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EDITORIAL: Audit exposes widespread deficiencies in CCSD

Clark County School District officials offer a constant refrain lamenting the district’s funding levels. But a new audit reveals they haven’t spent the money they already have very wisely.

At the behest of new Superintendent Jesus Jara, the Council of Great City Schools conducted a review of the district’s business operations. Its findings read like a parody of the inefficiencies and ineptness of a government bureaucracy.

The district — a multibillion-dollar-a-year operation — doesn’t have an “up-to-date long-term facilities master plan.” Neither is it doing much to maintain its existing equipment.

“The team found no evidence of a formal plan for predictive, preventive or routine maintenance programs, which has caused a considerable (and growing) unfunded deferred maintenance backlog currently estimated to be in the $6 billion range,” the 11-person team found.

When air-conditioning units, roofs and plumbing “are not proactively maintained, these systems follow an accelerated deterioration curve and fail prematurely, sometimes years before their designed life expectancy,” the report said.

That’s reason No. 14,309,239 why you can’t fix a broken system by throwing more money into it. But it gets worse.

“Maintenance was not involved in the implementation of the current maintenance management software platform procured and, as a result, there is reluctance to use it,” the consultants noted.

The consultants found that failures to adequately review land surveys “resulted in structures being built over monitoring wells or gas lines that were damaged during construction.” The district has managers and supervisors who are in the same collective bargaining unit. Some supervisors oversee just a single employee. A lack of internal controls resulted in more positions created than had been budgeted for. The district has “excessive staff layers in both transportation and facilities.”

These inefficiencies are wasting limited dollars. District custodial work was 41 percent more expensive than the median of other districts examined by auditors. The district is spending an extra $24 million a year.

The most obvious solution — outsourcing — is likely to be the most controversial. A similar report in 2011, commissioned by former Superintendent Dwight Jones, also recommended outsourcing transportation services and custodial work. But many of those changes had to be negotiated with the support staff union and — unsurprisingly — went nowhere.

On Wednesday, the district announced that it was conducting a nationwide search for a new chief operating officer based on this report. Good. Bring in someone who can improve operations and ask the Legislature for the authority to make needed changes. Do that, and district officials can at least help address their funding concerns.

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