Peoria Public Schools will get an increase of about $9.3 million this year in evidence-based funding from the State of Illinois, as district leaders mull the idea of getting outside assistance to address a two-year audit backlog.
New Superintendent Jerry Bell announced the higher evidence-based funding allocation during Monday’s Peoria Board of Education meeting.
“We’re sitting in a good spot in terms of receiving the additional dollars that our students and our teachers richly deserve,” said Bell, delivering the financial report in place of CFO Michael Curry.
Curry has submitted a letter of resignation to the board, effective Aug. 31, and did not attend the meeting.
Bell told the board that prior to his resignation, Curry contacted a “national organization” about the possibility of the district getting “third-party accounting assistance.”
He said the unnamed organization “comes in and helps not just school districts, but other businesses and organizations that are in need of additional financial assistance regarding getting their books in order.”
Bell said the idea would be for the district’s new chief financial officer “to see if we can get our handle on where our cash flow is, in terms of the accuracy of our cash flow as well as reconciliation of our bank statements.”
Curry was chosen in February to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of previous CFO Mick Willis, and had been on the job since July 1.
At the July 27 board meeting, Curry said the district’s business office is struggling to handle a backlog of annual audits.
“As I started assessing the business office, knowing that the audit process was a burden, it was easy to quickly see that the department was understaffed to address the backlog of audit requests and complete their duties for the current year,” Curry said at the time.
“We’re asking a group of five or six individuals to do today’s work and last year’s work and try to be try to be on top of things this year while constantly responding to requests from the auditors to find records and data from prior years.”
Curry told the board that without completed audits, there’s no guarantee the district’s financial ledger is “absolutely concrete correct.”
“I’m not confident in our numbers. I’m not confident in the numbers on the amended budget,” he said then. “I don’t think we need to continue with the amended budget because it’s not required [and] we are not 100% sure that those are accurate numbers.”
