The Board of Education’s CIP/Facilities/Finance (BOE CFF) Subcommittee discussed the itemized estimate for January, along with a transportation update and a workflow analysis, at its Tuesday, February 18 meeting.

For her financial report, Director of Business and Finance Tanja Gouveia said the BOE has spent $49,878,426 year-to-date and have a balance of just under $8 million. However, combined with their anticipated obligations of $7.7 million, Gouveia said they are looking at an anticipated year-end balance of $240,338 — expending 99.74% of their budget.

Before continuing, she noted that her office corrected all the balances for last year's expended column.

"So what we had to do was just reload everything, and after the auditors made our final adjustments, we put the numbers in," Gouveia explained. "So everything's good now."

She said were some changes over the previous month, with the majority of it occurring in their salaries account.

While certified salaries did not see much change, increasing by around $12,000, non-certified salaries was a different story.

Gouveia reminded everyone of the CFF Subcommittee meeting last month, when she said the business office had to manually recalculate all of the district's paraeducator positions due to the equity adjustment that took place January 1.

"So we had to go through every para by hand and recalculate their balances," Gouveia explained. "So when we did that, I was right on the spot, which I was really happy about."

Last month's balance of $148,000 was reduced by $90,000, with the balance now standing at $58,000. This, combined with open para positions that are expected to be filled, leaves the paraeducator sub-account with a projected year-end balance of $33,436.

Moving on to benefits, Gouveia said they are no changes in that area. She added that the business is a little behind because they are short-staffed, but they are going to recalculate Medicaid, FICA Medicare, dental, and pensions. Gouveia hoped this would be done over the next month or so.

The professional services saw a reduction, as the district had a pretty large decrease in its legal fees over the prior month. Gouveia said they reduced this account $45,000, which has to do with ongoing negotiations and two unanticipated negotiations.

BOE Chair Alison Plante asked what the unanticipated negotiations were. Gouveia said it was security and behavioral therapists (BTs) since they each formed a union after the budget passed last year.

"When we made this budget last year, we did not yet know that those two groups planned to unionize, and so we had two new union negotiations this year that we did not anticipate," Plante explained.

Itemized Estimate Continued

Gouveia said the professional property services category is in good standing, and that the building, site and emergency repairs line item specifically was doing "really, really well."

The line item has a current balance of $266,000 and a year-to-date expenditure of $204,650, which Gouveia said is really good for this time of year.

However, they expect these remaining funds to be spent by the end of the year.

"We typically spend about $500,000 plus in that account, so our budget's always a little shy in that regard" Gouveia explained. "Our budget's always a little shy in that regard."

Gouveia said the other purchased services category is "usually the wild card," but that there was not too much going on with it.

The category's balance increased by $51,000 due to a reduction in anticipated out-of-district tuition obligations. Gouveia said she typically follows this throughout the year and, if she does not hear anything coming up, she will start reducing it.

The biggest change, which Gouveia said fascinated her, was in the electricity and natural gas line items. After recalculating demand and reviewing costs for Eversource services, Gouveia noted electricity rates have changes.

Rates went up for electricity supply. The district is locked into a fixed rate, so Gouveia said this increase does not affect them. However, when the rates go up for supply, so does virtual net metering credits.

"The credit went up, the demand has gone down, and we're now looking at a potential $130,000 surplus," Gouveia explained.

Gouveia said it is still early and the weather is still pretty volatile, so while things could change, she will not "completely count on it."

Their natural gas account has a deficit of $95,000, largely attributed to demand costs rising by 73%.

"I've never seen it skyrocket like that," Gouveia said. "Hoping it'll come down, but typically whenever Eversource resets their demand ... it stays that way [for a time]. But I am hoping the demand levels out for natural gas."

She said it is a little different with electricity, believing that it is annualized.

"Fortunately we do have the money to cover that, but I just don't like seeing huge deficits, especially in these commodities," Gouveia said.

Transportation Update

Gouveia moved straight into an update about the district's transportation services. She spoke with All-Star Terminal Manager Colleen Peck earlier that day and had good news: the district is fully staffed as far as full-time route drivers.

Peck said they had two more expected to be licensed the following week, with three more in training.

Superintendent of Schools Anne Uberti spoke about Peck's strong leadership, describing her as very professional and good at her job.

Uberti added, "[Peck's] very approachable, she's smart ... and I can see why people would want to work with her."

Gouveia said All-Star has begun a camera replacement program for its buses. These cameras record student behavior inside buses, according to Uberti.

"So when we'd request a video to investigate a complaint from a student, we were often unable to access the video. As it turns out, the cameras are old, so they're going to be updating and replacing them," Uberti explained.

This replacement process began earlier in February with 20 cameras. This comes at a cost of $55,000 to All-Star, and the remaining camera replacements will be including in its budget next year.

Gouveia noted improvement with All-Star's handling of the district's fall and winter athletic trips. In 2023-24, All-Star only performed 46% of the trips, and only performed 34% of the trips in 2024-25.

2025-26 has seen remarkable improvement compared to the past two years, with All-Star completing 87% of the district's athletic trips.

Workflow Analysis

Gouveia finished the meeting by sharing an operational review conducted by CliftonLarsonAllen (CLA), which performed a workflow analysis on the district's Human Resources (HR) and Finance departments.

The analysis was to identify workflow bottleneck, redundancies, and overlaps, while enhancing efficiencies and the departments' use of technology.

The assessment began in November and was completed in January, with the final draft report delivered in February.

Gouveia gave a quick overview of these two departments and how they handle all district-wide operational activities for students and staff.

The HR and Benefits team support eight unions as well as non-union staff, Early Learning Center, coaches, and student employees. They provide services such as onboarding, off-boarding, health insurance and benefits, and assistance in a wide variety of employee-related matters.

Finance's payroll staff processes 950 bi-weekly pay vouchers for very complex groups, totally over $57 million annually, and process checks for vendors weekly, which totals about $34 million annually. The department also oversees all transportation and student meal services.

"And in the 15 years that I've been here, our budget has grown by 35%. However, these roles and responsibilities have not changed, so we thought it was time for a change," Gouveia explained.

As a result of last year's budget cuts, Gouveia said they were faced with the reality of having to redistribute the workload. At first, they were very optimistic, thinking they could "do it all," but Gouveia said they began to notice pressures building in key positions.

This, along with the aforementioned redundancies across both departments, is why they reached out to CLA for the operational review.

CLA set up interviews with the entire HR and Finance staff, reviewed their technology use, and looked at how their roles and responsibilities aligned across the two departments.

Gouveia said CLA identified several operational inefficiencies, mostly in workflow processes since they still rely on a lot of manual data entry. They also noted that, while the departments have strong institutional knowledge, they did not have documentation to back any of this up.

Lastly, they said payroll processing relies heavily on one staff member, creating operational vulnerability.

As far as operational strengths, CLA said HR and finance show strong collaboration, technology integration with electronic substitute calling and time/attendance systems, and reliable and consistent payroll execution.

Moving forward, Gouveia said they want to implement additional software technology to lessen the use of manual data and spreadsheets.

She added they are reshaping two team roles to eliminate redundancies and bottlenecks. One is the benefits coordinator position, which could be used as a swing position to assist HR during the peak seasons. The benefits coordinator would report to Gouveia and the HR director.

The other is the grants coordinator; since this position was not a full-time role, Gouveia said they identified an opportunity to expand it to full-time. This allowed them to absorb the majority of the cafe bookkeeper responsibilities and create critical backup capacity for the accountant, along with grant-related work.

As such, the grant coordinator position has been renamed to the grant and school nutrition manager.

=====

Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.