RSU 9 board discusses audit, COVID-19 impact

FARMINGTON – The Regional School Unit 9 school board met Tuesday evening, discussing results from the district’s audit as well as updates relating to the COVID-19 illness.

COVID-19, a respiratory illness, has spread into several states, prompting travel restrictions, quarantines and some states declaring a state of emergency. The Maine Center for Disease Control is currently reporting zero confirmed cases in the state, having tested more than 40 people and registered only negative tests.

Although Maine currently has no known cases, the illness has been the subject of discussion between school districts and the Maine CDC, Superintendent Tina Meserve said. Nurses within the schools were getting a lot of questions, she said, and the illness was already prompting some cancellations.

These included a planned trip to Boston – that state declared a State of Emergency yesterday – as well as a competition the Mt. Blue Robotics team had intended to attend at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Cancellations are also impacting staff, as the annual Western Maine Education Collaborative Rendezvous professional development event at the University of Maine at Farmington was cancelled by the university.

Steps the schools were taking locally included more environmental cleanings – particularly for door knobs and railings – as well as additional encouragement for students to wash their hands. For students that did exhibit a high fever or other symptoms, the district continued to advise parents to keep them home, Meserve said.

School closures were not being actively considered at this point, Superintendent Tina Meserve said in response to a board member’s question, noting that the state had no confirmed cases.

“We’ll do whatever the CDC tells us to do,” Meserve said. “There’s a lot of potential scenarios.”

She did say that the Maine Department of Education would allow school boards to decide whether or not to waive school days lost due to COVID-19-related closures, rather than requiring they be made up like snow days.

One option, in the case of a closure, would be to utilize student laptops for some type of distance learning program, Meserve said. That was hardly a replacement for an in-school program, however, and younger students do not have laptops through the 1-on-1 program.

Meserve also said that closing a school would have a ripple affect through a community, as parents needed to take time off work to make child care arrangements.

The audit, conducted by Runyon Kersteen Ouellette, found no material weaknesses with RSU 9’s financial statements. Tim Gill, the certified public accountant that reported the results to the board, said that the district’s General Fund balance was $1.55 million at the end of the previous fiscal year, increasing by approximately $335,000 over the previous year. Of those funds, $500,000 was assigned to reduce the impact of the budget on local tax assessments, while another $232,389 was restricted to Career & Technical Education funding. That represented a change in how the state funded CTE programs like Foster Career and Technical Education Center: funds not expended now had to be segregated within the General Fund and only used for CTE programs.

Gill did identify three areas of deficiency that the district is working to address. These issues included the segregation of duties within the business office, the preparation of financial statements and the handling of school lunch cash receipts.

Largely, the issues relate to not having multiple people in charge of incoming funds, such as separate personnel handling revenue collection and recording the transaction. Gill described the issue as mostly driven by the small size of the district’s business office and said that the majority of school districts deal with similar issues, as school boards typically would rather put funding toward teachers than administrative positions.

RSU 9 was aware of the issue from the previous year’s audit and added a position to the business office as part of last year’s budget process. Superintendent Tina Meserve noted that other steps had also been taken, such as having the superintendent review the business manager’s journal entries.

Tracking lunch money was challenging for districts, Gill said; for example, batching credit card receipts could make it difficult to follow funds from the point of collection to deposit. “The process isn’t as clear as we’d like it to be,” Gill said.

Other recommendations made by the auditors included correctly documenting student activity accounts – complicated by the large number of clubs and groups, many using school secretaries as points of contact – reconciling old, outstanding checks and ensuring that journal entries were reviewed by a third party.

Gill also touched upon accrued summer salaries, a liability the district is in the process of addressing. Like most districts, RSU 9 spreads out the salaries of staff over the summer months, paying money earned in September through June over the course of July and August, to provide year-round paychecks. As the new fiscal year turns over on July 1, this creates an issue wherein salaries are earned in one fiscal year, but paid off in the next year’s budget.

Auditors are now pushing for districts to account for staff salaries in the fiscal year they were earned. For RSU 9, that means picking up two months of salaries, or roughly $1.96 million. In September, the board voted to phase in the change, utilizing money out of the General Fund initially and phasing in the payments over the next five years.

Runyon Kersteen Ouellette also audited two federally funded programs – Title 1A and the Special Education Cluster – and found no issues.