Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools officials responded to a new report from the state auditor’s office related to last year’s deficit.
At the meeting Thursday night, they also discussed committee appointments and a lawsuit against social media companies.
The state auditor shared its initial report on the district in August. It identified years of overspending and poor budgeting practices that led to a $46 million deficit.
This new document goes into more detail about some of those findings, noting failures to reconcile budgets and record expenditures in a timely manner.
At a Board of Education meeting, held hours after the new report was released, Superintendent Don Phipps said those issues have already been publicly addressed.
“The information here is information that many folks in our community probably have heard to some degree," he said. "May have been phrased a little bit differently, may have had a little more clarity to it, but these are things that we knew were issues that we had to be working on, and we certainly have responded to that.”
The district has begun using a new budgeting software with stronger internal controls and is providing monthly budget-to-actuals reports to the school board.
A different issue noted in the new report was a lack of clear terms for a loan from the district’s child nutrition department. But Phipps says the school board addressed that concern in January by agreeing to repay it this fiscal year with interest.
At the latest meeting, the school board appointed four community members to serve on a new Audit Advisory Committee, which will help respond to future reports like this one.
They also gave the district approval to join pending litigation against social media companies for the negative mental health effects they’ve had on students.
“If there's a $50 billion judgment or settlement out there, and it's appropriated to districts, we're a larger district, more than likely, we’d get a larger cut of that," said General Counsel Dionne Jenkins. "Those can be very valuable funds that could be used to support students.”
Several North Carolina school districts, including Guilford, Wake and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, have joined the pending litigation, too.
