Budget Committee Documents

The next Budget Committee Meeting is scheduled for April 19. Some background on last year's actual versus budgeted expenditures can be found here. The estimated budget was emailed to the committee members yesterday and can be seen here.

UPDATE FOR APRIL 19 MEETING: An additional handout was supplied offering more detail as to the specifics behind the categories in the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 budgets. The committee worked off of the numbers provided in the handouts linked to above. No changes were made to the allocations at the meeting.

Open Letter from Dulaney Barrett

Dulaney Barrett has asked me to publish this letter which is his response to the Special Board Meeting held to address the School Board's violation of the Open Meetings Act when appointing D'dre Brock and Ed Woten to the School Board.

In his letter, Dulaney refers to various blog postings from cmsbears.net. To help you follow his letter, I have linked to those postings:
Open Meetings Act notification (dated February 5, 2010)
Request for Letters of Intent (while I requested copies of these letters in November, I only received Dulaney's letter and was not successful in obtaining a copy of Ed's)

Letter to Mr. Hancock Outlining State Budget Concerns

Mr. Hancock asked me to post the following:

Attached is a letter that everyone should read.  I would like for the Mountain Monthly, Margo, and our web site to please publish the letter.  People need to know what things are like as we develop our budget for the 2010-2011 school year. 

Tommy Hancock, Superintendent

Cloudcroft Municipal Schools

PO Box 198

Cloudcroft, New Mexico 88317

575-601-4416

Alamogordo Daily News April School Board Meeting Coverage

Here is the article for the April School Board meeting.

Summary and Podcast of School Board Meeting held April 5, 2010

You can find a podcast of the meeting at http://cmsbears.podbean.com. For convenience sake, you may choose to listen to the podcast in ITunes, which will let you skip to the chapters that you are interested in. Just search for Cloudcroft in the ITunes store and you should find the podcast. Sometimes it takes them a day to update their podcasts.

To briefly summarize the meeting, the board approved all of the Action Items with the exception of appointing the Audit Committee, which they tabled. If you are interested in serving on the Audit committee, it will consist of two Board members, plus a parent of a student in the school, plus a community member with knowledge of accounting/auditing principles. They should be selecting the committee at the next meeting.

The Finance Committee will consist of Ed Woten and Jackie Cates, who also serve on the Budget Committee.

The Board approved consolidation of the School's bank accounts. Apparently, the school has 7 different bank accounts, which the Business Manager Sharlotte Lund explained makes it very easy to kite checks and misappropriate funds (per the Auditor) so the auditor has recommended that these accounts be consolidated. What was not addressed publicly was (1) how long ago the auditor made these recommendations, (2) have any of the other auditors made this recommendation and (3) how long has the school maintained multiple accounts. As a member of the public, I found this odd. The board agreed that the opportunity for fraud was there and approved consolidating the accounts.

The Board approved the Open Meeting Resolution, which is the same as last years' only with a date change. Doug Porch did note that the Agenda has not been getting posted in the Cloudcroft Post Office and asked that Teresa fax him a copy when it is done so he could personally take it over there (right now Teresa mails it to the post office.) I also couldn't help but pipe up and ask once again that they post the agenda to the school's website, which was supposed to start happening last July. See: (http://cmsbearsinfo.blogspot.com/2009/06/school-board-agenda-publication.html). It sounds like Teresa is sending the agenda to Wanetta Ferguson (wife of the school's Technology & Network Administrator Joel Ferguson) and assuming from there that they are being posted. I assured her that I check on a regular basis and they are usually not posted.

Next year's school calendar should look very much like this year's, and was approved by the Board.

Budget Committee Meeting Podcast and Handout

The Budget Committee met today and was given this handout. You can listen to a podcast of the meeting at http://cmsbears.podbean.com.

As a member of the committee, I'm still trying to sort out in my head just what input (if any) the school is looking for. As you will hear from the podcast, most of the meeting consisted of the Superintendent and the Business Manager telling us what guesstimates they think they will be plugging into the budget. I have asked that the committee receive last year's budget estimates versus actuals (in the same categories as we were given), as that seems to me to be a logical starting point in the budget process. It sounds like this information will have to be "created" for the committee and the Business Manager isn't sure when she'll have a chance to get to that. I am hoping that it will be prior to the next meeting, which is the day before the budget is due to PED.

Quality of Education Survey

The 2009-2010 Quality of Education Survey is up and running on the PED website. You can access instructions on how to complete one (or more) for Cloudcroft Schools here. You can also go to the PED website at http://164.64.166.19/studentsurvey/surveyframe.asp

Now is your chance to complete the online survey. It is a pathetic example of apathy that only 39 surveys were submitted last year.

Agenda for School Board Meeting to be held April 5

Here is the agenda for tomorrow's meeting. I would like to be able to link you to the agenda on the school's web page, but the it is not posted there.

Budget Committee Meeting Tuesday April 6

Public Notice of next budget committee meeting.