The Jacksonville School District 117 Board of Education heard a clean opinion on their annual audit last Thursday night prior to taking action on restructuring their bond payments to finance a new elementary school in the Murrayville-Woodson area.
Zumbahlen, Eyth, Surratt, Foote, and Flynn Auditor Suzanne Steckel says that cash on hand had gone up while the district had paid down its debt in the previous fiscal year ending June 30th: “The thing I like to point out here is your total cash in investment balance. You are at $46.4 million, as of June 30th a few months ago. The prior year you were at $45.6 million. So, you’re up about $900,000 in cash, which is always a good thing to see. There was really no new long-term debt. If you remember, there is now a GASB-87 in place, so there was a small bus lease that got added to debt for a whopping $60,000. The district did pay your debt down last year by $1.2 million, so your ending at $48.7 million.”
Steckel says that the district’s financial outlook could possibly tied to possible attendance growth: “One of the things that I haven’t been able to say at very many school districts is that over the last 4 years, your attendance has been increasing. You’ve gone up 120+ students. It was flat between 2023 and 2024. We basically stayed exactly the same. It’s rare. In most of the smaller districts, we’re seeing where it’s just reducing. I’m not seeing where, when I compare 4 years, that it’s going up.”
Steckel says some of last year’s audit issues had been cleared up as far small problems that didn’t raise to the level of a finding in the audit. However, Steckel says one thing that did pop up this year that was new: “The district had one employee who didn’t file their statement of economic interest. Unfortunately, like I told Rick [Cunningham], it’s an all or a none thing. There’s a statute that everybody has to file it. I mean it’s unfortunate because you all have such a long list of employees. I hate the fact that it was just one person. I had the same issue with an audit last night somewhere else. If you remember last year, our only finding was we had an inter-fund loan where expenses had been paid from a fund where it was grant money that was supposed to be used, and that grant money didn’t get deposited into the right fund. I think since then you all have approved to pay those inter-fund loans back so there are no longer inter-fund loans.”
Steckel says that all of the paperwork will be filed with the proper authorities and the Illinois State Board of Education prior to filing deadlines in December.