The Schenectady City School District ordered $143,036 worth of excessive math workbooks between 2021 and 2023, according to a new audit report from the office of New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
The report, which was released on Friday, says that the district failed to maintain adequate inventory records for the workbooks and that district officials did not determine the district’s actual book needs before placing orders for the workbooks.
The report determined that the district ordered 4,126 more sets of work books than were needed between 2021 and 2023, with state auditors finding 29,169 unused individual workbooks during a physical search of the district’s book storage room and in storage at 11 district elementary schools.
The report states that school officials were not aware of the large volume of workbooks stored at the district’s elementary schools, with 22,592 workbooks stored at district schools.
In a letter to the state dated Oct. 23, Schenectady Superintendent Anibal Soler, Jr. acknowledged that the district has ordered an excessive amount of math workbooks, but noted that the orders were made while district schools were closed due to COVID-19 and that the district ordered a large quantity of workbooks to ensure all students had them for at-home learning.
Soler said on Friday that the workbooks did not go to waste, with the district using them in the 2022-2023 school year and the remainder during the current school year. The superintendent said the district adjusted its book orders for the last two school years to acquire less workbooks considering the school already had a leftover supply.
“We bought too many, but it doesn’t mean we didn’t use them the following year,” he said.
The district will not face penalties from the state as a result of the audit findings.
The district will provide the state with a corrective action plan within 90 days.
“We’re going to have a corrective action plan in place, but those books weren’t discarded,” Soler said on Friday. “We were aware of the number of workbooks that were in the storage room and then we reduced the number the subsequent year. It may appear that district taxpayer money was not spent in a prudent manner, but we don’t believe that to be true because we adjusted the order for the upcoming year. If we weren’t prudent with taxpayer money then we would have ordered the high number again the following year.”
According to the report, the district paid $254,281 for math workbooks in the 2021-22 school year and $215,702 the following school year.
Soler began his stint with the district on July 19, 2021, with the audit beginning on July 1, 2021 and lasting until March 24, 2023. Soler noted that the book orders were in place before he took office as the Schenectady superintendent, with Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning Lorenda Chisolm hired in October 2021.
The audit report notes that the Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning is responsible for “overseeing instructional practices and curricula materials, including maintaining inventories and ordering consumable workbooks.”
The excess books are single-use math workbooks.
The state report notes that the district lacked an adequate inventory policy or written procedures on how workbooks should be accounted for and how the inventory should be monitored.
Soler said that since district schools reopened in September 2021 that the district has improved its efforts at keeping inventory for its book supply.
“At the time we didn’t have a method to keep track of things,” he said. “We were in the pandemic and buildings were limited in access and staff was not really in person. Now that we’re all back, we have a central storage textbook room and we have a person assigned to that room that goes in and does inventory. We have full access to all of our schools, so we can track the inventory that’s at our buildings and those are things we definitely were not able to do at that time.”