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Failing Math: Getting to the Bottom (Line) of Burlington’s School Budget Crisis by ALiCiA FRE E S E
S
uperintendent Jeanne Collins has a tidy explanation for the messy situation facing the Burlington School District. It’s been “kind of like fixing an airplane while you’re flying it,” she said in an interview last week. By now, Burlington voters have a clearer view of the maintenance problems. The 372 N. Winooski Ave. proposed budget they’ll consider in a spewww.samswoodfurniture.com cial election next month has a higher 12v-samswoodfurniture031214.indd 1 3/7/14 2:44 PMprice tag than the one they rejected on Town Meeting Day. That’s because the school board has since discovered that the Grab any slice & a Rookies Root Beer for $5.99 + tax original sum would have resulted in a deficit — for the fourth year in a row. The error lies in the fact that the original budget was based on the previous year’s — rather than on actual spending, according to Melanson Heath & Company, an independent firm hired to look into the matter. Who’s to blame for a blunder that seems to defy not just the tenets of basic account1 large, 1-topping pizza, ing but also common sense? Mayor Miro 12 wings and a Weinberger and several city councilors 2 liter Coke product have decided Collins is the culprit, calling for her to step down. Collins has maintained she’s simply Plus tax. Pick-up or delivery only. Expires 5/31/14. fixing a problem she inherited when she limit: 1 offer per customer per day. became a superintendent, nearly a decade 973 Roosevelt Highway ago. And although the school board hadn’t Colchester • 655-5550 issued any pink slips as of press time www.threebrotherspizzavt.com Tuesday, it’s calling for wholesale change in how the district manages its money. 12v-ThreeBros050714.indd 1 4/30/14 12:28 PM The ongoing hullabaloo has been a blur of numbers. Board members have alternately described the figures they are working with as “bad,” “very good” and “very grey.” The one thing they aren’t, admits board chair Patrick Halladay, is “perfect.” Collins traces the problem of “bad data” back to the finance director, who oversaw the budget when she first took the job, in 2005. She says Scott Lisle relied on an anHEAR EVERY WORD. tiquated, self-built software system to run Adirondack Audiology Associates has the budget numbers. He and Collins didn’t 30 years of helping patients and their part amicably, which, in her telling, left families restore the quality to living. the next finance director, Michael Gilbar, Treatment processes for: stringing together the fiscal year 2012 • Hearing Loss budget based on a combination of the 2011 • Tinnitus budget and what actual spending data he • Balance Dysfunction was able to extract from the old accounting New patients welcome! system. Accepting most insurance. Gilbar left after one year, and his re802.316.4602 placement, Karen Groseclose, undertook Offices in: what Collins considered an essential Colchester, VT • Plattsburgh, NY • Saranac Lake, NY reform — a transition to a new accounting
David Larcombe and Miriam Stoll
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software system. But Groseclose departed last year, partway through the process. Today, David Larcombe, Collin’s fourth finance director, is in charge. But the process of inputting data from the old system to the new still isn’t complete — though Collins assured, “I think we are very, very close.” Already a time-consuming task that has occasionally involved entering data by hand, it’s been further complicated by the fact that many line items were coded incorrectly in the old system, according to Collins. It wasn’t that the administration was deliberately overlooking actual spending figures, Collins said; it simply didn’t have access to all the data required and couldn’t accurately gauge spending in real time. “We truly believed at the time that it was adequate data,” said Collins. “We knew we had difficulty getting the data, but it was the best data we had at the time.” In an era of overspending, Collins said she might actually have been too frugal in this area. “I think we did underestimate how challenging the transition would be, and we didn’t put enough resources into it.” Halladay and several other school board members aren’t sold on her story. “Before computers and software existed, there were ways to figure out how much money you had budgeted and when you were getting close to spending that amount of money,” he said. He suggested that the district could have drawn better estimates
Liz Curry
by looking farther back and using an average of multiple past years’ actual spending. “To say it’s strictly an issue of technology really isn’t accurate,” he continued, adding that the auditors told the board as much. In both FY 2012 and 2013, the district ended the year with a deficit. It was a “complete surprise,” Halladay said, when Larcombe told the board sometime around Town Meeting Day that the district would likely end FY 2014 in the red — again. That prompted the board to commission the audit, which showed that the 2015 budget,