In one of his more significant, although slightly flawed, education reform initiatives, Gov. Ted Strickland wants school districts to undergo annual financial and operational performance audits.
”Just as we provide an academic report card for our schools, we will provide parents, public officials and taxpayers an annual fiscal and operational report card for every school district. That means that when we send districts funding to help students who need additional attention and instruction, we will now be able to track our dollars to see that they directly reach those students,” Strickland said in his third State of the State address.
This is a great idea on a number of levels.
Parents and homeowners would be able to determine whether their district is making the grade on spending. For years, the Ohio Department of Education has issued academic report cards for districts.
Yes, at times, woeful news in the audits would make it more difficult for superintendents and school board members to ask voters to pass levies.
On the other hand, fiscal and operational performance audits would help districts identify and correct spending problems.
Reforming schools starts with audits
2 thoughts on “Reforming schools starts with audits
School district audits need to be independent”
Comments are closed.
FWIW, Eric Kass, the new head of MMSD business services has done a lot in a very short time to move our financial reports into a more informative and helpful direction. We have a way to go, to be sure, but we have come a long way in a very short time from where we were a few years ago.
At the last operations committee meeting, Eric shared a newly formated financial report that helps to put the numbers in context for the current years and compared to previous years. Sounds sorta boring, perhaps, but is very helpful in trying to figure out whether we are on track with the budget and whether the expenditures are in line with what they have been in previous years. Helps to hone in on areas that merit additional review and explanation.
The annual audits are in place. The value is in the work that the auditors have been doing to help bring MMSD practice in line with accounting standards. Again, not perfect but far from where we were a few years ago.
Fiscal audits are worth spending state funds given Ohio has found fraud in several districts. I also noticed that in some cases they compared staffing to the state average and recommended decreasing staff significantly to meet the average. The latter recommendation concerns me, since the rationale of the auditor did not discuss whether appropriate services were being offered by those districts at the average, for example.
That is, fiscal prudence needs to be compared to quality of service.