ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
The USD 480 school board took on a busy agenda for its most recent meeting Monday evening.
Early in the meeting, the board heard from LNEA Treasurer Kelsey Kronawitter about the proposed new scheduling discussed at last week’s board workshop.
“At Liberal High School, we did conduct that voting survey last week, and out of the 44 certified staff who were eligible to vote, 42 of them did vote, and the final result ended up 15 ‘Yes’ votes and 27 ‘No’ votes, meaning the majority of the voters did not want to move forward with the proposed new schedule,” Kronawitter said. “With that in mind, we’re still looking to get some clarification on what our next step(s) will be, and I’m sure we will be coming before the board again to talk about everything. I know it’s been a rough opening to the spring semester with everything that’s happened, and I want to thank the entire board for your openness and willingness to have those conversations with staff and members of the public. It’s great to see that happening, and I think it’s a great step forward. ”
The board also heard a presentation of the 2023-24 audit from Director of Business Operations Nila Newton.
“The district is in an overall very healthy position. We started the year with $30.7 million and ended the year with $41.9 million, and the majority of that was in our Capital Outlay and our bond fund, which represents about 78 percent of our cash,” Newton said. “The other big account that holds some of our cash is the contingency fund, which has about $3.6 million. We don’t really look at the revenue and expenses, and as the letter from Hay, Rice and Associates notes, as part of obtaining reasonable assurance about whether USD 480’s financial statement is free from material misstatement, they performed tests of its compliance with certain provisions of laws, regulations, contracts, and grant agreements, noncompliance with which could have a direct and material effect on the financial statement. However, providing an opinion on compliance with those provisions was not an objective of our audit, and accordingly, we do not express such an opinion. The results of our tests disclosed no instances of noncompliance or other matters that are required to be reported under Government Auditing Standards. They ended up finding no major irregularities, but they did make some notes on our activity funds because we should always be trying to improve there and look at our processes. And in that regard, we’ll always have an irregular segregation of duties since we’re a smaller district, and there will always be those adjustments suggested. I was also told these were just matters that came to their attention.”
Newton said there have been adjustments made since budget time.
“At the end of the year, there were a lot of adjustments made, which caused us to have some overages, which were corrected by adjusting some of our journal entries,” Newton said. “What tied into the budget was the point about the outstanding purchase orders. We started clearing up some very old encumbrances, and as we processed them, it created some swings and our final numbers didn’t entirely match, which he understood, because that can happen sometimes. Those aren’t anything he’s super concerned about, and he knows we’re working on clearing those up from our records, but it is something that came up. Our cash reconciliations also don’t match the treasurer’s account, and that’s because we can’t get move in the system, which is something we’re also working on. We need to bring all of that into the system so everything fully matches up. These are not the material findings, they are just recommendations, and we can discuss whatever needs to be. But we did have a clean audit.”
After several more minutes of discussion and questions, the matter died due to the lack of a motion.
In other new business, the board also approved payment of payment application No. 4 to Osborne Construction in the amount of $376,337.99 for the LHS auditorium rain screen project and the Dual Credit Cooperative Agreement with Seward County Community College. The board also voted to approve new courses Spanish Language Arts at Seymour Rogers Middle School and Spanish III at LHS.
Later on in the meeting, the board heard information about a potential land sale.
“We have talked about this previously, we have a member of the community who has asked about purchasing some land adjacent to Seymour Rogers Middle School along U.S. Hwy 54,” Director of Operations Chad Mease said. “He did come back with an offer of $25,000 for approximately 0.62 acres, or $0.93 per sq foot. For a property on U.S. Hwy 54, that is very inexpensive.”
“I think something to consider is whether or not they’d want to lease it and be responsible for the maintenance and upkeep and all of that,” board member Alan Brown said.
“I can definitely talk to the person and ask about all of that,” Mease said. “But I don’t think that would necessarily be an issue for them.”
The matter will come back before the board as an action item at a future meeting.
