School Committee members debate potential audit request

While the School Committee has voted on and approved its Fiscal Year 2027 budget, conversations about funding are ongoing.

During a School Committee meeting on Monday, May 18, School Committee members continued a discussion on whether to request an audit to look at the district’s budget.

Committee member Chris Oliver pitched the idea at a previous meeting, noting on May 18 that he thought it was something worth looking into because the school district may one day in the near future need to request a Proposition 2 ½ override or debt exclusion.

An override would be a permanent property tax increase while a debt exclusion would temporarily increase taxes for the duration of a capital project, such as constructing a new middle school.

Oliver noted that while he doesn’t personally think there’s a need for an audit, he wanted to pitch the idea because he’s “trying to look through the lens of other people that might.”

“Every vote counts for an override, and if there are questions still remaining out there from citizens that may feel that the information is only coming from the school department, even though we’ve said it comes from the Department of Education,” he said.

There was some division between School Committee members on whether an audit is necessary, with members Kathleen Amaral and John Nunes opposing the proposal.

Amaral said that the school district is an “open book” when it comes to how money is spent and doesn’t ask from the town more than they need.

“We are to the penny … anyone could look at our books, and they’re not going to find anything,” she said.

She added that if an audit does go forward, then it needs to be something all town departments do, a suggestion that was made by School Committee member Elizabeth Coughlin.

“The other departments … face the same obstacles, so having a third party … look into the same questions that this committee wants the school to answer I think would be a good idea,” Coughlin said. “Then we have an even view of all the departments.”

Nunes called an audit a “waste of money,” noting that the town has “tight financial issues.”

“That’s money that could be used someplace in a budget for someone, whether it’s ours or the police department, DPW, harbormaster, or whatever the case in point may be,” he said.

He added that there needs to be trust that the district’s central office staff knows what they’re doing when it comes to what has to be filed and what reports have to be generated.

“Our books get looked at as part of the town audit. They’ve never come to us and said, ‘We got a problem,’” Nunes said.

Amaral noted that the information is available on the dashboard of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which includes data about student demographics.

“It just feels so wasteful to hire someone to compile that publicly available data and repackage it in a way that’s super expensive, and it’s going to tell us exactly what we already know,” she said.

Members of the school department will be meeting on Tuesday, May 19 with the Town Budget Advisory Group to determine whether conducting an audit would be necessary or worthwhile.