001good evening everybody I'd like to bring greetings from governor Roy Cooper Christy he wishes he could be here but unfortunately Raleigh got him tied up the governor had asked me to present you an award tonight it is the highest civilian honor highest civilian honor award that any person in the state could receive is to order along leap I Christy if you could please join myself and Senator Van Dyne Christie can join the Fraternal Order of people that could get to say here's to land a longleaf pine the summer land with the Sun doth shine where the wheat grows strong and the stronger great here's to down-home thank you so very much I hope I don't have to recite that like really quickly because I can't do that hopefully there's a crib sheet right there there
002is so coming back here is coming home and I certainly appreciate you I will try not to cry but you all know I can't do that because you all know me and I want to thank you because it truly is a passion for me to make sure that people know what's out there for them and for me and you've all you're still home and you're still family and I do appreciate that one of the things that nobody ever can take away from somebody is their education and everybody needs to continue learning no matter what and it is important for kindergarten students it is important for our middle school or high school our intermediate school no matter when you learn you have to continue learning I have had such great time to reflect over what we
003are and what we've done I've heard amazing stories from parents about how great our teachers are our faculty and our staff and what Buncombe County Schools brings to each other and what it's brought to this community it does take a village it takes a great community we live in an awesome place but we are an awesome school system that does great things for this community and our community grows and flourishes because of this and that is who we are that is what we were called to do and that's what we called to do every day so up there you all are part of this you all give your heart and soul every day you all are the reason this happens I don't do this alone you know that I call on you immensely and called
004on you immensely a lot and Nathan's right yes sometimes it was eleven o'clock and I remember one night Greg in maintenance he said Chrissy stop emailing late I forgot to turn my sound off on my phone and it keeps ringing so but it's a dedication than a calling and us in education know it well and my heart bleeds education and I hope that no matter what my mom always said no one could take your education away so be a lifelong learner and make sure no matter what I'm so proud of my kids were able to go through Buncombe County Schools I'm so proud that Cody is teaching at or when and doing such a great job he loves that he is a model his dad he knew it from the day was born he was
005going to do that and so we've had great success here you are a phenomenal and I'm very thankful for what you Burrell oudh me to do I am a CTE person I'm dedicated to the craft and I'm just very appreciative of everything you are phenomenal so thank you there you go to be able to pull this over I'm Christie cheek it took people from wrong you know Gregg Chris she's taking it her husband with her good to see you I told Christy that Charles Kuralt used to say that no probably there's not many people in this room that knows who that man is but he used to say that all the time on his on its program on CBS do you know who Charles Karl that was just a test all right at this time
006we have the curriculum feature yes madam chair fellow board members dr. Baldwin we thought it might be of importance for you all to have an update on our people as you know your budget alots eighty-five percent of your dollars to people and we know how much people matter to our children in our schools so Brian Propst and Cynthia Lopez are going to give you an update on the workforce and certainly part of your strategic plan that we are working on daily you will see a mid-year update once we finish first semester and we continue to update this so we'll get that information to you probably in the next month so welcome Cynthia and Brian I wondered why Brian was here you know he doesn't grace us with his presence very often not often in a
007necktie yeah well once a year and I can attest to Christie's mentorship over the years as a young CTE teacher she was great to me all right we're booting up here I got a black screen I'm a tech guy I guess if I turn the computer on that would help and it's gonna ask me for the password let me pull up Barry's email of course it shut down notice I'm not running to helping because I don't know anything here here we go well thank you good evening madam chair dr. Baldwin board members and audience guests my name is Brian Probst I'm the HR information systems manager of Buncombe County Schools and tonight I'm going to share the state of our current BCS workforce and compare it to some previous years so each of you have
008a handout with a lot of data on it I'm gonna highlight most of it in graphs nice colorful graphs so what we have on the screen right now is our SS 200 full time employee data which is a report that we turn in every year to dpi that highlights our full time staff so let's talk about some of our employee counts and make up between 2012 and 2016 looking at these graphs you'll see that we had a steady decline in staff but then over the next three years up to present day it's leveled out so for our current year if I couple the full time staff along with the part-time staff you'll see that we have a total of three thousand seven hundred and fifty-eight total employees additionally we have 650 substitute teachers and about
009500 other temporary as-needed staff that would include interpreters tutors coaches etc so next here is the gender makeup percentages which have been pretty consistent over the past seven years seventy-five percent female 25 percent male next I'd like to share some of the degree levels of our permanent employees who hold an educator certificate so on this graph notice you'll see for the bachelor's portion on the left side of the screen a slight increase by about I'm sorry slight decrease by four percent over the number of educators who hold a sole bachelor's degree level over the last seven years but our master's degree you'll see a slight three percent increase in the number of educators that hold an additional master's degree over the same time period the same shift also appears with the increased number of educators
010holding an advanced or doctorate degree and these increases are despite a provision in North Carolina law that was eliminated in 2013 that gave a ten percent raise to educators with a graduate degree so both of those are going up alright let's talk about beginning teachers so for our beginning teachers who are in their first their second or their third year of teaching we hit a seven-year high back in 2015 and BT numbers have decreased actually over the last few years one reason is the recent enrollment decline and the UNC system teacher education programs in fact there was a 30 percent decline in enrollment between 2010 and 2015 so we're kind of just getting to that ripple effect after they've graduated another contributing factor is Buncombe County Schools hires more out-of-state experienced educators now than ever
011before so of the educators at BCS has hired in the last three years this chart shows the colleges and universities where our beginning teachers have earned their degrees so note this is only the top ten in Buncombe County beginning teachers have earned their degree from over 70 institutions all right so here's the 2019 breakdown of the license staff and the total year's experience so on the next few slides I'm going to break down the seven-year trend and shift so this pie graph shows the senta jizz of how many years of experience or educators had in 2013 and then this is going to be 2015 we did every other year 2015 in 2017 and currently in 2019 looks like a Trivial Pursuit here so let's go back to 2013 and look at our educators with less
012than 10 years of experience so we're just going to be focusing on the purple and yellow wedges here so in 2013 collectively these newer educators made up about 42% of our workforce licensed staff workforce so it went from 42% in 2013 to now 37 percent so it's decreased now let's look at our educators with more than 25 years of experience so these orange and red wedges so in 2013 collectively these career educators made up 17% of our licensed staff workforce and now today in 2019 this group has decreased to 13% which only leads us to one conclusion so if we look at our educators between 10 and 24 years of experience the blue gray and green wedges collectively in 2013 this group made up 41% and now it is 50 percent so the conclusion is
013that this middle group of educators is expanding while the two ends of the spectrum the newer educators and the career educators are decreased have decreased so on to some national board information bcs proudly ranked 17th in the nation for national board certified teachers and we ranked fourth in north carolina for national board teachers been record and the communications department actually just published an article on this on the website it's under news and stories and so finally our teacher turnover rate let me go over some numbers here BCS had a rise in attrition between 2013 and 2015 we went from 9.5 to a seven-year high of 13.6% and then it leveled out between 2016 and 2018 and our current turnover rate is 12.1 percent comparing this to North Carolina average turnover rate it kind of took
014the same highs and lows throughout the period and currently North Carolina's turnover rate the state average is 13.3% so BCS turnover rate has consistently been lower than the statewide average and just finally a few comparisons to some surrounding eliezer on their attrition data Yancy's was the lowest last year at 7% McDowell eight point nine percent madison nine point eight percent Haywood County was 11.1% Rutherford 11.5 percent Henderson just below us was at eleven point nine percent Transylvania fourteen point one and Asheville city's off this chart relatively speaking at twenty point seven of course this data can shift you know quite a bit from year to year so at this time if there's any questions I'll be glad to answer those before I pass it over to miss Lopez could you share that PowerPoint with us
015I sure can all right thank you so don't go far so you can tie me to make sure I don't much time okay all right so even though our turnover rate is has gone down some in the past few years it's still an area of concern for us and you cannot you know I don't seem to go very many days without reading about the teacher shortages across the country and in North Carolina and in my professional organization I hear about it all the time and I think it's much worse in other areas of the state than it is for us we're very fortunate here and I know this group of folks that I talked to a lot in the summer about hiring will tell you that sometimes we are we are seeing maybe not the
016same quality if not the same quantity that we have in the past and so it is an area of concern for us and it is something that is part of our strategic plan as Miss Lunger says one of the goals for academic excellence is that we recruit retain recruit train and retain highly effective educators so to that end our HR department has for many years had a recruiting team we pulled together a group of folks every year and kind of brainstorm about what we can do within this budget and so we attend regional and state job fairs we shifted some we have in prior years looking on out-of-state some and been gone and then the next year we'll measure that has that been effective and so we've really tried to measure what we're doing we've
017gotten the most bang for our buck from our regional universities and I think one of the mr. purposes slide showed that and so we will continue to attend those job fairs and then we also collaborate with our local risa and attend the mountain teacher job fair all of the districts in the West attend that and that's always been an excellent job fair for Buncombe County Schools but we also use social media and our communications department does a great job about with marketing and talking about the great things that we're doing helping us maintain a very interactive website so that it makes it easy for folks to find out what's going on in our system and how to apply for jobs and then the past few years we've used virtual job fairs we've actually sat in
018the office and connected with people who can't travel here and told them about the virtues of coming to Buncombe County Schools and that has been somewhat effective another part of the recruiting team job is to look at diversity as well we recognize that we would like for our workforce to match our student population in terms of diversity and so every year we think about ways that we can increase diversity in our workforce several years ago under the leadership of dr. Baldwin and Miss longer we joined the Buncombe County or WNC diversity engagement coalition which is a networking group of local employers mostly public employers it's the city of Asheville the County of bunkum UNCA a BTEC mission hospital and their focus is diversity equity and inclusion in employment mostly in employment and so we are
019a member of that organization have tried to participate in some of their training and that sort of thing to help us and we do have next month I think it is at the end of next month we have one of their members come in to speak to our principals about the hiring process and what we can do to try and over some come some of those cultural barriers and biases that keep us from maybe hiring more diverse folks into our system the local supplement I would say that if you ask me to say the most important thing that we do above and beyond having an excellent school system to help us recruit and retain folks it's that local supplement Minh so everybody who had a part of that boy I thank you for that it
020does make a difference and just proof this week this was an article in the Haywood County Mountaineer I think the title of the article is curbing the loss of teachers and so just this is a paragraph from that article that they're recognizing that every year they're losing a bunch of teachers to us and to Asheville City and that's because of the money and our supplement I think it said was 50 percent higher than their highest supplement and that's not at all levels so we really appreciate our local supplement and we think it absolutely makes a difference the other things that we do in Buncombe County you know we have our teacher housing which is also made a difference and helps because of our high cost of living our supportive beginning teacher program the professional development
021opportunities that are offered through our curriculum department are wonderful leaders and as mr. cheeks at our awesome school system but I'll also say location location location when I go out recruiting if we don't have a big sign that says Asheville then we're losing out on folks because Asheville certainly helps us recruit folks to come to our area and like mr. Probst ed you know we are depending more because of the decline and folks going through teacher education programs depending more on those out-of-state applicants to come in and fill some of our vacancies and the location really makes a difference there so now and you may end up hating me for this I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the challenges we face with licensure and it fits into this because it's I
022feel like it is overall a challenge in terms of our ability to recruit and retain folks licensure and that is getting a teaching license for our teacher is a challenging endeavor in North Carolina and there have been a lot of efforts made by HR folks by superintendents and we've you know we're we're still working on it we're not making the progress that we would like to make but a couple of things that I just want to put on your radar about the licensure process number one a few years ago North Carolina decided to make the licensing exam for elementary teachers more rigorous because the states that had this more rigorous exam had higher native scores and so they put in place a reading foundations test and a math test both provided by the Pearson corporation
023and since that has been in place a number of teachers have struggled who want to be elementary teachers or special ed teachers that have struggled to pass at math Pearson exam we've struggled with it here in Buncombe County across the region risa tried to put it some helps in place by offering staff development to those folks but this was an article just last month from the Charlotte paper and I think it was also in the Raleigh paper that two thousand North Carolina teachers failed that exam and every time they take that exam I mean I just imagine you're out of school you take you pay a couple of hundred dollars to take your licensing exam and then you fail a portion of it where you have to keep going back and taking it over and
024over again and every time they take it cost a hundred dollars and that doesn't include the prep course that they might have to pay to take so it has been a significant issue in our state well this week the State Board of Education heard a report about how we need to get rid of that exam and this article the Charlotte article is a great article if you get the opportunity to read it but that article points out that there was a study done that has shown that teachers who pass that math exam which is high level math is you know what you might teach in a high level math course in high school even though they're teaching elementary ed that they are not getting better test scores there's no correlation between passing that exam on
025the first try and their effectiveness in the classroom so that was a welcome study the State Board I tried to listen in on the audio stream this week trying still trying to get more information about what the discussion was at the State Board level but I am hopeful that in the next couple of months we're going to see that the State Board is going to allow us to go back to the Praxis math test which is it much better aligned with the licensure area so be on the lookout for that another challenge that we have had that just kind of doesn't make sense in licensure has been with our out-of-state teachers they have been required to me even if they go through a teacher education program and they pass all the exams in that state
026and they teach for 20 years and they come to North Carolina in many cases they still have to pass our exams and you know I think that it hasn't been a real hindrance to folks coming here because I think they don't really realize it until they get here they think oh I have a you know a teaching license I'll be able to get get a job in North Carolina but then once they get here they receive a letter from dpi that says oh you have three years but you've got to pass this test and for example we hired a teacher this summer from Florida 20 years of experience he's in working in one of our elementary schools but he has to take those exams that I talked about for elementary ed and pay for them
027out of pocket so this too was something that was before the State Board today and so we're hopeful that North Carolina will say you know if you've been through a program in another state and you passed whatever tests they had in place you ought to be able to teach in North Carolina let us hire let us check references let us you know look at it from an employment standpoint and give them a license when they come to North Carolina so hopefully we'll see some action on that another thing that's getting ready to happen is the elimination of lateral entry you may be aware that lateral entry is if someone didn't go through traditional teacher education program but majored in science and then decide that they want to go become a science teacher lateral entry allows
028them to go into the classroom and teach currently while they go back to school and take courses and they can actually affiliate with go to our regional alternative licensing Center and they if they need a methods class or you know any any type of pedagogy class they can take classes kind of here and there they don't have to go to a university and affiliate they might be able to get some classes at risa and classes at a BTech and so it is there to get those classes so that they can become fully licensed well our ability to do that ends this June and folks as long as they get started by June they will have until 2020 but if they come to us in July there will not be eligible for a lateral entry license
029so we have this new thing and it's called a residency license and I understand the rationale and that is that there was a study a few years ago that showed that lateral entry teachers were not as effective as teachers who went through a university traditional program so I understand that and I can't really fight with that study but I will say this will provide a challenge to us this year we hired 17 lateral entry teachers and I don't think that we'll be able to hire that many with the residency requirement so what residency does basically it's if you have a bachelor's degree and you've completed relevant coursework like you majored in science or math or you pass the licensing exam you can still get a license but you must go to an educator preparation program
030which is basically a university and affiliate with that University be enrolled actively in their programs and before you can get the job and they're also going to be pre-service requirements that you must meet before you can be a teacher and so I worry about the expense for folks the options that we have now are less expensive but also universities being able to offer these courses at night so that teachers can teach during the day and offer online courses and I know UNCA had a meeting about that very thing yesterday a lot of universities aren't quite equipped for that yet so I do list this as a challenge I think eventually will you know work the kinks out but I think that it may present a challenge to us in the next year in terms of
031our hiring so just something for you as a board to have on your radar we may come back to you with an update or additional information about that so a lot of information and do you have any questions for me we appreciate your support we appreciate what you do thank you the lateral entry folks now do they have taken they have to take practice yes they have to take attention what was there that after that and night does the new thing that's coming and also require practices past the practice and then and then in addition to that right to the other things that you had on right right basically so if you've liked the science is a good example so you majored in biology and you went and worked for somebody and then you decide
032you want to be a teacher and you come back you've got to affiliate with that University and meet all the requirements of the University to get a teaching license which will include taking and passing what the practices the content exam and your difficulty and I'm guessing maybe I'm wrong but I'm guessing some of that will be predicated on where you obtained that bachelor's degree so that if you came to Asheville and wanted to affiliate with UNC Asheville and your bachelors is from state of Texas at an accredited institution do they have to do they have to grant credit for all those courses or is there a possibility that they may have to take something else other than just the educational courses and that would be up to the University you know it would be up
033to the universities program but they would analyze your transcript for that very thing to see if if what you've taken meets their content requirement as well as their licensing requirement okay thank you any other questions from the board thank you I think we've absorbed just about as much you know I'm sorry I don't you might hate me for that but I followed everything you say excuse me thank you very much for bringing mr. Probst and his tie do we have a public comment tonight I don't share there are no public comments thank you very much so now it's time for Debra frisbee and the audit reports she brings with her report so I will introduce Mike Wieck with Anderson Smith and Wieck who's going to be reviewing our financial statements for 2017-18 thank you very
034much you're welcome madam chair members of the board dr. Baldwin pleased to be here tonight and I was gonna tell you I'm very thankful I got to see the presentation for the order of the longleaf pine is very impressive so I was glad I got to know our waiter for that I'm gonna present the audit report for bunking schools for the year ending June 30th 18 and I've got a PowerPoint here I think each of you have the hard copies in front of you but I'm gonna try to hit the highlights here tonight if any of you have any questions whatsoever feel free to stop me at any point and I'll do my best to answer those questions that you may have the first thing I will look at this is on page one this
035is actually our opinion letter on the financial statements and please report it's an unmodified opinion letter that's commonly referred to as a clean audit report that's the highest level of assurance that we can give on a set of financial statements as your independent CPAs and just to let you know when we say unmodified what that really means is there was nothing that came to our attention there in the scope of our audit that would make us to say that the auditor was in accordance with accounting standards except for this modification there were no exceptions on that being and I'm going to skip well actually on page three I just want to point this out did you ever have any questions in the future our phone number is right there so feel free to give me
036a call on those I'm gonna skip pages 14 through 13 that's the management discussion and analysis and that's really something that we within the report we do not issue an opinion on the management discussion analysis and overall summary prepared by management really I'm going to skip over to page 14 and this is the full accrual financial statements in front of you here and if you remember in past years I've told you really not to manage off of this statement because this is the state that includes your fixed assets and things like that you're not gonna go out and sell the school buildings to come up with cash to fund the ongoing operations but this year the there was a largest change that I've ever seen in all of the school boards in my 25-year career
037and it is reflected on these statements you may remember this was back in 2015 the district had to start recording a liability for the pension expense for the district this year the district had to start recording a liability like light iPad other post-employment benefits and what that really is that's going to be your health insurance for retirees so the issue we had to start booking those the adjustment to your net position number that's what I'm focusing here on the bottom the adjustment to the beginning balances of net position was three hundred and seventy million dollars just a very large number and when you had the retirement force from the pension portion and that came into fact it was forty nine million so you sit here and think about said well how is the insurance so
038much higher than the pension portion because you know it's more expense in paying the pension out versus the insurance these numbers are all reported net and when I'm saying net the actuaries come up with the calculation of what your future obligations gonna be for the projected benefits for the healthcare and you come with this gross number then you back out any investments you've got and that comes up to your net liability on the pension side North Carolina is very proud and they do a very good job compared to other states on the retirement side where they're funded at about ninety percent so what that means if you've got a hundred dollar liability there's ninety dollars in the bank to pay for that and your net liability is ten dollars on the open the post employment
039insurance it's funded it's only three percent so what that means if there's a hundred dollar gross liability you've got three dollars in the bank to pay for it that net liability is 97 so that's really how it looks sort of disproportionate with the liability for the OPEC versus the retirement in the end just taking that a step further that really is probably why the state had to canceling any future benefits for insurance for new employees after 2021 if y'all remember that rule took place this year from an accounting standpoint I can tell you the math wasn't going to work out if you kept accruing those benefits to everyone on down the road either it would have worked if your contribution rate would have skyrocketed its 18% now I've heard people say it's gonna need to
040be between 30 or 50 percent if they kept the benefits of that same rate so that's really what happened one thing you may say is why is bunkin can't schools recording this liability of the districts we get in throughout the state that's what the board's typically ask us on that because Buncombe County Schools has no you can't control the contribution rate into the plan you can't control control the benefits that's paid out to it but in the end the employees do receive a w-2 they are employees of Buncombe County Schools and not the state so therefore the accounting requirements make these islands be booked and I can tell you mean essentially all I work on the school boards every school board in the state is experiencing this same thing the adjustment for Wake and Charlotte
041Mac was in excess of two billion dollars just to give you an idea so just be prorated based on ATM essentially the one thing I can tell you though it is those adjustments are very relevant if you're a city or a county where you can issue debt and the recent news came out maybe a couple of months ago about how upside-down with Chicago was with her up ebb and the retirement benefits if you're thinking about buying bonds in that entity that's very relevant but the problem is in my mind the accounting standards just don't segregate or differentiate between a school board organization and the cities and counties so in the end sorry to take such a long time going over that item when I'm there's nothing you can do control it whatsoever but it is
042such a very large number somebody looks down and sees a negative eighty seven million net position they'll say what's going on that's that's what's really happening that's what's calls that number does that makes sense to everyone because it is a again it's the most significant change we've seen in the statements since we've been auditing those whatsoever the next thing I'm going to go down to those I'm gonna look at your traditional fund statements and nothing has changed on these from the past I'm just moving down to page 17 and out here is I made some notes on this other page all right what I want to point out if you look at the general fund which is on the leftmost column and I'm going to look down at the bottom you're gonna see an ending
043fund balance of about 7.1 million that was a 3.3 million reduction from last year looking at the fourth number from the bottom there and really what I want to point out to you I've got this that's right the data wrote down here if you go back to 2014 I'm gonna call out the fund balance positions from 14 down to 18 it went thirteen point five down to twelve point five eleven three ten six and now we're at seven 172 something like that the point is I think that management is well aware of this reduction in fund balance and the board has been well aware of this eating a way of that but with this trend that you can see going back to 14 essentially you know roughly a little bit less than half in over
044the course of these years clearly we can't continue that trend going forward you know we're going to have to to make some hard decisions I'm sure y'all are very much so aware of that going forward but the balance is probably just that trimming one to slow that down a little bit it would be our recommendation as your auditors and again I don't think we're telling you anything you didn't know but again we'll just make sure that we make everyone clearly aware of that if you provide a money tree with this audit that'd be really good I'll tell you madam chair I mean again really about all we do is all the school boards and as a firm and we are seeing this so much throughout the state you got do you give them money treats
045and you don't give us any yeah I don't I wish I had that and I'm but but you know you're losing the ATM the rising calls we've talked about in other years with that rising administrative cost the contribution rates for the retirement the state enacts the amount but they don't fund the money that it takes for federally paid people locally paid people and we were really seeing that throughout the state so it would look like based on what you're saying then that we've got about if things continued on the trend they're going we've got two two and a half years of fund balance left it would be close to that and the thing is I think we've always talked about this in the past when you get that fund balance to so little of a
046balance it's almost like the just that the person out in the community living paycheck to paycheck and you want to be running on the educational system paycheck to paycheck or do you want to have a little bit in the bank where you can plan for the future I mean that's really how I look at the this to me that's the significance of fund balance and so from an accounting perspective from from as you look at us what what does other than what you've just told us wouldn't would affirm in an audit in this type situation make a formal recommendation to a school system or just have this type of conversation yeah because it really doesn't fall within though it would be within our conversations and this is what's interesting the state gives guidance on what
047fund balances should be for cities and counties they have not given any guidances for school boards so that's where without us having a specific authoritative guidance it's harder for us to turn anything in writing and say that and then really what I'm seeing throughout the state it's the dynamics are just so different from district to district and in some areas if you build a little bit of fund balance then your funding sources may drop and it's it's just so difficult for me to really give you an honest answer or an informative answer on that what I can tell you though is truthfully the lower that fund balance goes the last management ability you have as the board and when when when an outside entity from the Board of Education suggests that perhaps we don't need
048a fund balance from from an accounting standpoint what would your thought did that be yeah I mean from my standpoint it's that if you don't have fun balance if something comes up where are you gonna get the money you can't levy taxes right so you don't have to go ask somebody else with your handout to pay this or make cuts and today what do you do to make cuts how can you cut money at a school board you cut people or other people that's your only option and how important is a fund balance and it probably varies from the sizes for system system that you deal with to me one of the big things has always been and as frisbees expressed this just before but your thoughts on having a certain level of fund balance
049and cash flow there to meet your debt obligations because you don't receive your money's coming from state federal government variety of places all at the same time so there's got to be some importance to that I would think or quite nice I'm wrong you have to have that I mean in the simplistic form of what you're saying is you want to make sure you're not bouncing cheques when you haven't got the funds coming in from the federal government with are a little bit slower getting the budgets approved and then you can have different issues with the timing of your supplements items like that may come in month to month so it's to us it is piling and we're accounts we're gonna be conservative you know definitely we were strong advocates of building some fund balance
050do you advocate a particular percentage or do you just advocate be as frugal as you can in some of their ads that's where the state won't give us any information but let me and it's hard for us to come out and say that but but I do want to point this out as you're we're getting into some very interesting information this is my pet peeve if you have we're playing on the same page well I went back here to show your fund statements and what I look at I look at your general fund your state public school fund the money coming from dpi in Raleigh your other special revenue fund which is your fund eight that we're aware and then over we got the next call other governmental funds that includes your federal money if
051you see that the federal money is gonna be fourteen point eight million but in the end this is your revenues that you get as the district on what I call your instructional funds so if you add up I'll just do it in my head here try to be accurate if we can 63 million from from Buncombe County and local you've got one hundred and forty million of state so what's that 205 add five for other special so you're a two-team coming with paid your own again okay from them seventeen seventeen oh yeah sorry about that I thought you changed yeah I did we backed up a little okay sorry about that oh good okay so really that's where I'm going across that your instructional funds so I think we were up to ten if you
052take the federal money you're gonna be at two and a quarter so roughly you've got two hundred twenty five million dollars coming in to Buncombe County Schools for educational purposes now if you to me and you probably seven million of your fund balance of the general fund that's a large number and if someone wanted to do calculations they can make it look a certain way if they compared the seven million solely to the sixty three million come in from Buncombe County you know it looks you know you're over ten percent that was pretty solid but you can't carry fund balance in the state or federal monies if you get cuts in the state where does that money come from or more it's got a comfortable local price one of the two so that's where I
053say if you're going to do any fund balance calculations you've got to factor in these other funding sources that you have to have fun bounce to cover any actions there that you can't control thank you the next thing I was going gonna go down to is look at your child nutrition program and this is another quirk of the opiate requirements on the balance sheet and income statements for the child nutrition program this is going to be pages 20 to 23 have liability on the face of the child nutrition statements now on the balance sheet so it really makes those hard to read and to comprehend if you look on page 22 you're gonna see a negative position of over four million dollars that's why when I got pulled up on the screen here is on
054page twenty four is your cash flow and the second number from the bottom shows that you added seventy million dollars of cash and essentially you have to manage child nutrition now just off of the cash is king adage if you're paying your indirect cost which is which you are here at Boone County Schools and adding a little bit of cash I think the child nutrition program is doing pretty well and that's now I'm going to go over the compliance session of the audit if that's all I was gonna go over on the numbers portion that unless someone has questions for me at this time on that questions and then on the on the compliance portion then just go over that with you quickly you each of you should have a shorter bound copy and within
055this you're going to see three opinion letters one is on the overall internal control and compliance at the district one is on internal control and compliance specifically as it relates to federal money and one specifically as it relates to state money on all three of these opinions we issued an unmodified or clean audit report on those so no issues noted there you can have what's called a financial statement finding would be an item would be an isolated instance of an internal control weakness or compliance violation and still have a clean report we noted no such findings this year either during the scope of our audit you will see an additional page a one-page management letter this would be something that would be an internal control type issue but it is of less significance we still
056have to report it but it's not required to be in the bound report and we noted two items this year on that one at one of the schools that we tested they were holding deposits a little longer than they should be and I'm you know we communicate that to man and I think they've already taken steps to look into that and make sure that's remedied going forward then in addition on one of the determination payouts that we tested we noted that the individuals paid out of the general fund and they should have been paid out of the state fund the significance of that it's it's more than just a it's it's really not as large dollars but the significance is if you can't pay the person out-of-state you need to pay them out of state
057to make sure you take advantage of those state funds versus paying out of your general fund that we talked about but but in the end in the in the scheme of things those are relatively small items one thing I just wanted to add going back again to how many school boards that we do we have between me and other partners we've noticed the trend this year not at every district but we're seeing more findings versus less findings and here this is less than what we've seen in the past and on a lot of our districts they're more significant than what we've seen in the past we've I've still got three audits that haven't been issued this year which is just really uncommon for me if we don't get them issued that's because the clients not
058giving us the data they need and it's really that just doesn't happen so in the end just want to point that out to you that this is a very good report from the electoral control standpoint and I think them you know the board should be proud of that and in finance department as well any other departments that we look at most you know we look at more than just the finance department during the scope of our testing so we're very appreciative the cooperation we get and I think that the district should be proud of those results so when we look in the Bound report it says there are no findings and then there's a separate letter which which lists the two things that you talked about so are these findings or they just kind of
059y'all need yeah that's the they call them management letter comments they're not findings note that the technical definition when something goes in in the Bound report is a true finding there's very specific federal guidelines that we have to follow and it has to be an internal control weakness where we think it could result in significant loss of cash or a true loss of cash being a compliance issue where monies were spending appropriately in excess of 25,000 so that's what goes in that other what's to deem listing difficut islands will be reported in the management letter I would just like to say in regular human English that this is amazing that we have such a huge and complicated budget and so many expenditures and so many places where we're handling money and so many different schools
060and we have no fundings good staff I mean yes excellent staff it was a very good report and you've got the continuity of staff of continuity of quality staff that's I was speaking to mr. as we earlier today when as we were meeting with into the past two years I've had five of my districts turnover a finest officers I mean you're just seeing more and more of that throughout the state and that leads to the issues that we're seeing so that's definitely not to take away of the performance but that contributes to the results well thank you for questions from board members I have a question regarding the fund balance issue that you delved into and I think maybe a patch line of thinking a management letter stating basically what you have shared with us
061would that be an appropriate request to have you to construct and share this board that's probably something that within our accounting rules we are you're always going to tell you the opinion we usually wear your independent CPAs us telling you amounts to having your fund balance you know I can say that we would recommend more or we recommend the reason for having a good solid sound fund balance but the more specific than that is sort of guess we're really close to crossing the line between are we auditing what we're doing are we telling you to do something then less all at that well I don't know I don't want you to be telling us that do it yeah but I would wonder if you stated good accounting practice or good practice might be to hold
062you see you see a constant decline and as pointed out three and a half years at this pace it's exhausted I can certainly do that I can certainly do that where we result on the trend that we're seeing I mean that would be very very easy to do that I think that and I ask you madam chair if that would be appropriate I would like to bring that to a vote at this board is it necessary that we know okay I can do that easily okay would you please yeah I'll get that to you thank you all right thank you yep all right anyone else well thank you for your report and especially thank you to our staff and the work that they do which gives us a good report thank you very much the
063next item on the agenda is the action agenda and it's a board amendment number two Deborah frisbee get to show off in front of the auditor now who's leaving do you want to okay we have a motion to approve the budget amendment number one it does it's two number two number two do we have questions from the board do you need a motion first names here do we do we approve it and then get questions motion okay so we have a motion to approve you don't have one yet I'd be proud to make it for you madam chair that we approve budget amendment number two is presented to see okay whatever he said I'll second it thank you and all those in favor jeez that now do we have any questions I'm worried about reading
064this next item on this agenda if you want to know what's going on over here no anybody have any questions all right then I have a motion and a second all those in favor aye any opposed thank you very much thank you the next item no this is mr. Farrelly he wrote a paragraph on here har Creek Elementary School additions and renovations project approval of design team and si ma our recommendations do you need a motion I suppose I do I would make a motion that we approve this as recommended can I get a second no secondly thank you are there questions for mr. Farrell I have one it kind of ties into both so we've got two different schools involved but we have some some connectivity in these two projects I think because of
065what we're moving from Fairview to Hall creaking Mike that's correct and we've got recommendations tonight probably supposed to have and it may be best we've got four different entities we got two different top companies two different CMA ours is there any reason for concern with that or what is the logistics of getting those things do those projects have to complete at the same time to make that transition and moving students from one location to another work and do we foresee any problem with that or is this something that happens normally well there is interconnectivity as you said and the work at hawk Creek and the addition must happen before we can begin the Fairview renovation so it will not be going on simultaneously phase two of Hawk Creek will be occurring when the only phase
066of Fairview is going on so they will be going on simultaneously but how Creek needs to start first so you don't anticipate any problem with being able to that disco sound wrong this is construction he anticipates all the problems I just do we I just want to make sure we probably couldn't have what's being recommended here tonight well there's pluses and minuses to that you if you have the same company you may be stretching that company a bit thin if they do well that's great if they don't do well it's hits you twice so the selection committee also felt it was a good thing to I guess I'll I'll use the term that one of our selection committee members used to kind of deepen our bench in architects and seem our contractors we are a
067public entity and we do projects over time and do you put all your eggs in one basket all the time maybe doesn't make sense so it helps us for the future and there's also there's kind of a friendly competition when you have multiple projects going on in multiple designers and contractors they kind of want to outdo each other if you will and that's an advantage I just harken back to when we were doing and it's I'm I think it's probably completely different but I know we had issues when we had to intermediate schools going on at the same time different building climate different economic climb and I get that and I'm sure that was that was what came to my head when I saw this we really can't we're really not making a choice to
068deepen the pool because we've got to award a low bidder that's a responsible bidder so correct or incorrect in this in the CMR process and the architectural selection process it's a qualification based selection process it's not a bid process you make selections based on the qualifications and the appropriateness of the fit as you see it and then you negotiate with that number one selection if you can't come to terms then you move to number two and number three that's why you see the alternate already got the alternates okay tim was the Epling catch was that prototype is that why architect designs almost my cock's had both those or yeah we just we made the decision to try to use basically the same design so that made sense to use the same architect it wasn't a
069prototype school though not that we probably would repeat again we had two unique sites but there were certain similarities between them that we thought we could make that work and that was an advantaged for consistency across but I wouldn't call them prototypes no we probably wouldn't build those exactly like that today the issues there as I recall came actually once we were in construction in terms of the economy it really was we lost a lot of sub count that the cottagey sees lost a lot of subcontractors to bankruptcy at that time and that's the root of the problem there other questions or comments I'd entertain a motion to approve we already have a motion do we have a motion and a second thank you now we can vote all those in favor any opposed I
070will put all of this ere headedness at the foot of cold medicine or maybe the lack of it next item is also mr. Furley and this is Fairview Elementary additions and renovations projects approval of the design team and the CMA our recommendations I do Nick I need a motion thank you this is my district I'd be happy to make a motion that we approve this recommendation as well thank you and a second thank you any questions from the board I would just like to make a comment having served on the committee that looked at both of these and in-depth conversation that we had about the process and Seymour versus bidding and how you select the different levels I was very impressed with the just the level of thought and our expertise in the room and
071really appreciate both Tim and Clark and all you bring to that process so thank you I would like to also comment being on that same panel in that there were numerous numerous well-qualified applicants that we reviewed and I think the folks that were looking and reviewing the material on the committee read it very thoroughly and I think the decisions that were made were not without lots of thought and discussion very comfortable with that and I think as from the standpoint of our board is we're very fortunate we had so much so much response people wanting to do work with Buncombe County Schools and I think that bodes well and once back to the leadership in that department thank you any other comments I have a motion and a second all those in favor next we're
072the Buncombe County early and middle college calendar the draft do we have questions from the board Consuela could I have a motion to approve I'm sure I move we approve the draft calendar for the early a middle college presented here this evening thank you do I have a second I'll second all right now do you have questions for Miss Walker who's standing right ask this question every year but just to get it in the record so this is the school year starts a lot earlier than the other calendar and that said that it aligns with a B Texican correct right early college and middle college operate under the cooperative innovative legislation that gives them that float ability and it's perfect for them to align closer to a BTech schedule okay any other questions from the
073board then all those in favor all right any opposed on the consent agenda thank you miss longer we have the minutes from the December sixth regular meeting open session and the personnel report to have a motion to approve swimming a second all those in favor we have an information agenda on that we have finance reports and notification of informal construction and repair contracts and change orders and the announcements of future meetings midterm grand graduation as you've already heard it's February the second with a snow date of February the third like we all believe if we get a snow it would disappear in 24 hours the next Board of Education regular meeting is February the 7th and at this it would be here in this minute or iam at this time I would entertain a motion
074to adjourn so moved second all those in favor very much sorry for the faux pause