Worthless checks have become somewhat of a concern at Andalusia High School, prompting Andalusia City Board members to increase fees Monday night.

The board added the item to its agenda during the meeting when the issue was brought up during the student handbook portion.

AHS principal Dr. Daniel Shakespeare said worthless checks have become a “major concern“ at the high school.

“It creates a problem for us in reagards to students filling debts at the high school,” Shakespeare said. “Many times parents will pay with a check, and on many occasions, those checks have insufficient funds. That creates a burden on our finances and a burden on our accounts.”

The board changed its worthless check fee from $10 per check to $30 per check system-wide.

AES principal Patty Taylor said luckily, they’ve been able to work with the parents to take care of it before it becomes a problem.

“It does get to be time consuming, especially for our bookkeepers,” Taylor said.

Watson reiterated what Shakespeare said about the checks being more of a concern than a problem.

“The $10 fee has been in place for well over 10 years — probably longer than that,” Watson said. “It’s not necessarily that we have more bad checks coming through.

“We just wanted to be more inline with other businesses in town,” he said. “It’s not like it’s anymore than normal; however, it is a concern.”

Watson added that each school handles its own checks, and with the decrease in personnel, ACS needed to bring its procedure up to standard.

In other business, the board:

• accepted the minutes from the May 25 and 31 meetings;

• approved the financial report for May 2011;

• tabled the change to the health handbook;

• accepted the 2011-12 transportation handbook;

• accepted the resignation of Johnny Williams as the building service worker at AES, and approved the hire of Lee Stacks as the band director at AMS;

• approved school fundraisers for AES, AMS and AHS.

• approved the changes to the AES and AMS student handbooks.

The additions to the AES handbook included adding “school-wide positive behavior support information that was adopted by the elementary school from the state department of education last year,” and changing the personnel to reflect the current faculty and staff listing, updating the calendar and revising the cafeteria meal prices.

The AMS addition included adding state guidelines for the search of a digital device.

• tabled the AHS student handbook;

• renewed the milk bid to Barber’s Dairy, which was the same as the 2009-2010 school years;

• accepted the 100 percent fruit juice slush bid to Trident Beverage for AHS and AMS;

• accepted the bread bid from Sara Lee Baking Company.

The next board meeting will be next Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. in the central office.

Kendra Bolling contributed to this report.