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.