The North Little Rock School District was cited in its 2017-18 annual audit for shredding records needed to verify that children in its grant-funded pre-kindergarten program met family income and/or other program eligibility requirements.
Mark Glover of the Hudson & Cisne & Co., certified public accountants, of Little Rock, said the issue was the only material weakness found in the audit. But, as a result, the district is now considered "a high risk auditee" and the district's next audit -- for the current 2018-19 school year -- will have to examine a higher percentage of the district's federally funded programs.
The North Little Rock School Board voted to accept the audit at its regular monthly meeting Thursday.
Glover told the School Board that auditors attempted to examine the enrollment eligibility of 60 children for the district's early childhood education program that is a recipient of a three-year federal Preschool Development Grant.
The grant helps to provide a program for children from low-income families or who have other qualifying characteristics such as low-birth weight, a parent under 18 at the time of the child's birth or a parent who is without a high school diploma or high school equivalency certificate. The records of 60 children were intended to be a representative sample of the total 358 children, ages 3 and 4, who were in the grant-supported program last year.
"For 42 of those 60, the district's program director could not provide us the documentation when it came to eligibility requirements," Glover said.
"Upon further digging and talking to the program director, what she was doing was whenever a student graduated from the pre-k program, she discharged all documentation ... and basically that kid's file was discharged and shredded," he said. "Forty-two of our 60 had graduated so therefore we couldn't test and satisfy our requirements from an eligibility standpoint."
Jodi Veit Edrington is the district's long-time director of early childhood education program.
The audit was not the first review of the 2017-18 prekindergarten program.
The district last year paid $22,626 for a six-month investigation into the pre-kindergarten program, but never released the law firm's resulting report, calling it a personnel record that is legally protected from public disclosure.
The investigation centered at least in part on whether high-level district staff members were appropriately allowed to enroll their children at no cost in the pre-kindergarten program.
Glover said Thursday night that the destruction of eligibility records has been stopped and that appropriate records for the children are now being kept by the district.
Glover called the issue an isolated one as auditors have examined several of the district's federally funded programs over time and did not find problems.
Brian Brown, the district's chief financial officer, in an interview during a break, said that the district will not be required to repay the grant or face any other financial penalty.
He said the records from 2017-18 were destroyed when children moved into kindergarten to protect what was considered confidential family income and other information about a child and the child's family.
Brown said that the records for this current school year will not travel with the child to the child's kindergarten program but will be stored for auditing purposes.
This is the last year of what has been a three-year federal grant of more than $700,000, Brown said.
Metro on 02/22/2019