The Guts of CISD’s Response to TEA

by Micki Nellis

May 21, 2008 - CISD’s response to the TEA report asks for reconsideration of $166,000 of the $367,000 that CISD has been asked to repay in misspent federal funds, leaving $200,000 uncontested.

CISD filed a 754 page response to TEA on May 14 and included an additional 1200 pages, according to Interim Superintendent Dr. James Warlick and Financial Officer Mike Bailey.

The 41.38 MB report is posted on the school’s website at http://www.cleburne.k12.tx.us/news/cisd_response/cisd_response.pdf
The report, in Acrobat pdf format, takes about an hour to open in Acrobat and download on a fairly slow DSL connection.

The guts of the report are this:

The first 16 pages present a plan to do better. This includes revised policies and procedures. One of TEA’s options is to impose sanctions, including appointing a management team for the school. The revised policies and procedures are aimed at staving off further intervention from TEA.

Pages 656 and 657 include two spreadsheets. The first is a list of disallowed expenses in the amount of $12,480.66. The second is a list of expenses totaling $11,905.32 paid out of general funds that CISD asks TEA to “swap” for the disallowed expenses.

CISD asks the TEA to reconsider and allow $7,641.00 paid to SECCA, a consultant firm which was supposed to help them administer federal grants. The invoices from SECCA did not reflect specifically what they were doing for CISD.

CISD asks the TEA to reconsider and allow $140,000 in salaries paid to speech pathologists. There was a problem with a missing form and proof of certification.

CISD also presented some figures on drawdowns which was not clear to us. The figures were not clearly explained for lay people to understand.

The gist of it is that CISD asks TEA to reconsider about $166,000 of the $367,000 the TEA has said they must pay back.

The rest of the response consists of copies of new forms CISD will implement for pre-purchase and purchase authorizations, copies of the original federal grant applications, copies of daily schedules for the speech pathologists, copies of their licenses, and copies of the invoices CISD is asking to “swap” for some disallowed items.

The additional 1200 pages include “alternative” documentation for the salaries paid to the speech pathologists in lieu of the one missing form per teacher required by TEA.

Five grant administrators have been named: Sharron Miles, Janet Walker, Penney Morrison, Randy Stone and Judy Senter. A Special Revenue Fund clerk will also be hired. The district has already employed an additional CPA as of August, 2007.

Tom Padgitt, attorney hired by the school, said he has spent 28 hours on CISD’s behalf. He told the school board that the biggest problem was that policies weren’t enforced. “People who were monitoring the expenditure of funds should have known and weren’t following them,” he said. “It will take from the very top down to see that these policies are followed.”

Board Member Donna Boles, who was president of the school board during part of the misspending and during early futile alerts from citizen watchdogs, said “I’m still a little bit puzzled by the fact that someone didn’t know the rules.”