Submitted by: Dr. Kathy Knight Burns
School Board, Vice Chair
November 9, 2015 11:00 a.m.
Every school in Nassau County is required to meet rigorous reporting standards for the multitude of daily financial transactions necessary to support its curricular and co-curricular programs. The responsibility for insuring compliance with fiduciary policies and procedures on a daily basis falls on the school bookkeeper. Nassau County School District’s bookkeepers quietly and diligently work to insure that the deposits and purchases made in each of our 15
schools are completed in an accurate and timely fashion.
Thanks to these dedicated members of our learning communities, more than 10,000 students and their parents are offered opportunities with little thought given to the responsibility of collecting funds for student activities, tracking checks, depositing proceeds from dozens of fundraisers and athletic contests, and submitting and receiving orders for classroom teachers and coaches. The responsibility for accuracy is enormous; the potential for error is huge, and the attention to detail required of our bookkeepers is unrelenting.
Each year, an audit is completed at every attendance center to insure that all financial transactions were made in compliance with the required accounting procedures. Recently Courson and Stam, Certified Public Accountants, conducted an audit of the 2014-2015 Internal Fund activity for our schools. Eleven of the fifteen schools in the Nassau County School District received a “perfect” audit. The bookkeepers for the following schools deserve our recognition and appreciation for their outstanding performance:
Callahan Elementary School – Brenda Higginbotham
Callahan Intermediate School – Debbie Boyd
Callahan Middle School – Susan Kegley
Fernandina Beach High School – Sally Fulford
Fernandina Beach Middle School – Kathy Shipman
Hilliard Elementary School – Janice Hodges
Southside Elementary School – Cindy Bingham
West Nassau High School – Bea Mitchell
Yulee High School – Carol Rose
Yulee Middle School – Candy Ritsma
Yulee Primary School – Sandra Boatwright
Yulee High School and Yulee Middle School have had perfect audits for the past seven consecutive years. Callahan Elementary and Callahan Middle School have had perfect audits for the past five consecutive years. The four schools that did not receive perfect audits this year were cited for only one item each, related to back-up documentation.
Pierre Laporte of Courson and Stam stated: “It seems we have reached the point where each year a majority of the schools do not identify reportable control issues that need to be addressed as a result of our audit work.” I want to extend a huge “Thank you!” to our bookkeepers for their hard work that resulted in such an excellent audit report.