Danbury School District finance committee recommends February report, hears updates on staffing, grants and payroll cleanup

At a Danbury School District finance committee meeting, members voted to recommend the February financial report to the full school board and spent the session reviewing fiscal adjustments, staffing vacancies and federal grant exposure.

The committee heard that the district is working to correct salary allocations and grant charges that were recorded to incorrect job codes or locations, a process administrators described as time-consuming but necessary. Mike Weaver, Chief Financial Officer, said, “we're presenting the financials, through the end of February's, last month,” and explained staff are identifying employees charged incorrectly and reclassifying those amounts so financial statements more accurately reflect costs by location and fund.

The reclassification work is done in several steps, Weaver said: managers identify the correct location, Angela Walsh (finance staff) “will then reclassify the previous salary expense,” Weaver reviews and approves journal entries, and payroll reruns behind the scenes to apply corrections. Officials cautioned the effort covers many salary lines and supplements, and that a fully accurate set of financials will take time to produce.

Why it matters: the committee was told the district currently shows favorable budget variances driven in part by unfilled positions and by moving staff between grants and the general fund. Those technical reclassifications affect year-end surpluses and the district’s ability to report how much is being spent at each school or program.

Key figures and funding items discussed include a roughly $2.1 million favorable variance identified at the end of fiscal 2024, a reported $9 million favorable variance as of February for the current fiscal year, and an administrative possibility to place up to 2% of a surplus into a non‑lapsing account (administrators described a maximum of about $3.0 million for one year and $3.2 million referenced for the current fiscal year), subject to legal restrictions and final audit results. Committee members also discussed the district’s exposure on federal grants, described in the meeting as roughly $10 million in federal grant funding at risk of having to be adjusted depending on state or federal guidance.

Board member Theresa (first reference uses only the name as stated in the meeting) pressed for careful wording when administrators move positions back from ESSER funding, saying, “I just wanna point out ... it wasn't any monkey business,” and asked for clearer terminology about how staff funded by pandemic-era grants were relabeled in the accounting system. Administrators responded that some employees had been temporarily placed in placeholder job codes when ESSER funding wound down and that those placeholders are being corrected now.

Committee members described a substantial number of open positions. Cara (administrator) said the district has “over a hundred positions, probably close to upwards, like maybe 1 30 ish,” naming paraprofessionals, tutors, special education openings and other hard-to-fill roles as contributing to salary and benefit savings that create the reported favorable variances.

Payroll and system questions: several committee members asked whether the district should outsource payroll or replace systems. Directors reported they reviewed third-party payroll vendors and found no straightforward replacement that would cleanly replace the district’s Tyler system without extensive changes. The committee agreed the more immediate need is to stabilize and staff the finance and HR teams, obtain targeted training on existing systems and finish back-office cleanup.

Purchase orders and audit follow-up: administrators said they found a purchase-order issue during recent audits and are reviewing all open purchase orders to close or adjust invalid ones. A staff member reported that an open purchase-order review uncovered about $1.4 million that required attention; the committee directed staff to continue that purge and to report back after the April break.

Federal grants and AIS: the committee discussed uncertainty around federal funding tied to AIS and DEI-related grants. Tara (administrator) said she would meet with the state and provide a clearer update after that meeting. She described possible approaches including corrective action plans or gradual changes and said the district must honor participating-town agreements and MOUs while any off‑ramping of programs is considered.

Formal action: the committee made a motion to recommend the February finance report to the full board; the motion was seconded and approved by voice vote. The committee also agreed to keep the grant breakdown format shown in the meeting packet (the format that breaks grants out by classification and subtotals) for future reports and to schedule additional presentations and training (including a staffing presentation next Wednesday and a proposed financial-statement workshop in September).

The committee closed by scheduling further internal work: staff will continue reclassifying salary charges, review and close open purchase orders, and prepare training for finance staff so future monthly financial statements are presented with cleaner allocations.