2020-10-14 PPS School Board Audit Committee Meeting

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District Portland Public Schools
Date 2020-10-14
Time 16:30:00
Venue Virtual/Online
Meeting Type committee
Directors Present missing
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Event 1: PPS Board Audit Committee 10/14/2020

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i'm looking at my set of tiles why don't you start then emily mary katherine go through it go ahead scott bailey member of the committee i'm emily cortnidge director of purchasing and contracting janice hanson pps internal auditor mayor catherine moore internal performance auditor parker myros harvard student reps jackson weinberg the other student rep michelle de pass board member and audit committee member okay cara bradshaw executive assistant uh kate wilkinson public member roseanne powell board manager great and kate it's great to see you in person yeah i know huh it's the first time it's great to see everybody else in person as well but in person so um welcome so welcome everybody um we have a pretty full agenda and i'm going to try and make sure that we wrap up on time we're going to change the order the agenda just slightly because claire hertz the deputy superintendent for business and operations is in another meeting until five so we're gonna um we originally we were going to um discuss the uh implementation of the contract audits first and then go to the audit plan but we're gonna go to the audit plan um which claire has already provided her feedback on we're gonna do that first and then go to the contract implementation when claire is able to join us um so the first thing is just ministerial it's a um people should have gotten a copy of the informal minutes and we don't need to approve them if anybody has any questions about them or something that needs to be corrected please share them share that with kara or roseanne any questions or comments about the minutes great okay and thank you um cara from putting those together it's really helpful to get um sort of a detailed overview of what the discussion was um so the next item on our agenda is um the draft 2021 audit plan proposal and um in the uh as everybody may recall for 1920 we had there's two audits that um are still underway from the 1920 audit plan and that's the p-card audit and the ach audit so while that is in the document that was sent we're not really asking um the committee to discuss or approve that because it's already been discussed approved and um they're well underway so this is what we're really looking for today uh before i turn it over to the two district performance auditors is every year this committee forwards to the full board recommendations on the audit plan and um the mary katherine and janice um have created based on their assessment of the risk and conversations and they'll go through more of this they've come up with a series of recommendations uh for uh this committee to consider and ideally unless there is um not a consensus that we this committee would then make a recommendation to the full board um so the full board can consider it um and before the presentation i guess there's two other sort of um guardrails i are not guard whales maybe one maybe one's a guardrail and the other is a um just a note is that a guardrail would be there were there were a number of other topics that were um had been reviewed by the by the auditors as potential topics that have not been chosen and that are not being recommended uh for us to advance to the full board for the
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2021 audit plan um i'm happy at a future maybe needing to discuss those items that we're not that we're not going to be discussing today or advancing if people want to have a discussion about them um but i really want just given the amount of time we have um focus on the items that are being recommended so that's what we're going to start with and then the other issue that i want to just say that that we should um we'll be putting on the calendar for a future discussion is this morning uh director constance asked about a um moving the esl audit into this year's audit plan and because that wasn't something that had been recommended by the auditors i'm not going to insert it today because we haven't had time for them to prepare for us to have that discussion but i i do want to put it on a future committee meeting agenda so that if there is interest um by any of the committee members um and the auditors recommend we added in that we give space to that um but because this came in this morning and it wasn't on the auditor's recommended plan i'm going to move that to a future meeting is that okay with people that's fine with me um i also wanted to let everyone know i'm going to step out of the meeting at about 5 30 uh for about 15 minutes and i'll come back um that said there's something on the agenda regarding recruitment of a additional community member and um i'd like to be part of that conversation so if we have to move that around as well i just want you know it should be just perfect because we're gonna um address that during other business so which it should work um thank you come back anybody else have any questions about the scope of our discussion here on the audit plan um so yes so there is there's a topic that i've asked for for at least two years now um and that's the uh hardship transfer process um and i understand it didn't make the recommended list but i i'd kind of like to know to me when i compare it to gee are we losing some money for from renting out district facilities that to me doesn't doesn't look to me like a huge priority uh compared to a process that affects thousands of students um and i think is um there's a lot of issues there um and there may there may be other uh you know ell is another uh another issue that director constant brought up so i'd like a uh just a more of a discussion before we send priorities to the board about what's what made the cut uh or what we would recommend so add to that and that's that um when we're making these difficult choices if we had a uh just a way to make decisions that you know if we for instance had an equity impact um that might help us prioritize one you know audit over another um i agree the hardship transfer process is important so as the english as a second language and so is the facility usage because um that's where you can that's where fraud can happen so so if we if i i think it's a great idea to have an additional discussion and perhaps we should use an equity lens on how we're prioritizing our audit great was i on mute the entire time no no we would have told you michelle we were listening um so i'm hearing hardship transfers um ell and an equity lens um that we know that we have a a way to make decisions when we're trying to prioritize uh you know audits that are equally as important you know the hardship transfer process is important english is a second language um program audit is important and perhaps we can make those decisions easier by by coming up with a way to make decisions that includes an equity lens an equity impact statement in other words if if one of these audits has more of an impact on how children of
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color are being served in our community that might that might bring an audit rise and audit up um recommendation yeah uh so i really appreciate the committee members discussion kate did you have anything that or no oh i'm on mute aren't i um am i on mute no i'm not no uh i looked at the agenda and we went over it or over the proposed plan yesterday and i made my suggestions then so okay fine thanks jackson um do you guys have any um the student reps have any um thing about about the scope before we dive into the specific recommendations um i i'd just like to uh point out that janus did um did sort of a really smart thing in my opinion and that's if buildings were to open back up um the the building safety would then be moved to the top of the list which i think is is a really smart move but about the scope more generally no no okay so um i'm thinking about how we and we're about ready to dive in just been into the the draft audit plan but the cow will formulate this because it would be good for us and maybe we do um maybe we send two out and then just like we did last last year and then have the additional follow-up discussion um and then uh potentially if we wanted to have that be the third audit um or replace one of the other ones we could we could do that um i say we the two of the audits are almost complete the ach we're just waiting for the district to actually put some transactions through so there's a control group but we should be able to move from them and to the equity um lens michelle maybe um i'm thinking just in the future we have this sort of the template that's being that's being utilized that has the objective goals background information risks planning the estimated hours and then the scope i'm thinking it would be useful to be really intentional to ask as we're scoping the audit whether this has a disproportionate positive or potential positive or negative impact on students of color and that way we can really i think as we're looking at it also be holding that you know it as a primary value along with some of this other information is that something that we could add in future um i mean for example uh this the building um the audit of the building usage um one of the equity pieces is two years ago and i think it was now scott we um asked the district to create a waiver for title 1 csi and psi schools that they could have their custodial the custodial fees waived so they actually could have community events um because a lot of schools weren't able to do it and so auditing whether you know those schools know about know about that and actually are actually are using it because there's no sense having a waiver of the fees so that um school communities that can't afford to pay them are able to use it if nobody's actually using it or they don't know about it um i think that's great and i also think that the waiver should go like be tied to a community not a building necessarily in other words if we're working with erko immigrant refugee community and there's a somali community that needs to use a building in our system then they might want to use a non you know tsai school they might want to use lincoln high school and so the the waiver is tied to the community not to the building so i think that is um a great um potential change of policy that may be recommended if we find that nobody's using it or if we say it looks like that the current a d is too restrictive and nobody's using it um but that's that's an example of taking a what may be considered just like a standard you know
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uh building if you know efficiency and effectiveness of the use of the buildings and adding an equity lens like there is this equity waiver in there but are people actually using it like testing that as part of the audit um so why don't we uh have uh janice and mary katherine share uh the recommended audit plan i've asked them not to like go over the p card or the ach audit because we've actually already approved the board already approved the audit and it's already underway so that we don't need to have that audit so um janice why don't you and mary katherine jump in with and do it in the order of priority um and we'll see if we have a we have a consensus um on what to advance to the board all right so thank you very much um for the opportunity to bring this to you guys i i did present just my desktop but you guys should be able to see this in board books also i will say that um there are a couple of minor typos and errors here that i need to update and then also there was a request for me to be more specific in relationship to the timing of when the audit would be expected so i will get an updated version of this out to you guys i just need to consult with mary catherine before i commit to a really good time frame on but i will put that in here and i will get it out to you guys tomorrow um so let me just kind of up here at the top the summary the the number one item like julia said these first two are already audits that are approved so while they are on the list you know i'm just acknowledging that we are still working on them the next one is the asb and student body funds um so as a side note i i appreciate the recommendation for kind of adding that column related to equity impact and so i will um i will do that for future audit plans add the add a section for equity impact and take that into consideration i will say that unfortunately scott you were the only one i wasn't able to talk to you before this committee meeting where i was able to really talk through my rationale and decision making process for the proposal so i apologize i wasn't able to get to you but um we can follow up on that i will be very detailed with you so the the the first audit is what i want to talk to you guys about yes i'm sorry to interrupt are other people getting a lag or is that just my is that my laptop it's you i think it's you okay i'm gonna yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna remove my video so i can hear sorry okay so um i am proposing that the first audit after the rollup audits would be an asb audit and asb or student body funds audit to determine whether the district has adequate internal controls to ensure the complete and accurate recording tracking and safeguarding of student body funds so i went to a peoplesoft to try to figure out how much we were receiving and i couldn't get the exact number but i i found in last year's financial statements we are actually receiving over seven million dollars last year in associated or in the asb funds so that's a lot of transactions that are taking place district-wide and there's relatively very small little internal control or oversight in this area um so i think there's a big risk here um do you guys have any specific questions about uh what an asb audit or student body funds audit would entail or should i just keep going well i would be really getting a quick a quick overview of what that entails okay um like how many people are transacted you know contributing to those transactions are those funds decided like per student uh in the building etc yeah i just would like a little bit more information okay so um student body funds are restricted use funds they are funds that can only be used for a very specific purpose and it's
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highly regulated we those funds cannot be receded into our general fund they have to be receded into the associated student body fund and the use of those funds is restricted to a very specific purpose so we can't use them for anything other than what they are intended for so there are asb funds that are receded at every single school throughout the district and when something is happening at every single school district school within the district and there's not a very um clear and concise standard operating procedure that is provided to each school building then what the risk is is everybody's kind of doing it in a slightly different way and that is really inefficient and it it's a very high risk area any type of cash receipting or cash handling is always high risk it's it's just really ripe for opportunities for fraud and we haven't done an audit of asp funds receipting accounting for them um like an example would be like at a school i would look and ask for a list of fundraising events and say they said oh we had these five fundraising events and so i would go to look in the accounting for those receipts associated with those five events and for example what if i find only four deposits were made well what happened to the other fundraising deposit perhaps it was miscoded and and i could look for it in that way so there's so many different ways in which [Music] this air up area is high risk but not having an audit and not having in the past and not having a very clear and concise standard operating procedures that everybody kind of has to follow we definitely have training that is available i i went online and i looked and so there is training available but it's it is high level so um it's a very risky area does that answer enough michelle or do you want me to kind of try to keep going no that was great thank you okay awesome and i believe a couple of years ago some schools at least had their own independent bank account um and yeah oh says it all i will be looking for that um i think that got rained in uh pretty quickly that was i i think once our superintendent discovered that that that's a big risk um and i've seen that at school a lot of different school districts they don't there seems to be a little bit of a disconnect between general business practices that people in central administration might be more comfortable with and then out at the schools they are much more focused in on on students and sometimes the business practices aren't always kind of transmitted out to them in a very robust way and i think they're all trying to do a great job but again it's really important that we take a look at the guidance and the expectations the training that the manual that we're providing what procedures are required what the reconciliation processes and procedures are because it's just a really risky area and hopefully i find that there are not any outside accounts but i will be asking and looking for that um all right so the next audit that i am recommending is this facility usage and building rentals audit and thank you um scott for saying that you don't quite see the equity piece that means that i didn't clearly communicate the equity piece in here but my intent was to really address an equity risk associated with this i think julia mentioned this waiver and i think by by putting in our policy that we're providing a waiver it it says to me that the district is trying to provide equitable opportunities for community use of our facilities um
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and so i know that that's the intent because we put it in policy and and so the utilization of that waiver um i would really like to know if it's even being used if it has been used um people that i've talked to so far were unfamiliar with the fact that there was even a wavering system and so i am you know i think that this is a really an opportunity to hone in on some potential equity i i copied in a piece into the background here and and i will send an updated with a little bit better language to hone in on the equitable opportunity risks that i see and i will get that updated and send out to you because it is really my intent to not just focus on the risk of a lack of revenue you know it is also risk associated with equitable opportunity to use school facilities um and the the way in which the waiver is written i copied that piece from the ad into the um into the background information just because it was so difficult to understand when i read it myself and i'm an auditor i was like wait so how do how would i get an exemption and when is it so it was it was pretty complicated and so when things are complicated it increases the risk of not utilizing the the waiver um so i will update the risks to specifically address the opportunity for equity um equitable use of our facilities by community organizations and i because that really i do want to hone in on that piece of it in this audit i also want to check for liability like um you know it does say that there is a risk you know uh for legal liability if accidents occur if the um if the events that are held in our facilities are not being properly documented and um the community organizations are not providing their insurance to cover that liability then accidents that might happen could potentially result in liability for the school district so it's really important that we get district sponsored events and then community sponsored events classified correctly um in the kind of the application process for utilization of our facilities and and one of the things that i've heard from custodians is is that this is they'll show up to to school and the gym will be a mess and and nobody even informed them that there was an event the previous night and so um even utilizing the system to request for the proper permissions to use our facilities is really important and then categorizing them as a district sponsored event or a non-district sponsored event is also really important so i will do a little bit of updates to this just to be more clear and concise about the equitable opportunity to utilize our facilities because i do want to address that in this audit um any questions about this one well um also i promise to update this i'm not gonna feed the custodian coverage it should be fees fees not feed sorry about that so this was uh an action we took what julia two years ago um and uh the communication was poor um i i don't think the ad really captured the spirit of what the board was looking for um so i think there's there's some other dimensions to this as well um and it was you know you know scott school was uh kind of spearheaded the ask for this um and i know they used it but uh at least early on the communication was not very good going out to
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schools and uh parent groups at schools um and as much as i yes this is an important issue um i don't think it rises to the top for me in terms of priority uh and that's again we can catch up on that um and that's not getting together as more is me not you so um everybody's so busy it's a really tough time to reach out but i i do want to follow up with you to kind of walk you through some of my thoughts and it looks like a lot of hours uh compared to some of the other audits and so that's also i think of the issue itself where's where does it stack up and also the amount of time it takes um so that's i just want to register those concerns okay thank you for that and and i'm uh i personally would not be ready to forward this to the full board as a priority until we have more discussion but uh there you go so the i will will circle back to that so i will move on to the the last audit that i am recommending and then we will come back and and talk about what we are actually going to recommend to the full board so this last one which is um would become an immediate priority in the event that school any in-person um classes start back for students it would become a priority but what this would be is um compliance with the building safety plan check so for students to be received out at a school the building would have to have a building safety plan so i would get the building safety plan and then turn it into somewhat of a checklist so say for example the building safety plan says that they should have hand sanitizer at these three locations then i would go to check to see if there's hand sanitizers and those three locations and whether or not they're it's empty you know or for example one of the principals at some point in the past talked about turning a hallway into a one-way hallway well if that's if the building plan says that the hallway should be a one-way hallway then when the bell rings i will stand there and see if that hallway is being utilized as a one-way hallway but each little piece of the building safety plan is is really important because it's a combination of all of those things that um the little things that are we're doing in those building safety plans that will help protect the students so i i want to be diligent and timely in the feedback so what i want to do is commit to two-day turnaround so i will create the checklist and then two days after i'm on site i will deliver the results of that checklist to district administration and that will give them very timely feedback about specific compliance with their building safety plan where students are being being in person so i think this is really a a great audit but only if students are going to be held in person so it's the least of my priorities right now because i have no idea if that's going to happen this year but i did put a little asterisk by that in my prioritization up here that says um if it does happen then these health and safety checks audit will take priority over the other audits that are in place and and what i envisioned for this is um like one day a week mary katherine and i will go and do um on-site and and do separately she'll go to one building i'll go to one building so we'll try to do two buildings a week and if we see strong compliance we'll just keep moving forward with that if we see um some non-compliance with the practice we might need to increase that and do more of them maybe two days a week so i i really am asking for a little bit of flexibility associated with this um because we need to do it to the level at which we're we are seeing the risk and i think at the beginning the first couple of weeks you know there it's highly likely that people are going to be super compliant with every little detail but it's week 3 and
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week 10 are we still going to be strict about making sure um so even over time i want to keep doing them to make sure that the compliance with the safety plan is maintained to as for as long as the safety plan is required does that make sense any questions about that one no i hope you have to do it this year but i'd i'd love to see you at benson coloring parker when he's going wrong way down the uh one-way hallway i plan to give like get your mask over your nose no but seriously i know i'm teasing about it but it is really important the and the longer we we do get back to school that week 10 and week 12 i know that i have seen it in our community where right at first the first couple weeks you know even the grocery stores were being super diligent about sanitizing the carts now nobody's sanitizing the carts anymore the hand sanitizer is almost out everywhere i go you know and so that over time becoming lacks is a is even more of a risk from my perspective than the first couple of weeks i would say skip the first couple of weeks like and which is kind of what you were alluding to uh and wait and it'd be more important to do it uh at least a month out uh because everybody's gonna be kind of on at those like you said so that that makes sense to me i have a quick question um relative to the hours spent on each audit um just for my own edification um and director bailly you talked about the the hours required and i did notice like the nch audit and the p-card audit which i understand are in process um have fewer hours is there how do you determine the hours and are the hours on a particular audit relative to the amount of risk or is there some other calculus that we don't know about thank you so much for that question um i this is a difficult um thing for auditors to estimate how many hours is it going to take for me to do this work and it is extremely difficult to to narrow to nail that down in a very um precise way and that is why you almost always hear delays and getting an audit report because it's it's just not an exact science it is at best an educated guests so one of the things like for the ach audit mary catherine had had some experience doing ach type audits in the past and so i thought that we would be able to build on her experience and it would take us less time because of that level of experience and so that's why the hours on that one were a little bit lower because she had some previous auditing experience in that very specific audit topic that we could utilize um to benefit our us in a way in which we don't have to spend as much time researching the topic um you know for pcard audit i have a lot of experience auditing p-card audits and so again i the the the number of hours associated with that one was was kind of picked before i came to pps but um i do think it's realistic only because i have that experience and it will allow us to be more efficient in our time but audits like um the asb audit i have experience there but that is something that's going on at every single school asb receipts and so i tried to think how um you know how much work is it gonna take so i have the experience i know how to do it i know what i'm looking for i've done something similar in the past but when you have to deal with a bunch of different locations and gathering information from those different locations that's a lot of people to reach out to to get information from and so that really will
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take more time um but it is a educated guess at best but thank you for the question and i do try to do my best to try to be really precise but it is it's not an exact science i wish there was a class that they would teach on this in college for auditors to say this is how many hours but there's just not and so we do our very best but unfortunately it's very common in the industry to um not have that number be perfect so i'm i'm gonna just be cognizant of the agenda time and um i'm going to propose in a moment um a path forward but before we do that are there any additional questions on either the asb audit or the um health and safety checks audit yes i have i have one okay good what's the follow-up process going to look like for a building that's flagged as not in full compliance with the uh the health and safety protocol so that is a great question but unfortunately i don't deal that's not what i would do my responsibility is to report on the compliance and i want to deliver on that to district administration within two days of being on site so they'll get it timely but that is a question for district administration what are they going to do about that is a great question but it's just not my role and responsibility to oversee any follow-up um of non what do they do but what i will say is if i see a bunch of non-compliance i'm probably going to go back to that school in a couple weeks and check it again that's what i would do yeah that completely answers my question awesome anything anybody else have a question about those two audits um i'm gonna propose something and we'll see so if it's a committee consensus that we since we already have two in flight and the asb audit is a it's a an educated guess that's six 600 hours so um pretty substantial um and then the health and safety check we talked about why it may be relevant in the short term um i'm wondering if if we if people would be comfortable us recommending to the board um these two audits to add them to the 2021 audit plan and then at our next meeting um have the discussion about about the hardship transfers director bailey that you raised the ell audit the director constant raised and the last facility audit um before making a decision on a recommendation to the board on that third piece is would would there be any anyone who would have an issue with that being a recommendation coming out of this committee i think that sounds good is that just that right as well yeah sorry michelle what did you say i'm fine with that as well yeah okay parker jackson one quick sorry information question on the uh asb audit would you do a sample of schools that is a great question it's already been asked um by somebody else and i thought i was gonna try to update it to try to say that but what i will say is i will pick the schools based off risk um so one of the there are certain reports and reconciliations that each school asb coordinator needs to turn into finance and so what i'll do is i'll reach out to finance and say hey are there any schools that are consistently late or don't always fill them out or don't turn them in and and those would be where i start with but so those are the ones i would start with um those that are higher risk but i would also try to be a geographical sampling so take some from each of the different areas and then i would also want to test by grade a couple from different grades um so elementary school middle school and high school they're going to do things in a very different way so i want to get some of each but i want to really hone in
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on risk first so not just talk to accounting staff but also you know gather information to really see what schools are at higher risk um and hone in on those but in addition to that i will try to be get a geographical sampling in addition to a a grade sampling so elementary and middle and high school i'll try to get testing from each of those categories look at high schools especially be as a higher risk group you know focus more there because of the sheer transactions in the dollar thing was that volume your question scott uh yeah just roughly how many schools do you think you would in one sentence i don't know i don't i i didn't pick i would like to say um maybe ten a transactions from ten that's kind of what i think um yeah i'm not holding into that but just just to give give me an idea yeah thank you okay so um we have a consensus from the committee that will make a recommendation to the to the board to add those two items to the uh 2021 um recommended audit plan and at the next committee meeting we'll have a discussion um about the other audit topics um of those three uh probably there's uh room for one more uh to be added in so we can have a conversation about that um so thank you um janice and mary catherine for uh spending the time i know you talked to a lot of uh district staff and and parents and other people to come up with those recommendations i appreciate that um just to clarify when we bring it to the board um we could have the rec the date that you anticipate sort of like when you'd start on the two that aren't started yet and the sort of maybe the what you anticipate to be the ending dates for the two that are in flight would be helpful and then that equity um that equity lens added to the the matrix would be helpful okay we'll do and i'll get that updated draft to you guys with just the two on it with those updates on it and you'll have an opportunity to take a look at it um and i'll fix my my spelling things too great um so the next item on our agenda is the um the implementation plan for the contracts audit and i don't know roseanne or kara do you think you could pull up on the screen the the the landscape version of the document uh yeah just give me yes all right i printed it landscape so that's how i'm seeing it okay it was also posted landscape so we're good okay um well there were two different orders and this one is in the order of the actual recommendation numbers is the version um so as a refresher for everyone in the 1920 audit plan we had um and this came out of the secretary of state's audit as well a number of recommendations um to look take a deeper dive on our contracting process um the office of internal performance auditors their first audit um was the contracting process they provided a um they did a presentation on the findings and the recommendations uh and they provided that to the audit committee uh director bailey i think that that happened before you joined the committee um and same thing with parker and jackson um i think that's correct maybe i'm wrong and the at the time the decision was made that at the committee meeting in october that staff would come back with their implementation plan and so what we have is the implementation plan the proposed
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implementation plan and i'm wondering if it's possible to make that slightly larger on the screen oh there we go i've got to get things reorganized um can everybody see that or have it somewhere where you can access it um it looks pretty good on the screen okay on the screen it's small let's see i've got it on my own alternative screen so so i'm going to suggest um it's it's a 11-page document and there's a lot of information here what i'm going to suggest is we spend some time um we ask that claire or emily whoever would be on point or wants to sort of frame up um the approach the staff um came up with on the action for the implementation plan and then maybe just a brief overview we could have any questions that are asked and then i think just because of that the scope of this what i'm going to ask is that also people that we uh you can submit questions or comments about particular parts of it and that um we'll take take some of the some of it offline um but because we could probably spend a fair amount of time talking in great detail but i thought at least we'll do the overview get it set up um hear about sort of the thinking of staff on the implementation and then we can go from there but i i do again want to be respectful of face time and have a hard stop at fairly close to six um and we need five actually there's two things we need five minutes for the um community position um on the committee and then just i want to ask rosanna cara we don't have any public comment do we okay perfect um great so we'll say five minutes at the end for the when michelle gets back about the community process and then uh we'll spend the time in the between getting an overview and having like a first round of questions and discussion about this so emily or claire i wanted to just insert one thing before i leave and that's that um you said there's a place to have discussion somewhere offline just so everyone knows those will go to you questions concerns yeah that would be great and i'll put together a document that consolidates them all for anything that doesn't get discussed here i mean obviously anything discussed here we can uh drop it in or change it but then yes um because i have a fair number of things some of them that don't warrant um a discussion here today or using committee time but okay with that so i'm going to go ahead and start and i'll try to keep my part to less than five minutes and then i'll turn it over to emily to give an overview of the areas in the finance department this is a multi-um department response it's uh contracts as well we do have a department that is responsible for contracts and our director emily cortnidge does a phenomenal job in that role she does work with many department leaders so this includes work from emily as well as tracy pender our director of financial services our legal department mary kane has been involved in some of the setup that we need to have in place for training for contractors and danny ledesma has um is a contract owner of many um especially student um instructional uh contracts and community-based organizations we also have um dr cuellar's team in instruction that where there's uh three areas that also have contracts under his leadership and so the responses come from all of those areas and i would say that um there will you will find times in there where you see for instance if you look at 1 and 2 and 2a while there are three separate findings there's really one solution for those three separate findings so you will find that um the re you know right you can see number two and 2a both say c response to recommendation one above so um just be aware that they're kind of some of them are grouped together and there isn't necessarily a different solution for each individual recommendation but it is um we have
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responded to all of the recommendations and with that i would like to just kind of open it up to emily who has worked probably the most on this document and just to give some highlights of what you've already been able to implement and even the end of schedule we'd love to hear that great thank you so i will just quickly outline what we have completed so far here um in the finance department so that again that includes purchasing and contracting as well as tracy pender's work in accounting and i'm also very familiar with uh legal counsel's work um on this because uh mary kane and i have worked together on a lot of it so i can quickly outline some of those things so what we have already completed in response to this audit first we've we changed the annual mandatory contracting course deadline so that now it is required of all contract managers to take the course before they submit a contract for the fiscal year so in the past we had a grace period and because a lot of contracts were submitted during that grace period that meant that some of those con contract managers were not taking the uh course and didn't get the benefit of it um before they uh put contracts together so again we put that we put out the course this year in late june we made it immediately required as of july 1st for any contracts submitted for the 2021 fiscal year we also added to the mandatory contracting course we added additional guidance on contract review and evaluation and also of keeping a record of performance and outcomes we added guidance on how to draft an appropriately detailed scope of work we added guidance that use of the extensive specialized scope of work template for large student instructional and family engagement contracts is mandatory we another thing we've already achieved just with the last board meeting is we began publicly posting the scopes of work for large student instructional and family engagement contracts with the board materials so that those are viewable by the public on the issue of prompt payment of invoices we have started tracking receipt date and informing our contract managers in the training course and otherwise um that they need to track and and submit the invoice receipt date when they submit submit invoices to accounts payable so we can better track the flow from receipt to payment and ensure that invoices are being timely paid and uh the ap our accounts payable department is also working with our financial systems team on areas within our peoplesoft erp to streamline invoice entry and decrease accounts payable turnaround time so in process my team has been now for a year now implementing new contract management software called cobblestone which has many benefits for but for the purposes of this audit i'll just list a few it it will provide a central and accessible location for contract managers to access and save all contract related documents with the contract record and um we are we have implemented and are using cobblestone now for all of our processing and workflow within purchasing and contracting but we'll be training contract managers over the next few months and we will certainly instruct them to save any reports or other deliverables with the contract records so that they are centrally accessible which is not something we've had in the past um it cobblestone also has the ability to track invoice submissions and payment status because it will integrate with our peoplesoft financial system it has the ability for purchasing staff to trigger surveys and reminders at contract end and ability of contract managers to insert deliverable due dates and receive automatic reminders through email um i've also been working closely with general counsel's office who's convened a group of leaders working on developing specifications and mechanisms for including training requirements in applicable personal services contracts so that is contractor
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training requirement this group is also exploring how best to ensure contractor compliance which is a challenging issue and as soon as clear guidance is developed we will include the requirements in our templates and our rfps communicate the new expectations with contract managers include the expectations in the next revision of the mandatory training course so that is the brief summary of where we are great questions absolutely so before i know that between the secretary of state's audit and this audit that um there's been a lot of time spent and also an investment by the district um in tools and processes um to get our arms around i think a big complex um contracting system and there's a lot of there's a lot of money and funds going through the district and so um i think i want to thank emily you and your team and claire you and your team for the work that's been done um and some of the improvements that have been made to date um i'm gonna maybe we can go around um just each uh one of us if we and raise uh maybe a couple questions on all of them and then we if we have time we can go for another circuit so think about what your two or three most biggest issues are that you'd like to ask about and then that way everybody have a chance to ask some questions and um your lower priority items if you don't get to raise them we'll do that um outside after afterwards so i don't know scott if you want to start you're on mute i'm so much the better when i am on mute um i don't have any questions at this point um i i did a fairly detailed reading through the first half and i'm still working my work my way through catching up on things uh i mean it looked like a lot of we accept the recommendation and here's how we're implementing it there were also some pushback around we don't have the staffing to do that um you know not a bad idea but um and some other this some other pushback around this is uh this is you know this is a complex system and that's that's just not not gonna happen at least in this lifetime um you know again not i i didn't see any any this is a crazy idea it was more what's what's practical and what are we staffed to do um and then then a whole lot of yeah we'll do that um that's that's my reading my reading so far so i i really it didn't really raise any questions or red flags or anything like that with me so far kate you're on mute i think we'd all be used to this by now um i just i had one question i'm like scott i'm still working through some of the material but on the contract section if you find someone submitting a contract has not completed that training um do you then what do you do do you send the contract back or yep we notify the contract um that we haven't taken the training yet and we hold the contract and do not run it through our review and approval process and don't sign it of course until they have taken the fee okay that might be um a good point to note there but that's all thank you parker or jackson uh sure i have sort of a question concerning uh cobblestone um you mentioned that its program saves the the transactions around around a contract is that correct well it's going to um integrate with peoplesoft so whenever a payment is made on a conscious order and encumbrance occurs on a contract it'll brought in that financial information so you so we can go into cobblestone look up a
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contract have all the information worth tracking which we already track you know when does this expire is it renewable has it gone to the board hasn't been amended et cetera as well as that's where the actual contract documents and approval papers and so forth are all saved but it'll also pull in that financial information so you can see how much has been actually spent on this contract and we haven't had that integration between systems okay yeah thank you because my understanding was historically there was almost a lack of information surrounding contracts from from the past and cobblestone will help to sort of keep track of historically of contracts a while ago and then also sort of keep tabs on them is that correct we've been um trapping contracts in my department um in a different software system since 2006. and we have those all saved on a separate drive so we've got our tr we had our tracking database we had all the contracts saved and then we have peoplesoft well you could grab the financial information the problem was you had to go to three different places and those weren't all accessible to all the staff who work on contracts they were certainly accessible to my staff and other finances but now we have a system that's going to bring all that information as well as the document saving in one place um which is accessible to anybody who has a login okay streamlining the process essentially absolutely yep okay thank you jackson yeah i had a couple questions but the first one is um around number 17 or sorry 18 um and the recommendation was kind of about um prior to assigning this role of contract manager to employees who already have full-time employment in another job area making sure that they can take on that responsibility and making sure that that is um that they are able to fill both that contract manager duty and the duties that they already have and i'm wondering um for especially the instructional leadership plan what as needed specifies and why not all contracts managers would be um subjected to this review so i i don't want to speak for the instructional leadership and um what they intended there so maybe that's a question that we could follow with them and get back to you um roseanne or kara which one of you are taking notes for okay um if you just maybe keep a running tab on some of the follow-up items because there's going to be a few more anything else jackson yeah just one last thing for number 3c it says that um sorry this is another instructional leadership but i guess um it kind of is in the purchasing and contracting as well but how will what is the accountability measures in place to make sure that if contract managers don't submit um evaluations like how are we making sure that they are so that's tricky i mean that is something for each supervisor of a contract manager to track and ensure that contract managers are doing what they need to do to be in compliance um but you know we in purchasing and contracting process review approve about 1600 separate contracts a year from everything from construction uh field trips you know space rentals to these sorts of uh large instructional um kinds of contracts where a lot of this the what this audit focus really um and so having an across-the-board requirement for all those different kinds of contracts wouldn't make sense because there's not a one-size-fits-all requirement so we are and not every contract results in or requires reports for example so that's really going to apply more to your instructional contracts and um it's unfortunately not something that my team has staff uh to track contracts after they've been uh signed i mean we track the expiration certainly and we ensure that they don't go over their encumbered amount but we can't um we can't go back
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and supervise contract managers that's really in their supervisor's family great so i have a couple questions um i'm gonna just flag a couple things i guess this would be the list for the list roseanne or cara of some future things there are a number of items um that um set number seven um let's see no let's see it's items 10 11 12 13. that all reference that the general counsel office has determined that the release of information forms are not required and um i know emily you said at the very beginning you've been working with the general counsel's office um i think it would be important for us to have somewhere that memorialized we have that opinion that um the release of information form is not needed because we have these other things so if we could just formalize that and provide it to the committee so that we we we have that we can we know what we're relying on um in that case so that that would be one thing and somewhat tied to that another this is just a general comment is for those items that once they're marked as completed if there is um evidence of the completion it would be useful to um you know have document links to the evidence of you know the marking of we've completed it and here you know if there's a specific specific deliverable or something you know a tool or something else that it could be used that um that be sort of accompanies the completed um training so you all could take it pardon i said i could send you a link to the contract training so you all could take it i mean that would be an example i think um something or like again if if the general counsel's office has like issued an opinion that we don't need x and so therefore you know we're not going to do these four items or these four items is not necessary for us to address them um that we have that then um on a there's a number of these items that aren't implemented till march 31st and given that some of these are holdovers from the secretary of state's audit it seems like it would be um that the dates that's too long of a lag time um some of these things i'm surprised that we're not implementing right now can you um give me an example um okay well so for example we passed the professional conduct um this is a july one we passed the professional conduct policy a year and a half ago and there's several things that relate to that that aren't going to be implemented until july 1 of 2021 and then there is um you know developing an internal controls around say number eight number eight is one that has march 2021 and i think we already said some of these things in the secretary of state's audit that we were going to implement it earlier so i'm curious about that and then probably my my biggest substantive um set of questions revolve around 17 18 and 19 and the actual performance management so this isn't anything related to the mechanics of the of issuing the contracts um or anything like that because i do think we have um a pretty tight process and that the process was already solid and additional improvements happened um through the secretary of state's office and i think then as emily mentioned at the beginning of the meeting more addition additional improvements have been made and changes um so it's not really at the front end of when we're doing the contract but once the contract has been um let and this is the oversight and then the evaluation
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and the performance management um and those kind of go to 17 18 and 19 and again i think you know march 21st is um my expectation is that those were going to be implemented this fall when we approved a whole series of contracts versus saying it's going to be in the spring so um again i don't i don't want to speak to uh instructional leadership and what they intended there with those dates um i i do know that i did put march um for a few of mine and that had to do with the time required just to finish the cobblestone peoplesoft integration and then train up all our contract managers especially in this virtual environment and that's the whole um software implementation and customization and uh integration process is just taking a great deal of time but we're getting close so i did need those months to finalize all all of our training and instructional materials um and then i can also speak to you i'm sorry emily those can you just flag um maybe send it to roseanne or kara that which which ones that are dependent upon a cobblestone training yes i will um i don't need it right now but it would be useful to know which ones are those yup yes and then um as far as the contracting the contract of training requirements so um i've been involved with the group convened by the general counsel's office since late last spring or early this summer i believe um it's very complex figuring out how to give contractors access to the training platform right now it involves giving them pps email addresses and when we're talking about all contractors and all of their uh staff pps email addresses that's problematic um if we if we have them do training outside of the pepper uh platform um then we can't track whether they took the training or not but that is one idea is to put it on a website and they have to certify that the training there's also a lot of complexity about which contractors must take this training is it those who are going to have um direct unsupervised contact with um is it beyond that and then which trainings and then how much time does that take and are we paying for that time so um and then we have all these little contracts where somebody may have direct unsupervised contact with students but they're there for all of the you know an hour or two or maybe they have student contact because they're coming for an assembly and we can't ask all of our assembly presenters to have to take extensive trainings um so these are the kinds of issues that this whole group that includes general counsel's office purchasing and contracting several instructional departments hr and i.t are wrestling with and there aren't easy answers so maybe um because i say just the lag time because it's a student safety issue maybe um and we could get a like an interim update on sort of because it does sound complex but it also sounds like a long period of time before we're implementing something that's actually current policy um and it's around student safety so um in the offline we have a conversation emily about how we could get an update or like here here's what the timeline is for the pieces to be implemented um versus we're just looking for a for a july you know hitting a july deadline well i wanted sorry mary kane is um preparing an update to the board on this very issue um and that is in the works right now okay great um i'm glad to hear that um michelle i wanna welcome back do you um have any questions about um we while you were gone we just did a round robin of um at least your you know you know your top questions and then anything that um we could also do additional follow-up after the meeting but go ahead uh yeah sure thank you um yeah i'm looking for the number having a hard time reading it on my screen um but i think it's number four and it has to do with um developing the internal controls
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that'll ensure the contracts include appropriate and specific deliverables performance measures expected outcomes and um so i was just curious just from the staff side how we're where we are in proceeding with putting these measures in place and it looks like there's an evaluation being developed and just wanted to i'd like to be updated on that that that uh it is number four we just and i was prepared to you know um just to follow up by email but since we're gathered here we might as well i do have a question about like where we are with the evaluation developing it is that going to be um are we going to be evaluating ourselves are we getting a third party um and i've just closed out of the tab unfortunately let's see you can get it back is that do you mean your evaluation of contract um what do you want can you explain why we will be evaluation i'm talking about when we let the contracts um specifically for our res jay our our partnerships and again i'm having tech problems today i have tech problems every day but um i just closed out of the uh out of out of the lin the tab um so i was curious about where we are developing an evaluation if if that's an internal evaluation or a third party and um what types of performance measures are we talking about um or may have a better understanding um that works being led by danny ledezma and russ brown i believe so um i'm not sure but claire do you have anything to add there so i believe that danny ledesma sent out a an update to the board on the timing of the work between she and russ so i i don't have it memorized in my head but i know it's later this fall that they're planning on bringing metrics back um to the board on the um contracts for the resj work and the cbo's and um contracts that have already been approved by the board yeah so the ones we approved it said september 30th the vast majority of them than the last the last board meeting it was i think sometime before for december but we'd be halfway through the contracts frankly um by december um so we haven't had those yet but i think what michelle's getting at is so we have performance metrics the work's done who's actually doing the evaluation of whether the services that were provided were effective and accomplished their outcomes is that is that what you were asking michelle yeah thank you so yeah so the contracts you know right now don't have performance measures installed and i'm just curious with all of those different partnerships we have what the expectations are and how will we know whether we're successful and what type of reporting you know we have i know when i uh managed contracts for the city of portland that um depending on who the contractor was if it was a cbo specifically we would do an in-person evaluation um every other year um and we went down through a checklist of of um performance measures to make sure that they were hitting the targets that they'd set with us and i was just curious what pps's process was that with that and and again where we were with the developing the evaluation tool i think that danny's going to be joining us to answer some of your questions director asks i see that danny just joined so um i think we we might have a little bit of a difference of a a difference of opinion so the contracts as is they do have uh performance measures and the what's missing from the contracts is the shared report we are in the process of working with our new performance performance management staff person dr pitts along with dr brown to develop the overall sort of evaluation of these contracts and in the memo i think one of the challenges is that in order to establish an evaluation
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framework you have to set a baseline and neither last year nor this year prove um i i think would be sort of a a sort of meaningful baseline given all the disruption that's as it happened as a result of covet so um russ and i are meeting with dr pitts we've got a um we've got a sort of framework for that shared report it's uh in process now and where we should be able to deliver it in the in the memo that i sent to the board we said that we'd have that by the end of october um the delay has been that um we've been as you as you just recalled we just uh we just finalized the last contracts uh in early october so we're we wanted to give our our folks a chance to be able to um to sort of negotiate those final contracts before we sort of develop that shared report i guess i'm i'm confused then because in the in the contracts itself that we were voting on it said that the final performance measures would be set and when i look at inside and i think that the structure is very strong um and i really think that's part of the rfp process you all did this last year um but i think the final performance metrics when i'm reading through it what what i'm thinking about and as i say it says final performance mexico should be finished on something like increase the uh like uh decrease absenteeism is say for like a listed goal um but what you would have is you know the actual performance metric of like here's what it is a baseline and then here's here's what the contractor you know based on the set of strategies or tactics is saying they're going to accomplish in terms of vis-a-vis that that that overall goal um so there is there is a goal and a topic but it doesn't actually have like here's here's our expectation of what's going to be accomplished i think so that's what i when i'm yeah i'm happy to walk you through that so in the contract right now there are performance measures in two places the first place is the goals and activities as you describe as well as a set of deliverables that are the performance measures what is different than what you've seen in years past is that we asked folks to report back out on attendance we're not asking them to report out on attendance this year because that's act that that's information that we have access to in our investment strategy uh that was based on what the rfp was based on uh the relevant research pointed to three key indicators that had uh to do with success for these types of programs the first was the amount of time spent in eliciting the strategies and so that is a performance measure that's in each of the contract you'll notice that we have both a time per student and a time per family the other indicator that the res the relevant research pointed to was the demographics of the uh marine adults who's delivering the program and so that performance measure is also contained in that table where we're asking them to report on the demographic diversity of the staff who are employing the um strategy and then the third one was sort of fidelity to the strategy and so that's where we have the sort of goals and activities lined out so what will what you'll see in the shared report is a sort of template that asks them to report on those things in relationship to the logic model that they all submitted and then what we will be doing separate from the performance measures and the evaluation is looking at the overall impact of all of these on uh the sort of outcomes that you you mentioned that could look like attendance but this year would not be a good year to baseline attendance given the different the different things so i think that's where maybe we have more examples in terms of the nomenclature um so we'll be sharing that shared report out with folks by the end of the month yeah well i guess and we should take this offline but the um actually in the contract it says the goals weren't finalized on on all of them so if that was inaccurate we should probably take it out of the out of the contract but every contract we've voted on in that particular area for the last four meetings three or four meetings have all said that they weren't completed um but i think we should probably have richer conversations that we're both using the same we're all using the same um terminology and have an understanding of what those performance measures would be um i want to be respectful of everybody's time so what i'm going to ask is if anybody
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has additional questions or issues they want to raise and we certainly have some that we've already brought forward please send them to me i'll probably i'll try and compile them all share them share them out with everybody on the committee of what the sort of outstanding issues are and we can then probably set up a meeting with emily and claire to walk through um how we might address any of the questions or issues that came up does that work for people yeah yes and janice lost power so she had this oh yeah she called me okay well fortunately she got her piece done the last item that i wanted to raise um was at the last meeting we talked about the um the vacancy we have on the the committee for a community member and um we had had that the draft that we had used for the solicit community members um last time had a very heavy focus on auditing like if you have any experience like this is a committee for you um and we made a decision that we wanted to like open the aperture we wanted to actually go out and tap some people in the community to ask them to apply to be on the committee and we didn't want it just to be people who had auditing experiences so we did it we created a redraft of and i don't know um rotara if you can put it up on the on the screen but if uh if everyone's okay with what we where we've landed we can go out and i want to thank director de pass for identifying some um some individuals who might be interested and also talking to some of the municipal or the local and regional auditors and coming up with some potential names cara are you able to pull that up or roseanne just a second i'm pulling it up right now and the other thing that we should that people should know is that we took that language out because we wanted to um you know create a pathway to to make this committee more diverse so um the city of portland auditor has recently gone through a diverse um changing up their hiring process for incoming auditors and i was inspired by that work to um see if we could broaden our language around like who we're actually looking for so again auditing is not a requirement i mean we did we did try and like have a little bit of truth in advertising of what you're going to be doing here can't get away from that um but not making auditing being like a required skill listing some other places where people might bring some expertise um you know also valuing a commitment to public education um as well so i'm curious if anybody has any sort of final edits or if they want to send me final edits but we'd like to start circulating this and actually in the next three weeks solicit interest and move to fill that last seat on the audit committee any particular anybody have any suggestions or things they want to change or names that we want to um are we still recruiting through the google form i mean are we using that on our website in terms of um soliciting interest so we haven't even posted this yet because i wanted to um make sure everybody's okay with the redraft but yes um so we thought there would be two ways that we would not only post this but also circulate it to individuals that both kari guy who is the cycling off community member but also that michelle came up with um and certainly anybody um that this can be circulated to anybody and that we'd like to have a more diverse committee and also fill the slots so if if nobody has any additional changes we can go ahead and get it posted and then start circulating it and use the google form any comments no
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okay um and i guess the question for roseanne i think she's um off the screen is there's a apply here can we um do the back end work on getting that connected to the google form that michelle uh had sent over to and shared with us last committee meeting yes we can okay awesome all right um is there anything else that anybody like to raise before we adjourn


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