- ✅No missing money. The auditor gave the financial statements a clean bill of health, and the worst figures the district had reported earlier turned out to be bookkeeping errors, corrected in the district's favor.
- ❌But the district broke basic money rules. Five "material weaknesses" in financial controls, $38M shuffled between accounts without required board approval, an overspent budget, and misspent federal grant money.
- ⚠️Fixable, but real, and recurring. Several of these problems are now in their second straight year.
The worst-looking numbers, fact-checked
Every year the district files its own numbers with the state months before any outside auditor checks them. That early, self-reported version (officially the “Certified Annual Report”) is what we'll call the filing. Here are the two figures from it that looked worst, and what the audit found when it checked. Both turned out better than the filing showed.
So the worst early numbers didn't hold up under audit. The real problems are about how the district ran its finances, not a vanished pile of cash.
The real problems big deal
Worth knowing medium
Smaller / housekeeping small
The good news reassuring
What the district is doing about it credit where due
The audit looks back at the year that ended in June 2024. Since then, the district has started working through the problems, and its corrective action plan responds to every finding. The main steps so far:
- ✓New financial leadership. New CFO Pat Moore has driven the cleanup and authored the corrective action plan the district is now working through.
- ✓Caught up on the long-overdue bank reconciliations, which the district reported current at a recent board meeting.
- ✓Standing up a new Financial Oversight Committee to add independent review of the district's finances. More on that →
- ✓Tightened approvals for payroll, payments, and journal entries, the gaps behind several of the findings.
- ✓Working off the audit backlog: FY24 is now complete, with FY25 and FY26 on a filing schedule.
These are steps in progress, largely self-reported in the corrective action plan, so the next audit is what will show how many take hold. Read the district's action plan (PDF) →
The FY25 audit (the year that ended June 2025) still has not been done, and it sits right in the middle of this story. The district did not start catching these problems until partway through FY26, so FY25's books were kept under the same practices. And we already know FY26 brought serious trouble of its own, such as the $10 million the district had to borrow between its own funds in August 2025 to keep cash flowing. With documented problems on both sides of it, the FY25 audit will almost certainly surface many of the same findings, plus unresolved items.
The early-warning signs are already visible in the district's own FY25 filing → A read of the unaudited FY25 Certified Annual Report against these findings — a fund balanced to exactly $0.00, a wave of prior-year corrections, an unaudited starting point, and the same capital spending that broke the FY24 budget.
FY24 isn't the catastrophe the early numbers suggested: there's no missing money and the books earned a clean opinion. But the audit documents a district whose financial controls broke down: rules ignored, budget exceeded, federal money misspent, and several problems now repeating. Real, but fixable.