Right off the bat, I have to say that our current Business Manager, Pat Laffey, is excellent.  His office is understaffed, he inherited a garbage fire, and he’s grotesquely overworked.  Somehow, in all of my interactions with him, he remains positive.  I would have at least devolved into epic cynicism to cope by now.

The reason things are so bad are because of his immediate predecessor, Gregg Sunday, who both helped facilitate theft from the district and stole from the district.  (Fun fact: my position is that the district should be suing civilly for damages.)  Not only was Sunday a criminal, he was quite obviously an awful business manager.  A lot of records were on paper. A lot of the recommendations in the plan reference bad practices.  A lot of financially sound ideas were never pursued.  And on and on.

So that’s why the Business Office has its own section.

Here goes:

• Staff realignment and training.  This is related to the reorganization I mentioned in the Admin section.  Some Business Office functions will be moved to HR.  An Assistant Business Manager (which we budgeted for already) may be hired (side note, the Board is discussing bringing in an accounting firm with school expertise in order to fulfill these responsibilities, which would be cheaper).  The big one is training– as in, make sure the clerical employees have multiple, rather than singular skill sets.  This will be important as the district transitions to more static systems and programs.
• Explore Joint Services with the City of Scranton.  I’ve pushed this for YEARS and am glad to see it in the plan.  The Board has a committee to explore joint services, but I’ve seen it do absolutely nothing since its inception.  I’ve written about areas of cooperation extensively, so hopefully we’ll see movement.  There aren’t specifics here, so the possibilities are currently wide open.
• Stop issuing debt for operations.  This is a no-brainer.  Doing this in the past got us to this point.  The plan calls for debt monitoring.  This initiative basically says to keep an eye on it and avoid making the problem worse.
• Get reimbursements.  The state will reimburse the district on some types of debt issuance and payment.  I recently learned that the district hasn’t applied for all of these reimbursements, and we are currently working on doing so.  This will get us some money in our coffers.  The plan basically notes that we need a system in place to make sure we apply for this money as soon as we are able.  I’d say, “duh” but the running theme here is that Scranton needs to be told to do basic things.
• Improve financial reporting.  Basically, important information is scattered, incomplete, hard to access, and sometimes non-existent.  The idea here is to create regular reports covering every aspect of the district’s finances.  Hopefully it’s more readable than our accounts payable sheets (hundreds of pages of bills).
• Comply with federal guidelines.  This is complicated, but suffice it to say, the district has made mistakes in the past.  It’s been improving!  The glaring thing I see here is that purchasing is not electronic, but paper-based currently.  WHAT?  Time to fix that.

Since these are a tad shorter, I combined them.  So here’s the section on Procurement (as in, Getting Stuff):

• Modernize purchasing.  This connects to my final bullet in the BO section.  The district has been transitioning to a new, easier system and the plan encourages institutionalizing it.  The idea is to train all relevant employees in the system’s use, and make things easier for everybody.  Then we can track purchasing and buy more sensibly.
• Appoint a Procurement Officer.   Or Director of Purchasing, or whatever.  But somebody will be in charge of buying stuff.  In a district this big, it’s needed.
• Bid Contracts.  A no-brainer.  The district set up a bidding timeline, actually, and so contracts in the future will be regularly bid out in order to ensure we’re getting the best bang for our buck.
• Asset inventory.  The district doesn’t actually know what it has.  So this needs to happen.  How we went this far without knowing?  Well…  that’s par for the course, I’ve found.  If there’s a pallet of paper at Armstrong and West High is out of paper, we need to know that.  Simple.  The plan points out that pieces of equipment work over $10,000 aren’t even entered into our system.  Uh.  Oops?
  • I’d add that if anything that we are supposed to have does not appear, we investigate.  Somebody was stealing desks a few years back.  If I recall, somebody was also stealing carpeting.  This initiative would help prevent that.
• Tell the Board what we own.  Another aspect of the plan that I’ve noticed is that it makes sure the Board knows what’s going on.  Currently, we tend not to.  So the Board would get regular reports on our assets.  Good idea.

There you have it folks!