Surplus Is Best Practice? School Board Head Doesn't Think So

Only a few days ago, the Montclair Public Schools website highlighted the fact that a consulting firm had presented the Montclair School District's amassing of a record surplus as an example of "best practice."

Indeed, the District Management Council—a Boston-based think tank—said it had used the surplus as an example of “best practice” in meetings and discussions with other financially strapped school districts around the nation.

(At a Board of Education meeting late last month, the volunteer Budget Working Group painted a financial picture of a Montclair district with a surplus even greater than $5.7 million—as much as $11 million as of June 2011. That presentation came just weeks after Business Administrator Dana Sullivan stunned the board—and the public—by announcing a massive surplus in a district toying with the idea of school closings just a year ago.)

On Wednesday night, Montclair School Board President Shelly Lombard said she doesn't know whether the District Management Council was misquoted or not "but I think someone confused savings with surplus."

Lombard explained that the council had helped the district improve some of its special education processes in a way that saved money but maintained the quality of education for students. For example, it identified situations where students could share aides. The money saved could then be invested in other areas such as small learning communities and part-time librarians. This, she said, is a best practice.

"But building a surplus that the board doesn't know about is not a best practice," Lombard said. "That can lead to poor decision making.

"So that's why we asked the budget working group to make recommendations for improving our budgeting process," she said. "And that's why we are doing a management audit so future boards will have better information and have it on time."

Lombard also noted that those who have accused the school board of fear mongering have conveniently selective memories.

"They forget that we appointed the working groups just three months after [Gov. Chris] Christie cut our state aid by several million dollars less than two weeks before our budget was due," she said. "We would have had to have last minute layoffs if the senior teachers had not agreed to a wage freeze.

"They [also] forget that that fall [of 2010] Christie went on '60 Minutes' and painted such a dire picture of the state's finances that most people assumed our state aid would get cut again or that we would lose it altogether," Lombard added. "They forget that if the charter school had been approved last year, we would have lost $2 million from our budget."

Lombard said it would have been "really really stupid" not to have planned for the worst.

"I don't know how they run their household budgets but covering your eyes and hoping everything will be fine is not a strategy I want to rely on with a $100 million budget and over 6,000 students at stake," she said.

And anyone, Lombard insisted, who believes the school board should have known about the surplus either doesn't have a boss or doesn't understand what a volunteer advisory board does.

"Just like your boss does, we rely on the paid professional staff to provide the information we need to do our jobs," she said. "Your boss doesn't expect to have to dig for info or to be an investigator who must 'ask the right questions' in order to get the info she needs.

"And she expects you to red flag any critical information that she needs to know to do her job," she said. "So what we are working on for the future is designing management/financial reports that board members, even if they don't have a finance background, can use to make decisions."

Lombard said it was awful to sit through the past budget year's board meetings and consider such dire options as the closing of schools.

"As I have said before, anyone who thinks the board spent hundreds of hours preparing for the worst while knowing about the surplus must be one of those conspiracy theorists who also believes that Elvis is alive and living in Queens," she said. "There is no upside for us in doing that.

"We are volunteers and we really do have better ways to spend our time than sitting at board meetings until midnight," she said.

To see the presentation made to the school board on the 2010-2011 fund balance, go here. The next school board meeting is Monday, Dec. 19 at 7:30 p.m.