What can I say that won’t sound smug and arrogant here? The consultant hired by the BOE to evaluate whether a having a finance director is a good thing for the BOE concluded that there’s a lack of financial expertise in the Norwalk Schools administration. Ya think? The Hour reports:
At the same meeting, the Budget Committee also heard the consultant’s report on the finance office’s structure in Central Office. RSMI Consultant Michael O’Neil recommended that there be more financial expertise within the district. The district has been considering hiring a finance director to handle its approximately $150 million budget.
Currently, the Common Council has a finance director, Thomas S. Hamilton, and many of the city’s budget proposals include a contingency fund.
“(In my report) I haven’t explicitly said yes or no to hiring a finance director, but I do believe there has to be more financial expertise at the management level,” O’Neil said. “There needs to be someone who spends all of their time on finance and the financial operations of the district.”
O’Neil said this could be accomplished by adding a finance director’s position or restructuring the current positions in central office.
O’Neil said, through interviews with members of the Board of Education, Board of Estimate and Taxation and the finance committee of the Common Council, he determined that the position of chief operating officer, previously held by Stuart Opdahl, included too many job descriptions, not leaving enough time for Opdahl to focus on financial responsibilities.
A finance director for the school board could handle the budget, pensions, insurance issues and be able to handle budget projections, O’Neil said.
“That job was just spread too thin,” O’Neil said.
Did they really need to hire a consultant to tell them that? No. But they did because at the time they made the consultant decision, Opdahl hadn’t resigned and Corda was still trying to kill the idea of a finance director. Let’s be clear on the impact of this issue. There will be no educational advances in this school system until dollars that are allocated for Education reach the classroom. To get there, you need a strong finance executive who can maximize the use of each dollar and cost contain the operations of the system. Corda has proven incapable of this. The BOE needs to make this a top level priority, which they haven’t.
So what are they working on these days? School lunch prices.
The food program is facing close to a $300,000 deficit if the district doesn’t raise prices for the next school year, including approximately $68,000 in uncollected funds for children who utilized the program.
The increased price of food, particularly dairy, was also a factor in the proposed cost hike.
“You have to take the estimated 5 percent- increase in the cost of food into consideration and add that into the scenario,” said Lisa DePaolo, director of Whitsons Culinary Group in Norwalk, the district’s food service provider.
I sincerely hope that they didn’t spend more than 20 minutes discussing this. Raising the cost of breakfasts and lunches is something you have to do. Unless they have a creative way to subsidize the cost to the student. But oh, wasn’t it Opdahl’s brilliant idea to take control of the food production out of the hands of the school administration and into the hands of a private contractor? And yet somehow we still have kitchen upgrade costs and needs that keep making to to the capital budget.
Sort of gets back to the lack of financial expertise now doesn’t it?
source: The Hour, School meal price increases recommended reluctantly, By JILL BODACH, July 24, 2008
Let’s move forward!!!
