When the school board meets on Monday, January 24th – they will have a lot of ground to cover, including the results of their annual audit. Here’s what we know about the audit before the meeting takes place.

General Results of the Audit

Carr Riggs and Ingram, the accountants tasked with ensuring that no one steals money or uses public funds improperly at the school district, has filed its report for Okaloosa County’s School District Fiscal Year (FY) that ended June 30, 2021. You can see that report here.

The good news: everything looks to be on the up and up. The school district’s net position is up about $400,000 from last year.

11 schools were found to be in the “gray area” of the report – which basically means that there were some minor issues with the method used for accounting. No schools in Niceville, Bluewater Bay or Valparaiso were on that list this year.

[RELATED: Niceville High Alum, Current NHS Administrator, Wins Assistant Principal of the Year]

Extracurriculars like Sports, Band and Chorus Have Had a Rough Couple of Years.

According to the financial audit – the COVID-19 Pandemic has been rough on the extracurricular activities budgets of the various schools programs.

To give you an idea:

• Ticket sales for all high school football games in the district went from about $850,000 in FY 2018-2019 down to about $700,000 in FY 2020-2021.
• High School band receipts are down almost ⅔, from near $1.1M in FY 2018-2019 to around $400,000 in FY 2020-2021.
• Middle school band receipts are down as well going from give-or-take $400,000 in FY 2018-2019 to $100,000-ish in FY 2020-2021.
• Similarly, middle school chorus reported receipts of about $175,000 in FY 2018-2019 and only about $25,000 in FY 2020-2021.

Stick with Midbaynews.com. We will let you know about any additional information that comes out about this audit at the school board meeting on Monday night.