hard deadlines

L-R School Finance dept. members Sharon Allan, Georgianna Murphy, Christine Tague.

In a 3-hour meeting, the Portsmouth School Committee last night approved "in concept" the plan for homeschooling Prudence Island students, received the final recommendations of the Facilities Subcommittee recommending a new elementary and the closure of Elmhurst, celebrated the work of departing Finance Director Chris Tague (and peppered her with questions about the chart of accounts and year-end financials) and took substantial citizen input on questions around teacher tenure.

Normally folks don't get emotional over the consent agenda, but one of the separations was School Finance Director Chris Tague, who got a round of applause and thank-yous from Supt. Lusi and Chair Dick Carpender.

Said Lusi, "I will miss Chris very much. Many on the committe and in the community know that during her time here, she substantially upgraded our financial systems, set up the ability for all administrators to have online access [to track budgets], and realigned the chart of accounts."

Carpender seconded Lusi's praise. "Two years ago, when Chris came in, we had been running budgets with structural deficits and there were a number of issues within the Finanance deptartment," said Carpender. "Her expertise and her commitment and hard work — it was not unusual for Chris to put in 55-60 hours a week and those kind of commitments hard to come by — because of that, the finance area is in a lot better shape. Hers will be very difficult shoes to fill."

I want to add that personally, as a reporter, I could always go to Chris and ask her to explain things, and she was unfailingly approachable and helpful. She could make finance stuff comprehensible, and I really appreciated that.

In the first item of the business agenda, the committee took up the "Memorandum of Understanding" which had been worked out with the School Department, RIDE, and the Prudence Island Foundation. Lusi recommended to the committee that they approve "in concept" since the document had yet to come before the Town Council. The the vote was unanimous to approve pending Council review, and included in the motion was changing the already-voted closure of the one-room schoolhouse to a "suspension of operations." Interviewed after the meeting, Allan Bearse said that the memo is currently with the Town Solicitor, and will hopefully move forward at the next Council meeting.

Then there was a double-helping of finance on the agenda, first a review of the new state-mandated uniform chart of accounts. Payroll Administrator Sharon Allan and Accounts Payable Administrator Georgianne Murphy joined Tague in explaining, in grisly detail, how the department had to migrate all their accounts from 16-digit codes for each expense item to a new schema of 35 digits, all sufficiently different that even the existing 1,500 line items had to be completely recoded and another 500 new lines added, work that had taken from last November to the required go-live date of July 1.

But even all that necessary work of replacing the more vauge In$ite data with more discrete apples-to-apples categores, Tague pointed out is only the beginning. "There is no history at this level of breakdown," said Tague. "It's going to need to be built, even by the state. It will probably 2-3 years before there is a consistent history."

MORE UPDATES TO COME. Sorry, this has just been an awful week.

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Corrections: fixed name of Prudence Island Foundation