The School Board approved a new practice for public comments as well as all action items during their meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 8.

After a short discussion opened by Superintendent Stephen Phillips, the School Board decided to make the following changes to the public comment procedure: 

• Lengthen the time for each person’s public comment from 2 minutes to 3 minutes.
• Continue to provide a total of 30 minutes for all public comments. 
• Continue reading emailed comments aloud but give priority to in-person commenters during the 30-minute time period for public comments. 
• Cease reading aloud anonymous comments.
• Ask each person who comments, whether via email or in person, to share their city of residence, but not their full address.

In addition, the School Board unanimously (7-0) approved the following action items:

• Allow Catalyst to change its status from a program within Newberg High School to an independent school. The change is scheduled to take effect this fall.
• Permit PGE to have an easement on the Dundee Elementary School site. An easement is a legal right for an organization, often a utility company, to use land to conduct business. In this case, PGE will use the easement to access power lines.
• Change student fees for both middle schools (see attachment for the full list).
• Give formal approval to Director of Finance Heather Bixby’s Audit Corrective Action Plan. The plan outlines the steps that will be taken to prevent these issues in the future. (See article at the bottom.)
• Let participants of Tiger Manufacturing, a student-run machine shop at Newberg High School, sell surplus.
• Make a change, as outlined in Resolution 2024-03R, to remove some of the School District’s legal firms and simplify the list.
• Accept the Oregon School Employees Union-Chapter 17 Contract for July 1 2023 to June 30, 2026. This is the union for classified employees. One key point of the contract was the Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) increase for OSEA employees. In the 2023-2024 school year, aII classified employees will receive a 3.5% COLA. On July 1, 2024, and July 1, 2025, all classified employees will again receive a 3.5% COLA wage increase.  
• Add members to the Policy Committee: Three School Board members chose to serve on the policy committee led by Deputy Superintendent Scott Linenberger. This year’s committee members will be Directors Sol Allen, Trevor DeHart, and James Wolfer.

Other than these action items and the discussion around improving public commenting practices, the School Board also received their school assignments during the discussion period. School Board members can visit any school but will give added attention and communication to their designated school institution. The assignations are: 

• Director James Wolfer at Antonia Crater Elementary School,  
• Director Trevor DeHart at Dundee Elementary School, 
• Vice Chair Deb Bridges at Ewing Young Elementary School,
• Director Renee Powell at Edwards Elementary School, 
• Director Sol Allen at Joan Austin Elementary School, 
• Director Jeremy Hayden at Mabel Rush Elementary School, and 
• Hayden and Chair Nancy Woodward at Catalyst High School, Chehalem Valley Middle School, Mountain View Middle School, and Newberg High

School District Shines in Audit Report

Newberg-Dundee Public Schools (NDPS) performed admirably on a recent audit by Pauly, Rogers, and Co., P.C. NDPS overhauled its financial statements, making the School District’s finances more efficient and more accurate.

Senior Accountant Luke Donaldson offered an overview of the School District’s audit report of this past fiscal year (July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022) during School Board meetings on June 13 and Aug. 8. Donaldson addressed financial practices and procedures, specifically highlighting the School District’s issues and the improvements that the financial team has made.

The 2021-22 fiscal year ended with a $7.48 million fund balance and a slew of issues that the School District has worked hard to correct. That hard work paid off. Donaldson said that his firm gave the School District its stamp of approval.

“The audit opinion is unmodified,” Donaldson said on Aug. 8, going on to explain what “unmodified” means in this case. “We looked at your numbers and, materially, we agreed that they are correct.”

At the June 13 meeting, Donaldson said that NDPS was in compliance with state and federal regulations, working through complex, pandemic-era federal funding and new auditing language. He noted that the School District handled each challenge well, largely due to the efforts of the financial team, led by Director of Finance Heather Bixby. 

“I’d like to thank Heather and her team,” Donaldson said at the time. “You guys put in a lot of hard work this year.”

Donaldson added that, upon her arrival at the School District, Bixby had to organize many financial documents, which he said were not in order.

"District books were not in a great place when Heather took over," he said.

Striving for financial success, Bixby said that her financial team implemented new procedures and worked closely with the firm. 

“I’m proud of our achievements and our collaboration as a team,” Bixby said. “We will continue to work hard for our community.”

At the Aug. 8 meeting, Heather shared the Audit Corrective Action Plan that she and her team implemented to address the previous financial issues:

• Bixby and her team discovered that “the District's Zion Bank Investment account was not being adjusted to market value,” the Audit Corrective Action Plan says. “This resulted in a $7,990,358 impairment which was not recorded.” To address the issue, the School District will now implement a procedure to review the investment account and adjust it to market value.
• The Audit Corrective Action Plan states that: “Reimbursement journal entries were incorrectly recorded leading to a misstatement of revenue.” The remedy is to assign a reviewer to each journal entry who is not the same person who prepared it.
• The Audit Corrective Action Plan notes that the School District did not record all items related to a land acquisition. These items were the related “Full Faith and Credit issuance, the local donation revenue, and the capital outlay expense related to the land acquisition leading to a misstatement of revenue and expenses.” The solution will be a documented plan of action for this specific issue, a plan that Bixby has already set into motion.