THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 4, 1995 TAG: 9511040031
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 50 lines
The bad news for Virginia Beach public schools just got $5 million worse. The audit just completed by KPMG Peat Marwick shows a deficit for fiscal year '94-'95, calculated in August at $7.4 million and climbing, of more than $12 million. Somebody's got to cover that shortfall. That somebody is the city's taxpayers through City Council.
The shortfall in '94-'95, and the budget process that all but ensured it, impacted '95-'96; in the current year, '95-96, the school system is short $6.6 million. The impact of that '95-'96 shortfall may well dig an $8 million hole in the '96-'97 budget.
This is big bucks. Fortunately, and not by chance, the city, which is more frugal and careful than the school system, has the $12 million needed now already in hand. There should be a price, however, for the city's check to schools for that $12 million-plus. And the price should be what City Manager Jim Spore recommends to City Council: the School Board's agreement to consolidate school financial accounting, payroll, purchasing and risk management with the city's department of finance.
In the recent past the board has balked at wholehearted endorsement of consolidation. Efficiency and economy would argue for it even without the disaster schools alone have made of school finances. But the clincher is this: Left to their own devices, the school system produced and the School Board approved a budget - at least one - that not only was dead on arrival but slowly decomposed without the public twitch of a single top official's nose.
The '94-'95 school budget, say the auditors, was useless as a management tool. It ``was prepared without realistic supporting assumptions and documentation for many key . . . items.'' Amounts budgeted in certain areas bore little if any relation to actual amounts needed before or since. No wonder, then, that some $43 million was transferred last year from some accounts to others, a signal of poor budgeting to the rawest recruit and a nightmare for department heads. They weren't apprised of transfers out of their accounts either before or after the fact.
The auditors suggest remedies, some already undertaken by Interim Superintendent Jim Pughsley. But they aim mostly at the how and how much of the schools' budget mess. It's time that somebody - the School Board, City Council, a special grand jury - delved into the questions this financial audit doesn't answer: the who, the when and the why.
KEYWORDS: VIRGINIA BEACH SCHOOL BOARD DEFICIT BUDGET by CNB