A recently completed audit of Isle of Wight County’s 2023-24 finances shows its school system to have recovered from a prior-year deficit.

An early 2024 audit by the accounting firm Robertson Farmer Cox found Isle of Wight County Schools to have exceeded its budgeted operating expenses by more than $700,000 during the 2022-23 school year.

The firm’s audit of the division’s 2023-24 school year, which was included in the county’s Dec. 12 annual comprehensive financial report, showed the school operating fund at $74 million in revenue and $73.7 million in expenses as of June 30, leaving a $283,793 surplus.

For the county itself, the report shows general fund revenues totaling just under $98.4 million and expenses at $93.5 million, leaving a $5.8 million surplus. The county had originally budgeted $95.5 million in revenue and expenses but by June 30 was working off a $99.4 million budget.

Auditor Aaron Hawkins told county supervisors on Dec. 12 that his firm had issued an “unmodified,” or clean, opinion for 2023-24, which means the county’s figures can be relied upon for accuracy.

Hawkins had issued an unmodified opinion for 2022-23 as well, though that audit classified accounting errors related to the school system’s deficit as a “material weakness” in internal controls and found “one instance of noncompliance” with state standards related to IWCS having been late in filing the financial component of its annual school report to the Virginia Department of Education.

“We do not have any findings related to internal controls and state compliance to report this year, and that hasn’t been the case in prior years,” Hawkins told supervisors.

The School Board concurrently discussed the 2023-24 audit at its own Dec. 12 meeting.

IWCS Superintendent Theo Cramer gave credit to Chief Financial Officer Liesl DeVary, whom he’d hired in May after former CFO Larisa Harris resigned.

One repeat finding from the 2022-23 school year concerned the division’s spending of federal dollars allocated to its child nutrition program. The 2023-24 report again found applications for free and reduced-price school meals had been improperly processed.

“I am led to believe there will be improvement for FY 25,” Hawkins said.

After outsourcing cafeteria management to Charlotte, North Carolina-based Chartwells from 2019 to 2023 and to Philadelphia-based Aramark for the 2023-24 school year, the School Board voted in July to approve the hiring of positions to bring food services back in house. In August, the division announced Ellen Couch, formerly principal of Windsor Elementary, as its new director of child nutrition and Mark Ruffin, formerly child nutrition unit lead at Windsor Elementary, as its divisionwide child nutrition technician.

“Last year we had a contractor providing some of these supports. So one of the benefits of bringing child nutrition back in house with our staff, we can better monitor as opposed to having this outsourced,” Cramer said.

“Child nutrition has put an action plan in place,” DeVary said. “They have an actual written procedure to make sure that this isn’t a reoccurrence for this year’s audit.”

“We have two people as a checks-and-balances system for every application that comes,” Couch said. “It’s checked by our administrative assistant and then Mr. Ruffin goes behind that and checks that as well.”