Principal could be promoted
After failed financial audits over a 15-year period, he may be made money manager
A longtime Broward principal may soon be promoted to a job helping schools manage money and inventory, even though auditors say he failed to account for hundreds of thousands of dollars in district property over 15 years.
Scott Fiske, principal at Coconut Creek High, also lacks the minimum job requirements set by the School Board for the job of director of the district’s Business Support Center, a department that handles bookkeeping and budgeting formany schools.
The job description requires a bachelor’s degree in finance, accounting or a related business field. Fiske hasa bachelor’s in civil engineering and a master’s in educational leadership.
Superintendent Robert Runcie plans to recommend Fiske over 169 other applicants at a School Board meeting Tuesday. Fiske would be paid $138,922, which is $4,046 above his current salary.
Fiske couldn’t be reached for comment Friday, despite phone calls.
The business support center has a model similar to an outsourced provider of financial services. Dozens of schools that don’t want to manage money themselves can forgo a bookkeeper or treasurer and pay the department for those services.
Fiske would be leading a department of about 90 people, compared to about 150 at Coconut Creek High.
The district determined 30 candidates for the job to be qualified. A committee of 14 district administrators interviewed 10 candidates for the job and recommended Fiske. He would replace Nell Johnson, who retired as the department director in December.
The qualifications of other candidates were unclear Friday. The district didn’t provide resumes, despite a request. A statement from the office of Chief Communications Officer Kathy Koch said Fiske is qualified because he has a master’s degree, which is listed as a “preferred qualification” on the job description. The “preferred qualification” doesn’t say the master’s must be in any specific field.
“When there is a minimum degree qualification and a preferred degree qualification, a candidate can meet the degree qualification with either type of degree,” the statement from Koch’s office said.
But that’s the opposite of what School Board members said in December when they added the business degree requirements to the job description.
“You have to have some type of academic background in that area to be a business manager,” board member Rosalind Osgood said at a Dec. 10meeting. “If I have a bachelor’s degree in nursing, I respect nurses, but it wouldn’t give me what I need for this position.”
Osgood couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.
Fiske’s qualifications are being questioned for other reasons as well. He was harshly criticized in a January audit, which found inventory costing $109,942 went missing at Coconut Creek High. Seventeen pieces of musical equipment supplied to the school band in 2016 as part of the $800 million bond referendum were lost or stolen, including a $4,800 bass clarinet, a $5,200 bassoon, five trumpets, two saxophones, two trombones, a flute and an oboe.
School officials filed two police reports months after equipment went missing, the audit says. Fiske said in a response that the school filed police reports on other missing items, but auditors wouldn’t accept them “because the items on the reports were noted as missing and the school was unable to verify conclusively the items were stolen.”
District Auditor Joris Jabouin recommended that the principal “improve accountability andthe safeguarding of the district’s assets by strengthening the internal controls at the school,”
This audit, as well as a similar one at Northeast High in Oakland Park, prompted district administrators to put the two schools on a corrective action plan that included more training and filing inventory reports quarterly, instead of yearly.
Lisa Maxwell, executive director of the Broward Principals and Assistants Association, said Fiske has a lot of relevant experience and the audit isn’t a good measure of his abilities to do the job.
“Not to minimize the importance of having clean audits, but in business support, their main function is helping out with the school budget process, paying bills, making sure field trips are in compliance, and he’s truly an expert,” Maxwell said.
The recent Coconut Creek High audit was Fiske’s first negative audit since he arrived at the school in 2011 from Western High in Davie, where hewas also principal.
While at Western, he was hit with at least six blistering audits from 2005 to 2010, several with repeat findings. A 2005 audit found listed almost $289,000worth of laptops, projectors, golf carts and other equipment was missing. There was about $154,000 worth of missing goods identified in a 2008 audit and about $73,000 in 2010.
“Failure to properly monitor records and accurately report manufacturer serial numbers at the time of purchase were identified as systemic deficiencies,” auditors wrote in 2010.
Maxwell said Fiske has made many positive contributions, including serving on a principals’ budget committee. She said he’s been animportant resource for letting top-level administrators know what kind of an impact cuts or new rules may have on schools.
“He’s dealt with budgets and fiscal matters every single day of his career,” Maxwell said. “He’s uniquely qualified.”