Workarounds don’t feel risky. They feel smart, helpful, even responsible, because it’s often how the job gets done. In the moment, those decisions feel necessary; but over time, those small adaptations quietly stop being exceptions and start becoming the system itself.
At first, these adjustments feel temporary. They are seen as short-term solutions, placeholders until the issue can be fixed. Even when changes are made, however, they too often take the form of additional workarounds rather than improvements to the underlying system. This is where risk appears.
I’ve been guilty of this myself. When systems were outdated, not designed for what we needed them for, or simply didn’t work, I created workarounds, and my workarounds often became the process. And when I did this, it felt smart.
Looking back, I can say that I missed the bigger picture.
A workaround stops being a workaround when new staff members learn it as the process.
When Workarounds Stop Being Temporary
A workaround stops being a workaround when new staff members learn it as the process.
Over time, institutional memory begins to replace documented procedures. New advisers inherit informal practices instead of formal guidance. Expectations vary from school to school, and consistency across the district erodes.
Oversight becomes reactive rather than preventative. Issues surface only after something goes wrong, often during an audit, instead of being identified earlier through routine visibility.
At this point, risk has increased quietly, without any single decision or event signaling the change. Consistent processes across schools no longer exist. Visibility declines, increasing the risk of an audit.
Audits Catch the Symptoms, Not the Workarounds
For context, I was an auditor early in my career. My experience sitting on both sides of the table shapes how I interpret audit findings.
Audit findings typically identify outcomes: missing documentation, inconsistent approvals, unclear oversight; they usually don’t capture how those outcomes developed. Activity fund audits are not designed to evaluate the system itself. They are designed to reveal risk and confirm whether controls were followed.
Auditors see the absence of records, but not the series of small, reasonable decisions that led to their absence. It's not what they are looking for. But their findings tell a story. In today’s world, their findings often tell you your systems are broken.
Who Workarounds Affect the Most
While workarounds may seem harmless at first, they tend to place the greatest burden on those with the least clarity or authority.
New advisers often struggle to understand expectations when practices vary across schools or individuals. Students lose opportunities for meaningful involvement when processes are simplified by removing them. Smaller schools with fewer administrative resources are forced to rely more heavily on informal practices. Clerks and support staff may face an increasing risk without the corresponding authority or visibility.
In these situations, responsibility shifts without clarity. Accountability exists, but it is unevenly distributed. At the same time, workarounds shield decision-makers from seeing the friction in the system, allowing risk to accumulate without triggering action.
Early Signs a Workaround Is Becoming the System
The shift to workarounds is usually recognized in hindsight, but the early warning signs are fairly consistent.
Practices begin to vary widely from school to school. Documentation starts living in multiple places. Staff members use phrases like “We’ll clean it up later” or “That’s just how this school does it.” Students are temporarily removed from parts of the process and never fully brought back in.
These are not isolated habits; they are signals that informal adaptations are replacing formal workflows, and that risk is accumulating before anyone realizes the system has changed.
The Real Cost of "Getting It Done"
The danger isn't just the uncomfortable meeting with the auditor. The real risk is that these informal shortcuts quietly shift the burden of proof from the system onto the individual, who must later explain missing documentation, approvals, or decisions the system failed to capture. When you work outside the process to get a vendor paid or a student event funded, you are essentially loaning the district your own professional reputation to cover a system gap.
Over time, this creates a dangerous blind spot. Leaders lose their early warning signs because on the surface, everything looks fine — the checks are being cut, and the events are happening. But beneath the surface, the system has been at risk for months or years.
This isn't flexibility; it’s a system that functions only because your people are exhausting themselves by compensating for its weaknesses. When the audit finally catches up, it’s the well-intentioned staff member left responsible for outcomes created by a process they did not design, who worked around a broken system to get the job done.
What Comes Next
In the final article in this series, we’ll look at what strong student activity fund systems actually do, and how districts can support learning, accountability, and oversight without relying on memory or workarounds.