Española School District Superintendent Art Blea received comforting news Jan. 2.
He received a letter from Cindy Gregory, hearing officer of the Dec. 21 hearing regarding the Public Education Department’s special education audit of the District.
The letter states, despite initially finding the District owed the Department $945,125, the hearing testimony and supporting documentation provided by the District cleared up all but $13,336.12.
“I was expecting a little bit higher, but this is definitely a much better scenario,” Blea said. After the meeting, he said he expected the District would have to pay somewhere around $100,000.
That amount remained because the District could not provide supporting documentation for the use of as much federal funding for its bilingual program in the 2009-2010 school year. Because of this, they failed to meet federal funding requirements.
The other expenditures the Department needed the District to account for included $16,425 for a conference trip to Disney World, $525 on cell phone reimbursements, $250 for driving school for a student, payments to a contractor for academic support amounting to $6,175, which they claimed did not receive School Board approval, and $908,478 in salary payments for principals and bus assistants which came out of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Part B funding.
Blea, Special Education Director Christina Baca, Assistant Special Education Director Deidra Montoya and Finance Director Janette Trujillo, were able to show the hearing council the largest amounts found by the auditors were largely incorrect. Only $145,877.87 went to salaries, which the Department approved when the District applied for federal funding that year, Only about $3,000 of federal money went to the conference trip. The $6,175 for the contractor did receive school board approval.
For the rest of the items, Blea said they were able to show documentation or provide a convincing narrative for documentation they would not be able to reconstruct.
“I feel very good about the decision, and of course we learned something in the process,” he said. “Even though we were not the people here at the time, we had to reconstruct records.”
Blea said he credits the hard work of Baca and Trujillo, along with their staffs, for the District’s good fortune.
“They literally spent hours researching records, getting documentation, putting together the big document we presented over there,” he said. “A whole lot of credit goes to those guys for putting that together on a very short time line.”
According to the letter, the Department undertook the initial tier I audit internally, focusing on school districts around the state which had a 200 percent increase in their special education enrollment and services.
For tier II they hired the Accounting & Consultant Group to audit nine specific districts, including Española School District. The schools were given the opportunity to respond to the audit findings in June, and Española failed to do so. Because of this, the Department called for the hearing.