WHITMAN – A report from the audit firm The Abrahams Group out of Framingham, hired to review the books at the Whitman-Hanson Regional School District seemed to leave some questions unanswered as consultant David King presented its findings to the Select Board on Tuesday, Feb. 4.
Select Boards in both towns requested the “agreed upon procedures report” on the school district. There seemed to be challenges involved from the start.
“We originally planned to do a brand-new data reporting system that the state was piloting, [but] they never piloted it until after we were done, so we used the old-fashioned methods,” King said.
He presented a series of comparison charts to rank Whitman-Hanson among four other regional districts in the area.
“We’ve been looking at these numbers for a while, and it’s nice to share them and to have conversations about them, but, honestly, I was hoping that the audit would dig in deeper and provide some analysis as to why,” Board member Shawn Kain said. “There’s some obvious questions about transportation or about some of the operational practices, and you can see where they rank among the other towns, [but] without an understanding as to why, it just feels lacking to me.”
Kain noted that, on the hard copies provided to the board, The Abrhams Group had written: “We are not engaged to, and will not perform an examination, the objective of which would be to express an opinion.”
“But, I think, in many ways, what we need is an opinion,” he said. “We need people to share opinions almost as a consultant would.”
Kain said an example would be, if a district got high marks, a list of practices they are engaged in to obtain that result, are the kind of opinions that can help the district become more efficient.
King said that was why The Abrahams Group included that statement in the introduction.
“We weren’t hired to do an analysis,” he said. “Transportation [for example] would be an entirely different study.”
The Abrams Group has done audits for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and school districts throughout Massachusetts and across the country on services; school-based performance and operations management; regionalization rules and budgeting and accounting for 29 years, according to the firm website [theabrahamsgroup.com].
“We started off with four school districts that had been suggested for comparison – Bridgewater-Raynham, Dudley-Charlton, Freetown-Lakeville and Hamden-Wilbraham,” King said. “In working with the [W-H] school district early on, they suggested we also add Dennis-Yarmouth, Dighton-Rehoboth and Dover-Sherborn.”
As the firm began reviewing data from those districts, however, the audit firm decided that Dennis-Yarmouth and Dover-Sherborn were not comparable to the other four districts, but Dighton-Rehoboth was, so it was added into the study, according to King.
“We’re going to look at a bunch of statistics,” he said in opening his PowerPoint presentation. “We’re going to go through them quickly because there’s a lot of them.”
Looking at enrollments, Bridgewater-Raynham is the biggest of the districts studied at 5,392 students, with W-H coming in second with 3,403 and and Dighton-Rehoboth is the smallest at 2,569 students.
W-H was second-highest in the number of economically disadvantage students, at 30 percent of all students in the district, to Dudley-Charlton’s 34 percent. The state average is 42 percent of any given student population, King reported.
“All of the districts [reviewed] are below that,” King said of the state average. All of the studied districts are in single-digits regarding the percentage of English Language Learners with W-H in second place at 2 percent, behind both Bridgewater-Raynham and Dudley-Charlton at 3 percent each. The state average is 13 percent.
Select Board member Justin Evans asked what year the ELL data was from.
“I know it has been a rapidly increasing population at W-H,” he said. King said student data was from 2023 and the financial data was from 2022.
W-H’s per-pupil assessment is second from the bottom in the group studied – it’s $34,340,078 operating assessment in 2022 at $9,859 per pupil. Capital assessments that didn’t apply to per-pupil costs were filtered out, King said.
W-H falls in the middle of the study group at $16,339 per pupil. Data was from state financial reports filed by the districts.
Per-pupil costs for administration and instructional leaders put W-H in the middle of the study group at $1,227. All were between $1,041 (Dudley-Charlton) and $1,447 (Freetown-Lakeville). W-H is second from the top in per-pupil costs for teachers at $6,625, with Dighton-Rehoboth in the top spot at 46,828.
“For other teaching expenses, W-H is at the bottom,” King said noting the category covers primarily teacher aides and paraprofessionals. In Technology spending, W-H’s per-pupil costs are back near the middle of the pack at $375, with Dighton-Rehoboth at $444 and Dudley-Charlton at $265.
W-H was in last place in regard to per-pupil expenditures for food services with $365, with Dudley-Charlton at the top with $575.
“This is point where per-pupil costs don’t mean a lot because of recent [state policy] with school lunches where al the lunches are free,” King said. “I wouldn’t rely too much on this figure, but it’s one of the things we looked at.”
In Trasportation, W-H is at the bottom, as well, spending $895 per pupil, with Freetown-Lakeville at the top with a $1,213 expenditure.
“These are all regional school districts who get regional aid,” he said. “Usually, every district has a different story about how they provide transportation and what their issues are.”
Evans asked if the transportation data represented the total transportation expenditure, or what the towns contribute to it. King said the data reflected the total expenditure.
“It’s nice to see where we rank, but, are there systems and practices in place that allow one town to be more efficient than others?,” Kain asked. “That would be helpful information for us as we’re thinking about [budgeting practices]. That’s some of the things I’d like to see surfaced out of an audit.”
To simply see where W-H ranks without an analysis moved Kain to say, “I don’t know what we can do with that information. I’m not saying that’s on you. It may be the way we put together the audit.”
W-H falls in the middle of the pack where operations and maintenance expenses re ranked, and is “back near the top” in per-pupil expenditures for benedits.
“A little bit of analysis – the two most expensive categories, when you break it down, is teachers and benefits,” King said. “To me, that’s where you want to spend your money – on benefits in order to get employees – and the same on teacher salaries.”
Evans noted that the teacher salaries and benefits was simply and averaging of “just total teachers’ salaries by the number of teachers.
“This doesn’t necessarily dig into whether we just have older teachers, so they’re at higher [salary] steps,” he asked.
“If you’re going to do an analysis of teacher salaries, you’d look at ages of teachers, number of years of experience,” King said. “You’d also look at benefits.”
“For us as well,” Kain said. “We’ve ben through a number of difficult budgets, having [fewer] younger teachers does kind of skew that number up.”
“I think we see that later in the report.” King said.
He also noted that W-H spends less on administration and leaders than all but two districts, spend more per-pupil on teachers than all but one districts and spend less, per-pupil than all districts,
The district also spends more than is required by their net school spending requirement by 15 percent. The state average is 29 percent, King said.
On Chapter 70, aid went up by $261,516 in 2022 as did the required net spending and the district’s required contributions went up, “but you were over the requirement anyways,” King said. “So, it didn’t affect you, but the district did get $261,000 more.”
The district was also asked to provide budget items funded by one-time sources – transitioning from a paid full-day kindergarten to a free all-day K in 2023, taking $476,627 from the revolving fund; ESSER funds were used to add positions – five teachers and 11 paraprofessionals.
“When the ESSER funds were expended, they went into the budget as additional staff funded by the budget,” King said.
In ESSER 1, was not spent on salaries, but “pretty much on expenses,” King said, adding that the district did not provide details on what the expenses were. ESSER II went mostly to salaries, a contribution to the Mass Teachers’ Retirement System that went along with those new teachers and more expenses and ESSER III again paid for teachers and paraprofessionals, stipends for attending grant-funded workshops, MTRS and other expenses.
“This is where they added the five teachers and 11 paraprofessionals,” King said.
A detailed appendix to the report, which King said was not conducive for use in a PowerPoint presentation, but he said, “it details five years of revenues and expenditures showing an excess and deficiency use over the five years,” King said. “We looked at those numbers. We didn’t see anything abnormal in them.”
The firm was also asked to look at Capital articles.
“The two parties need to get together and reconcile it, so the two reconciliations agree,” he said.