VERGENNES — Residents of the five Addison Northwest Supervisory Union communities have opportunities to learn more about their schools’ finances and long-delayed audits at upcoming board meetings.
Audits for the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 fiscal years for all four ANwSU schools and the central office were completed in October, and officials have set aside time at board meetings to field residents’ questions about the results.
Discussions were held last week at Vergennes Union High School and Ferrisburgh Central School meetings. Next up is Vergennes Union Elementary School on this Monday, Nov. 17, at 6 p.m., at the school.
The Addison Central School board will meet at ACS on Thursday at 7 p.m., and the ANwSU board will meet in the VUHS library at 6 p.m. on Dec. 17. At that meeting, officials will discuss issues that include the status of federal grants that were placed at risk by financial mismanagement in the central office in the past two years.
The full audits for each school, plus letters from the auditing firm with additional comments, have been posted online at anwsu.org. The link to the audits may be found at the bottom center of the ANwSU home page at “Audit Reports.”
The audits do routinely criticize ANwSU for not following Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) practices, which require complete inventorying of capital assets. However, at least some small communities, including Vergennes, choose not to follow GASB capital accounting standards.
ANwSU Superintendent JoAn Canning said in an email that all towns and school districts in Vermont are “supposed to” follow those standards, and many school districts do so. Those schools and towns who do not follow GASB standards automatically receive adverse opinions from auditors, she wrote.
The auditors also criticize ANwSU schools for often having one person handle lunch, student activity and/or principals’ funds, a practice that auditors say creates risks for errors and fraud. Also, VUES was cited for not segregating funds from a grant from its general fund.
In the 2012 audits, ANwSU responded to those criticisms by stating, “Recognizing there are limited funds with which to hire additional staff, we will implement procedures to minimize risk.”
To the same criticisms in the 2013 audits, the ANwSU responses were, “In Fiscal Year 2015, procedures will be implemented to address the lack of segregation of duties over the hot lunch fund,” and, “In Fiscal Year 2015, procedures will be implemented to address the lack of segregation of duties over agency funds.”