Petition Urges Burlington Residents To Support School Audit

BURLINGTON, MA -- A group calling itself Fiscal Accountability in Burlington is asking residents to sign an online petition that urges Burlington's elected Town Meeting to approve a warrant article that funds a complete audit of the Burlington Public School System. The article will be considered when Town Meeting on Sept. 24, and comes after the recent disclosure that the school system overspent its budget by $800,000 in the fiscal year ended June 30.

In addition to the $800,000, which the school department will request at the same, Sept. 24 Town Meeting, the schools needed to dip into revolving accounts earlier this year to cover $250,000 in deficits uncovered in smaller audits of the revolving accounts that were conducted in the 2017-18 school year.

"The School department needs a full, independent review of business processes to determine what happened so this problem doesn’t recur," the petition on Change.org reads. Backers were nearly halfway to their goal of getting 100 people to sign on as of Friday afternoon.

Last month Superintendent Eric Conti told the school committee the overspending would not happen again, thanks to new procedures put into place. Part of the overspending was attributed to severance agreements with faculty members that were asked to resign.

Town Meeting will be asked to either raise taxes or take money from the town's stabilization fundthat would cover the overspending. The article was sponsored by Kim Milne, who unsuccessfully ran a last-minute write-in campaign against incumbent school committee member Martha Simon in April, and several town meeting members, including Eileen Sickler, Shari Ellis, Joanne Frustaci, Ernie Zabolotny, Adam Senesi, Cynthia Phillips, Maria O'Connor, Michelle Papagno, Betsey Hughes, David Webb, Pat Angelo, Gary Kasky, Richard Wing, and Karen Cooper.

An August 8 memo from Burlington Town Accountant Paul Sagarino to the Burlington Town Meeting members and the ways and means committee lays out options for covering a deficit the Burlington Public School System disclosed last month. In a nutshell, town meeting will need to decide whether to raise taxes or take as much as 20% of the town's stabilization fund to pay the deficit.

"Considering the timing of Town Meeting right after the start of school year I would suspect that cuts would have a major impact. If the cuts included layoffs, we would also need to consider the impact on other budgets such as Unemployment," he wrote.

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Dave Copeland can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).