School Committee Not Addressing Special Audit

Dear Editor,

It has been a couple of weeks since the damning special audit report has been made public. To date I have seen no reporting that the School Committee has acknowledged or offered any concrete steps to address the issues documented in the report. Those who fail to study and respond to history are bound to repeat it.

There are many questions raised by this report.

Did the School Committee understand and approve of the line item transfers made to the Excess and Defenciency Budget for the two years in question and what was their reason to so fund the budget overrun? There was no expectation from the town Administration to level fund the schools because during the decades I have lived here, I cannot remember when it was ever level funded. The town finances did not require level funding, but when presented with available monies, the town was pretty quick to spend them.

Why doesn't the annual audit include the same scope that this special audit included? If the basic fundamentals of accounting are ignored, what is the check and balance available to identify this failure?

What steps are being taken to address the FY'16 budget shortfall?

I believe the school unions and School Committee could immediately agree to a one-year no raise, no COLA budget. This would accomplish two goals. The first would put the contract cycle in line with the Town's 3 year cycle so that both sets of unions would be negotiating in the same year and have access to the same economic conditions. Negotiating three year contracts from the same point in time would allow parity to be consistent and it would be the condition if there were no school district but simply a school department.

The contract to the audit firm conducting the annual audit could be immediately expanded or the firm conducting this special audit hired to continue and expand the scope of this special audit.

The School Committee could require all line item transfers to be approved by the School Committee with E & D transfers requiring a two-thirds majority.

If better coordination with the Town was an objective, the Committee could require from their business manager a quarterly report on the District's fiscal health and forward a copy to the Town Manager.

I do not pretend to know the inner workings of the District's accounting practices, but the independent audit report does not give me confidence that the situation that occurred, will not be repeated.

Sincerely,

Rule Loving

Townsend Road