Board of Ed. Hears Consultant's Efficiency Report

Tuesday night’s Suffield Board of Education meeting featured the presentation of an efficiency report from consulting firm Blum Shapiro and the formaton of a new committee for special needs students.

The Board deliberated for more than an hour and finally approved an ad hoc committee to study issues surrounding special needs children in the school system. Shortly thereafter, the board listened to the report from Blum Shapiro on how the school system can be more efficient.

Blum Shapiro, of West Hartford, was hired by the Board of Education to provide a complete analysis of school operations with an eye on savings and efficiency.  Jeffrey Ziplow, a partner with the firm, presented its preliminary findings and recommendations.

Ziplow outlined the approximately 80-page draft, which included numerous recommendations for structural and operational changes that could give the school system and taxpayers a significant savings. Copies of the report were not available at the meeting.

Ziplow read from several sections of the executive summary, citing items that need improvement. Those items include the inconsistency of purchasing procedures between the schools, increasing the accuracy of payroll monitoring for overtime pay, fostering better usage of existing technology by staff, a potential realignment of the school IT structure and the hiring of a full-time human resources director for the Suffield school system.

“Things are not all bad and too many times we focus on the bad and not the positive,” Ziplow said. “There is a lot of good technology in place and people were very open to what we were talking about.”

Conversely, Ziplow did note that there are a number of procedures in place that could lead to serious financial problems. One area he cited was a lack of consistency in management of student activity funds.

“Every school is doing it differently and there are no consistent procedures in place and in some cases no documentation,” he said. “You’d be surprised how much money is in some of these student activity funds… it’s not just a couple of thousand bucks.”

When asked the size of some of the accounts, he estimated the Suffield High School student activity account to be about $170,000 as an example.

“We need to put policies and controls in place to protect these accounts,” he recommended.

Ziplow said there are no monitoring systems to control how much overtime is paid to employees. He added that the report was not questioning the amount of overtime anyone was claiming but was pointing out that there was no system in place to monitor the process. Ziplow said Suffield needs better payroll overtime procedures.

A key recommendation involved hiring a full-time human resources director to alleviate the burden of hiring and some of the personnel management issues from the superintendent and other staff. The report noted that there is just not enough experience among current personnel to handle the complexity of the school-wide staffing issues.

The draft report will be reviewed by the Board members with Ziplow and his staff returning to answer questions from the panel before the group adopts the recommendations.

Ziplow said the report concludes with an action plan and recommendations for implantation on a red, yellow and green prioritization scale for the next three years.

“I take a lot of personal pride in this report and if it just sits on a desk or on a shelf and gathers dust, then I have failed to do my job here,” he concluded.

A final report will be made available to the public once it has been approved by the Board of Education. Copies of the draft discussed last night were only made available to board members.

A story on the formation of an ad-hoc committee for special needs students will appear Thursday on Suffield Patch.