Dr. David Hopson
12 Littleville Rd
Huntington, MA 01050

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March 3, 2008

Recent newspaper and television accounts would lead one to believe that school districts are having great difficulty managing their funds in a proper fashion. We’ve heard of shortfalls in the Westfield Public Schools, the Greenfield Public Schools, closing schools in Holyoke due to financial issues and the myriad issues, including funding, in the Ware Public Schools. Such issues are impacting present as well as future budgets for these school systems. What we don’t hear about is the majority of school districts, and cities/towns, that go from year to year with balanced budgets. Most of these entities constructively plan how they might meet both anticipated and unanticipated financial situations in the future.

Gateway is currently undergoing its yearly rituals to ensure that our finances are on track and that the procedures and protocols in place are adequate to protect both the district and our member towns. One of these is the adoption and ratification of a budget for the 2008-2009 school year (Fiscal Year 2009). Another is the current operation and preparations to close out the 2007-2008 budget in a manner that provides for student needs without ending the year in deficit. The last (at least related to finances) is the annual audit of our financial records for the 2006-2007 school year. Together, these three annual activities provide us with a review of past financial actions, a yardstick to measure how we’re doing currently and a plan for budgeting for the next fiscal year.

As you can well imagine, this provides a great deal of work related to essentially keeping and working with three budgets in the same time frame. The benefits are many including allowing the ability to review past, current and future data to locate trends, patterns and any areas that may be problematic in the future. While the audit takes place over a relatively short period of time, the preparation and follow-up extend the period of time that the business office is dedicating to this activity. This is similar to planning next year’s budget: the school administrators start the budget process in October, the school committee works with the budget in January and February, the public has a public hearing in March, and the school committee adopts the budget following the hearing. It is then up to the towns to vote to ratify the budget in May, with the going into effect on July 1—almost an entire year from preparation to implementation!

I have been pleased with past audits and don’t anticipate any surprises this year. Our business office staff is a dedicated, hard-working and accurate group of people with well-defined roles within established, written protocols of managing the district finances. The role of the audit is to review our operations, assess the financial status of the district and report the findings and any recommendations to the school committee. Each year the auditors suggest improvements to the system, some based upon their own experience, some based upon changes in state and federal regulations, and all intended to provide additional protection to the district and our seven towns. These recommendations are reviewed and acted upon by the school committee and central office to strengthen our ability to deal with financial matters. For those interested in specific findings, the yearly audits are available as public record and each new audit reports on the progress the district has made in meeting prior audit recommendations. In addition, a review of finances was also completed through the EQA review whose report can be found on the district’s website. I anticipate that the final audit report this year will be presented to the school committee sometime in May for Fiscal Year 2007.