear something had to shift.

The conversation then followed a single fee through its entire lifecycle: the same five stages every activity payment moves through, whether a district realizes it or not.

Collected  →  Routed  →  Recorded  →  Seen  →  Audited

At each stage, Danny and Gina worked through the practical questions district finance leaders wrestle with every day:

• When a parent wants to make a payment, how do they actually do it?
• How does the money get to where it’s supposed to be? Does each school’s money land in its own account, can a single deposit split across schools, and can that happen without manual journal entries or monthly transfers?
• How do you keep records, and what happens to the paper trail once the money’s been recorded?
• Who can see this information, and when? Is it available in real time, or does someone have to ask?
• What actually happens when the auditor shows up?

Gina’s experience made the case for why this framework matters: when every one of those five stages is visible and connected, an audit stops being a fire drill. It becomes a matter of pulling up records that already exist.

Centralized vs. Decentralized: Different Districts, Different Needs

Not every district manages funds the same way, and the session spent real time on that distinction:

Centralized districts typically have one account, one set of books, and procedures set and enforced from the central office, which means the office can see the whole picture.

Decentralized districts often have a separate account at each school, different processes between buildings, and a district office that’s waiting on manual reports to piece together a full picture.

If your district leans decentralized, the panel’s advice was clear: you need standardization that’s built into the tool itself and enforced at a system level, not just a policy memo. That means real-time visibility across every school, school-level controls that safeguard money right where it’s collected, and standardized reporting and GL coding so building-level data actually rolls up cleanly.

What Changed for Families

The conversation wasn’t just about the back office. It touched on the parent experience too. Families dealing with multiple kids, multiple schools, and multiple payment portals are one of the most common friction points districts hear about. The fix discussed was straightforward: one login for the whole family, visibility limited to their own kids, and no juggling separate URLs and passwords for every building or program. (And on the horizon: a direct sync between SchoolCash and Meal Magic, so parents can eventually manage lunch money and activity fees in the same place.)

Rolling out a new process always runs into the same question: how do you get principals, teachers, bookkeepers, and everyone in between actually on board? Gina shared a few tactics that helped her move the needle:

• Start with the people closest to the pain. Bookkeepers and building secretaries are usually the first to feel a clunky process, so bringing them in early (and letting them shape the rollout) turns skeptics into advocates instead of blockers.
• Lead with time saved, not process changed. Framing the shift around “this gets an hour back in your week” lands better with staff than “here’s a new system to learn.”
• Pilot with one or two buildings first. A small, visible win gives the rest of the district something concrete to point to instead of a hypothetical.

The Bottom Line

The session closed on the line that tied the whole hour together:

If you can’t see it, you can’t oversee it.

That’s the real theme underneath every poll, every question, and every stage of the Collected-Routed-Recorded-Seen-Audited framework. ECA and student activity funds don’t have to be the wild west. But taming them starts with visibility, into every dollar, at every stage, in every building.

Want to Go Deeper?

If your district recognizes itself in any of “The Signs” above (manual processes, inconsistent building-level practices, or one person wearing every hat), it may be worth taking a closer look at where your own gaps are.

• Try the http://www.kevgroup.com/assessments/the-k12-financial-maturity-assessment) for a quick, tailored read on where your district stands.
• Explore how a purpose-built http://www.kevgroup.com/overview closes the gap between collection and accounting.
• https://kevgroup.com/book-a-call/ with a school finance expert to talk through your district’s specific setup, whether centralized, decentralized, or somewhere in between.