CouncilmanBruening - 10 January 2006 12:04 PM
Perhaps the group before going public with election thoughts can work with the school board to create a “finance liason” group to work with a small group of teachers, building superintendents, cleaning crews etc.. to look at where our dollars are being spent every day and look for ways to save money..
Actually, expenses should be recorded and available at the Administration building for the residents to view, the same as the budget is. Whether this is true or not, I don’t know. I’m sure, however, there is a lot of waste...especially if no one is looking at where the money is being spent.
I worked in the corporate world for many years, and one of my many responsibilities was handling our departmental budget. It was amazing how much money was wasted and the employee who handled the budget before I did, did nothing about it. I changed that real quick! To give you an example...we had managers who had three wireless phones, plus pagers. When I asked them about it, I got answers like, ‘well, one of them is the old stationary car phone, and one is analog and one is digital’. One manager had a $9.99 plan, because it was the cheapest, BUT each minute used was charged 45 cents. I mean, come on! These were supposed to be intelligent people. We were paying monthly rental fees on all of these phones and pagers, mind you. I had them disconnect the stationary and analog lines and all of the pagers, and upgrade to a reasonable cell plan. The digital cell phones will switch to analog if that’s the only available signal. And who needs a pager when they have a cell phone? This is only one example, but my company was wasting over $12,000 a year on this. The managers did not do it intentionally - they just never thought about it.
I’m sure there are similar types of waste in our schools - not intentional, but no one is really looking at where the money is going. Maybe I’ll call the Administration and see if the expenses are tracked and if I can view them.
