CCSD has filed plan for avoiding previous financial issues – Las Vegas Sun News

The Clark County School District has sketched out a plan to avoid the budgeting and accounting woes it experienced earlier this year, according to a document it was required to file with the Nevada Department of Education.

The four-page “cross-functional process improvement cycle” correctional plan that Interim Superintendent Brenda Larsen-Mitchell sent to state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jhone Ebert for approval Friday looks much like a plan that district officials shared with the school board in October, when CCSD was still actively dealing with fallout from a combination of a potential central budget deficit and miscalculations in teacher salaries and funding to assist at-risk students.

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“This process improvement cycle, which is well under way, will serve as the core of the corrective action plan,” Larsen-Mitchell wrote.

The 13-point plan emphasizes clarity, verification and collaboration. For example, “end-to-end process documentation” will include a “high-level process map illustrating the relationship between each component of the process to the other components” and a comprehensive technical manual for the development of school budgets. Systems to “ensure cross-functional review of each significant step” will include “protocols for the confirmation and/or approval of subprocess components.” A new “workbook prototype” will allow principals to verify the calculations of their individual sites’ allocation projections

Ebert and Gov. Joe Lombardo jointly said in November that the state would appoint a compliance monitor at CCSD’s expense after determining its budget woes showed the district wasn’t following a law decentralizing control of the massive district. 

The decentralization law’s intent is to give individual schools the ability to set their own budgets with information provided by the central office. The state said CCSD did not follow this law when schools did not have up-to-date financial information earlier this year because of what CCSD characterized as “insufficient process documentation and communication and organizational and process silos.”

District leaders have never further publicly explained the mechanics of how any mistakes happened. However, Larsen-Mitchell has acknowledged poor communication aggravated a stressful time and said the district needed to do better.

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The district said this fall that it might have a central budget deficit as deep as $20 million because of unanticipated expenses such as litigation and cybersecurity expenditures last fiscal year. 

There were also miscalculations for funding allocations used to help at-risk students because the district erroneously used an old qualifier for determining which children are “at-risk.” The shifting definition meant some schools lost money. And principals developed their individual school budgets with information from the central office that said the average teacher cost was about $5,700 lower than it actually is. 

District officials confirmed earlier this month that it does not have a central deficit, although its revised budget showed a nearly $10 million drop in its ending fund balance. Officials had said for weeks that any deficit would be covered by tapping the unassigned ending fund balance, which is unspent money that isn’t restricted or committed to other use.

The corrective action plan will take effect by Jan. 9.