LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Clark County School District officials on Monday explained to state lawmakers the budget mistakes that led to schools running short of funds and the district's central office also coming up short.
Interim district Superintendent Dr. Brenda Larsen-Mitchell and two of her top deputies said that the district used the wrong criteria to calculate a funding formula, and schools underestimated the cost of teacher pay. The mistake went unnoticed until the school year had already begun, and principals had to scramble to fix the shortfall.
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More than 30 schools appealed to the district for help and were granted relief, officials said.
"I apologize that that happened," Larsen-Mitchell said at one point during the hearing.
"As I come across mistakes that have [been] made, or things that we have not done correctly, we are digging into the law, we are working with the general counsel, we are working with the Nevada Department of Education, we will be working with our compliance monitor to make things better."
Once the problems came to light in September, the district fired its chief financial officer, Jason Goudie, who denied responsibility for the problems. On Monday, Larsen-Mitchell and her deputies described a system where budget information was known only to a small group in district leadership, which they said allowed the problem to go unnoticed.
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After the problems came to light, the state posed questions to the district about how the errors had occurred. Unsatisfied with the answers, the Education Department, at the direction of Gov. Joe Lombardo, appointed former Clark County Manager Yolanda King as a compliance monitor to guide the district in getting back on track.
During more than an hour of questioning, Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro expressed frustration several times at the district's answers, saying the mistakes affected Clark County kids and their schools. At one point, she called it a "phenomenal" accounting error. She said that budget issues occur in state government all the time, but that the situation in Clark County was unique.
"What is uncommon is serious missteps in how we are accounting for these dollars and that just cannot happen again," she said. "And the answer before this committee cannot be 'well, it happened and we're just going to move forward.'"
For her part, Larsen-Mitchell said she has moved to stop officials at the district from operating in "silos," convening meetings with top staffers and building "systems and structures" where more people are informed about the budget.
School district spokesman Tod Story said the problem won't reoccur.
"We're confident that this will not happen again," he said after the hearing, stressing that no money was missing from the district's coffers.
"This specific issue we have been able to figure out where it occurred, how it occurred and the lack of communication or the siloing of communication that had occurred, has been addressed."
Now King will report to the State Education Department about her findings after meetings with district officials. She has been given an office on the fourth floor of the school district's headquarters, the same floor where Larsen-Mitchell has her office.
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