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Boscobel board recieves news on audit report
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By Tricia Hill

The Boscobel School District opened up their annual meeting on Tuesday night with a presentation by Debra Welch, the schools auditor from Clifton Larson Allen. Welch was excited to inform the board that their audit went really well. When doing the single audit, there were a couple findings, which will need to be worked on.

“It is pretty normal when working on the procedure to find things that need worked on,” Cherryl Knowles said. “We are currently working on procedures to fix these items.”

The board was made aware that they are sitting good on money and only have three months of expenses, that will help keep them from borrowing.

“This can get expensive, so it is a good thing that we have that extra money to fall back on,” Knowles said. “Our school is sitting in good financial standing.”

Audio recording bids

At the annual meeting in November, the board agreed to have Technology Director, Allen Hines come back in December with more bids for the purchasing of audio recording equipment for the recording of all board meetings. Hines brought back two bidsto the board  from Lifeline, out of Platteville and My PC out of Boscobel.

Lifeline’s bid was for $14,995, included new system equipment, engineering and design, factory operational manual, new audio wiring, labeling of audio system controls, manufacturer’s warranty as specified and on site training. Excluded from this bid is the AC electrical. The reasoning of the AC eletrical being excluded is because Lifeline Audio Video does not perform any AC electrical work that supports the sound system. They feel the customer is responsible for hiring an electrician for AC circuits to terminate at the sound system rack.

My PC gave Hines two bids, one for a four-channel conference room at $14,506.55 and a eight-channel conference room at $21,270. This includes the equipment it would take to run the system such as a automatic mixer. The training of the product is also included in the set up.

“If we go with My PC, they would be able to be here in matter of seconds probably to help us if we were having issues during a meeting,” Hines said.

When the board asked for Hines to bring back bids for just audio only, their hope was that it would be cheaper than the audio and video package. However, after hearing the bids they were surprised that it was actually going to cost more money then to do audio and video.

While four of the board members were all for dropping the idea of recording, due to the price, board member Ron Johnsrud was all for it along with board members Roger Knoble and Chuck Owens.

“By the time we spend $20,000 on recording equipment, we could have purchased 80 ChromeBooks,” board member Barb Puckett.

Johnsrud stuck to his guns and made a motion to have Hines seek less expensive options for audio. Hines agreed to look, but assured that it would probably be more expensive to go farther out looking for bids, due to the travel time the school would have to pay.

LaCrosse Equipment

Phy Ed instructor Kathy Larsen at Boscobel’s Middle/High School brought the idea of selling the LaCrosse equipment, which has been sitting around for eight years and barely being used since it was purchased. Larsen wrote in her action request to the board that they have tried many times to offer LaCrosse as a fall activity, but not many students were interested in participating.

Larsen sent out e-mails asking if anyone was interested in buying the equipment from the school and she received an offer from Jeff Urban at Union Grove High School for $500.00. Plus Urban would be required to pick up the equipment or make arrangements and pay for the delivery of the equipment.

After discussing it, all seven members of the board agreed to sell the LaCrosse equipment to Urban.

Skyward

Boscobel was due to sign a new contract with Skyward, the company that the school has been working with for around 30 years. Currently the school is paying $16,122 for their annual license fee, however with signing the new license fee for three years they will be paying $11,886. The total project savings from the previous year will be $6,145.

The full board agreed to continue on with Skyward and possibly thinking about looking for another company down the road if it were to become a necessity.

“If you guys decide to go with a new company, start looking now so we have three years to learn about the new system,” Shayla Pickett.