Losing confidence in Sun Prairie School District

Sadly, the credibility of the district is going up in flames, ignited by the sparks of a lengthening track record of poor quality information and financial freewheelin'.

The question we have is: how can we have any confidence in the fiscal management of the Sun Prairie Area School District?

Most recently we have the district exceeding the 2011-12 budget for certain line items and using 2011-12 surplus dollars to purchase items required for 2012-13 school year.  Without any public discussion. Or approval from the school board.

We also find out that the brand spanking new JV baseball field has drainage issues that is budgeted to cost $70,000 to repair.  Is this not something that should have been identified earlier and made the responsibility of the contractor that graded the field?

The Ashley field costing has blown credibility to shreds.  We were told that annual maintenance costs are $60,000 countless times.  Then late in 2010, the district re-calculated maintenance costs at only $15,000 per year.  However that figure has not been widely released.  Why?  Because the initial plan assumed that we'd save at least $450,000 in maintenance costs over 120 years, and therefor the district should pony up at least $450K.

And that's just this year.
Go back to last year and we have the whole candy fiasco, the inaccurate data coming out of the business office, the shenanigans which occurred at the annual meeting to name just the major hitters.

The *new* budget timeline works for the district but not for the community
This year we have heard no official word at all about the budget, and that's bad for the community.  The first time we officially see any form of a real budget, the new fiscal year will already have begun.
Seriously...how wrong is that?
That's like getting your tax bill after it's due.
Like getting your position description after you start a job.

We've gone backwards, people.
We should be reviewing the state of the CURRENT budget with the community from March through June, as the school and fiscal year year ends.
At the same time, we should be reviewing plans for spending for the upcoming year.


Mid-year budget changes are (almost) entirely unacceptable
With the exception of an unexpected grant or some major unanticipated cost, we should NEVER bee changing the budgeted amount for a given budget line.
Administrators get paid the big bucks to know how to budget...accurately.
And, if we DO need to exceed the budget, isn't that what fund balance is for?
Stop trying to con us into believing that leaving fund balance alone is required to get  a good rating and good interest rates. Poppycock.  That's the stuff that Walker feeds us.  Do we really want it from the district?

The complexion of the board has changed significantly.
We have a new board president.

This is a window of opportunity
for a board  with a new majority

We have a new board treasurer.
It's time to change the way the Sun Prairie Area School District does business.
But it starts with the board; it must take action to address and correct the issues.
And that action begins with a Situation Report and a public discussion.
Any volunteers?

Budget shenanigans alert: $384K of OVER-expenditures identified

Instead of an Annual Meeting Book
or a  150 pg Monitoring Report, how
about each resident gets a copy of this?

We knew it was too good to be true.
We saw at least $700K in surplus, Phil Frei kept saying only $200-400K.
Ah...but he controls the purse strings, so he knew.  He knew.
The questions are, however: did his supervisor, Tim Culver know? Why didn't the school board know?

Budget Shenanigans#1: $300K over-expenditure for textbooks
District administration had to know these were coming.  So why weren't they budgeted for?
Or did Mr. Frei know that there would be a surplus to cover the shortfall in these budget lines?


Budget Shenanigans#2: Who knew? And why wasn't it reported?

District administration certainly, without a doubt knew they needed to purchase these textbooks; they'd been meeting on the issue through 2011.  It is our understanding that when board members asked if there was money in the respective department budgets for these materials, administration indicated affirmative.  Clearly that is not the case.  So where did they think this money was coming from?  Fund Balance?  Budget surplus, hmmm?
Why was this not reported as part of the March budget adjustments?  Did Tim Culver know about/approve this?

Budget Shenanigans#3: Robbing Peter to pay Paul
Clearly, the intent was to purchase $300K of textbooks required for the 2012-13 school year using projected surplus dollars from the 2011-12 budget.  This is not appropriate.  Budgets are budgets. Any budget surplus belongs to the taxpayers, NOT district administration.  Could they ASK nicely (via the school board) if the taxpayers would be so kind as to allow surplus dollars be used to pay for next years expenses?  Sure.  And likely it would be approved.  But that's not what was done here.  The manner in which this was handled is questionable at best and subject to repercussions at worst.

The question that this brings, however, is what OTHER budget hijinx is going on that we have NOT yet discovered? It brings to mind the old adage that if one would steal a candy bar, it establishes that the individual has thieving tendencies, which leads one to question: what else will be (or has been) stolen...and when.


Budget Shenanigans#4: Money Manipulation 101
How can any budget manager, in good conscience, DECREASE the amount budgeted for a specified line item when expenditures for that line item already exceed the budgeted amount?  Because that's what happened for line 471, Textbooks.  The "budget" in March 2012 was $70,173, which was reduced to $66,814 in April 2012, the same month in which the budget was not just exceeded, but shattered by $161,500?   More to the point, the budgeted amount even in December 2001 was $186,003.  Why was it reduced by $120K when Mr. Frei KNEW these purchases were coming?

Wait...why are we even adjusting budgeted amounts on a monthly basis?  Hello...McFly!  A budgeted is a fixed amount by which one's spending is constrained.  If one simply moves the target every month, it defeats the purposes of even having a budget!  This little known trickery has got to stop.

In an attempt to rationalize this practice, Mr. Frei has used an analogy that a teacher might in the spring decide they want top purchase a magazine, but come fall, decide they no longer want the magazine and instead want to buy construction paper.  Therefore Mr. Frei decreases the magazine budget and increases the paper budget. NO!  What happens is that one line item will be a little short and the other will be a little high.  But they balance each other out in the end! So no harm, no foul.   Changing the budgeted amounts just muddies the water.  Of course, sometimes we muddy the water when we don't want people to see what we're doing.

Budget Shenanigans#5: Disingenuous Information
The value "FYTD %" on the monthly Expenditure by Object report is disingenuous at best. It ONLY reflects actual expenditures vs. budgeted amount. This value MUST also include encumbrances, which are financial commitments the district has made. School board members and residents who look at this stuff will generally simply scan the FYTD% column and look for anomalies. The April report shows that we've only spent 64.69% of budget for line 479 "Other Instructional Books", which at a glance, seems like we will have a surplus with only 2 months remaining. Only if you look at the Unencumbered balance and recognize that -133K represents a budget exceedance would you catch it. And it appears near the bottom on page 2 of a 3 page report.

Budget Shenanigans#6: These Are Not The Only Ones
Take a look at budget line items 440 (Non-Cap Equipment) and 550 (Equip. Addition) as we are now $57K and $27K over budget respectively for these lines (roughly 8%). Was the board made aware of this? What did we purchase that required us to exceed budget for these lines?

Eroding the Public Trust

Really!  What if you needed to pass
a referendum for a new school now?
Does anyone really trust the information
coming out of 500 S. Bird St.?

 It is incidents such as this that continue to erode the public trust in the district as good stewards of taxpayer money. People are hurting, and a surplus used to lower the levy for 2012-13 would have been very nice. Instead, it continues to look like the district wants to squeeze and spend every single taxpayer dollar even using questionable means.

District Leaving the School Board with Egg on their Faces
 The quality and shadiness of data coming out of the district is unacceptable, and these things also make the board look either ignorant or complicit. We don't believe either is true...we know how much information there is and how hard it is to peel all the layers of this onion. However, the district has placed all board members in a very bad position.

Message Ignored: Rolling the Dice At the Board Table?

Maybe we need to schedule a hearing exam, but what we heard at the May 16th FTT meeting was that the Committee needed (read: expected) to see much more detail before approving the 2011-12 Buildings & Grounds budget (including its Capital Projects budget).

In fact, many of the concerns still exist.  For example, the "Summer Maintenance projects" are virtually unchanged, and are nearly identical to what was listed in LAST YEAR's budget.

What do you think Slider thinks?

We also heard the motion from Committee to forward the Buildings and Grounds 2011-12 budget to the school board for consideration.  We didn't hear any approval of this budget by the FTT. Nor did we hear the FTT Committee forwarding the budget for school board approval.

What's going on?  Is the District Office choosing to roll the dice and hope it has 4 board members who will support and approve this budget?  Bet Slider hasn't seen a gutsier move than this since Maverick put on the breaks and let Jester Fly right by.

You decide.  Take a look at the documents presented at the May 16th meeting and then the documents provided for this Monday's (May 23) full school board meeting.  We don't see any new substance.  The board may have cut the Capital budget by 15% and the General B&G budget by $14,000, but there still is no explanation for why projects identified are the same as in previous years.  We don't think that's adequate.


Monday May 16th agenda
Monday May 23 agenda