Woodland Park RE-2’s board of education was presented updates on both their annual audit and the forensic audit for its charter school during its regular meeting Wednesday night.

For the district overall, its chief financial officer, David Kuritar, told board members that the books for the current fiscal year were in worse shape than the previous year, which itself yielded 16 findings.

He explained that this was largely due to inconsistent and incomplete bookkeeping due to a lack of personnel dating back to July, which a newly formed finance team has begun addressing.

Specifically, Kuritar noted that the district has onboarded a near-entirely new finance team over the past seven months, reconciled revenue activity dating back to 2024 and returned to in-house payroll following the use of an outsourced provider last year.

He added that work remains to be done, but that the systems are being put in place to provide a clean annual audit in the years ahead.

The district has a March 1 deadline to submit their financial audit with the state or risk delayed distributions of property taxes.

Board and community members commended the work done to address the district’s bookkeeping after years of inconsistency.

Board member Carol Greenstreet noted the tall order for Kuritar, following his hiring last year, and expressed her appreciation for the transparency to date.

“And it also seems to me that he prefers to work hard rather than spend money because he would rather work hard to get it done himself than to pay someone else to do it,” she said.

During the meeting’s public comment portion, Park State Bank Trust President and CEO Tony Perry, who also spearheaded the WPSDForward Task Force to support the district, announced a $30,000 unrestricted grant to help address current financial challenges.

He admitted that the amount is “a drop in the bucket,” but added that, hopefully, other local businesses will lend a similar hand.

“To get out of this, it’s going to require a lot of creative solutions and the business community is always asked to help as much as possible,” Perry said. “I think it’s going to take the entire community stepping up.”

Other district business:

• In late January, the board chose to hire Orten Cavanagh Holmes & Hunt, LLC as its new legal counsel.
• Greenstreet announced that the district has narrowed their superintendent search down to five candidates, which will get whittled down to three during a special meeting in the coming week ahead of a public announcement.
• The board was presented with a draft of next year’s academic calendar, which included bringing back a fall break in October and a half-day for parent-teacher conferences in each semester.
• The board received an update on a forensic audit of the district charter school, Merit Academy. Brandon Waldren, senior manager with Eide Bailly Firm Leadership, reported that they met with Merit personnel to clarify $1.4 million in revenues found not to be clear or validated. Following the review, these revenues came back with explanations and Waldren offered recommendations to revise the existing agreement between the district and Merit. The board plans to discuss these recommendations publicly aat a future meeting.
• At his first meeting, recently appointed board member Robb Davidson took a moment to publicly correct a recent story by the Courier and clarify that he previously worked for Space Command rather than the U.S. Air Force Academy, which was initially reported.