The last few days have been pretty crazy for those following the Woodland Park School District. I was going to write up a summary, but Colorado Times Recorder reporter Logan Davis just published a piece that is much better written than anything I could write!
The only thing I want to add to Logan’s piece though is that yesterday (March 11), the district announced that Ken Witt’s departure would be accelerated. Instead of his last day being April 15, it would be March 11, with Aaron Salt becoming interim superintendent for now. They’ve removed all discussion of the Merit Facility issue from the agenda for their March 12 board meeting and will tackle it in their April meeting instead.
Woodland Park needed extra time to compete its FY24 audit (school year 2023-2024), and shortly after the allowed 60 day extension was up, filed it with the state on March 3rd. They posted it to their website Friday, hours after Ken Witt submitted his resignation. When you read through the auditor’s findings, one wonders if there was a connection between those two events?
WPSD received a Qualified Opinion on their Audit. What is that? According to the Motley Fool, “A qualified opinion is an auditor’s declaration that there is an area of uncertainty in an [organization’s] financial statements.”
There are many uncertainties cited by the District’s auditor Hoelting & Company. These uncertainties vary in their severity. Per the Internal CPA Review, they are classified as:
Material Weaknesses–A deficiency, or combination of deficiencies, in internal control, such that there is a reasonable possibility that a material misstatement of the entity’s financial statements will not be prevented or detected and corrected on a timely basis.
Significant Deficiencies–A deficiency, or a combination of deficiencies, in internal control that is less severe than a material weakness, yet important enough to merit attention by those charged with governance.
In summary, the District administration has committed dozens of egregious errors and/or failed to control financial reporting processes to the extent that fraud is quite possible and the district’s financial stability is facing a significant risk.
What does this mean?
An audit that uncovers this many errors and lack of controls usually receives a less favorable opinion.
The auditor Hoelting & Co. states on pg. 58 of the audit, “Management is responsible for compliance with the requirements referred to above and for the design, implementation, and maintenance of effective internal control over compliance with the requirements of laws, status, regulations, rules, and provisions of contracts or grant agreements applicable to WPSD…”
So what happened?
In that design, management, and specifically Ken Witt, Aaron Salt, and their oversight of the financial and administrative processes has failed to the extent that district finances are at risk.
Below is a list of “conditions” which led to this Qualified Opinion, as listed in Section II, pg. 61, titled “Financial Statement Findings”:
The District was unable to reconcile and close its books in a timely manner.
Assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, and expenditures all contained material errors that were not detected by management.
Lack of supervision, training and resources within the business services department.
The District does not have the proper controls, processes, or personnel in place to analyze, adjust, or independently review account balances prior to audit field work.
The District did not require all “P-Card” (Purchase Card) holders to turn in support other than a receipt, such as expenditure form indicates what line item is effected.
The business services department was not able to provide adequate support for credit card purchases.
Lack of controls over P-Card usage, increasing the risk of error or fraud.
The District could not provide detailed documentation to show who attended trainings and how it complied with District policies.
Lack of control over district travel, increasing the risk of fraud or abuse.
The District was unable to reconcile grants that flowed from CDE to the FDW.
The District was unable to balance grant revenues and expenditures.
12 grants that did not reconcile the CDE FDW, Twenty-seven state and federal rewards that did not balance, over ten grants were not properly reviewed for deferred revenue, and nine grants that showed collective receivables exceeding one million six hundred thousand dollars that could not be substantiated.
Grant revenues, expenditures, and receivables were materially misstated.
The District did not timely complete bank reconciliations. In some cases, for over 6 months.
There is lack of controls over cash, increasing the error of risk and fraud.
The District did not record pupil activities within its general ledger software.
The Pupil Activity Fund was materially misstated.
The District has not correctly recorded BOCES flow through revenue.
The District did not account for a material amount of revenue that was received from BOCES.
The District general ledger did not agree to the final reconciliations with its component unit, nor did it reflect the proper accruals which led to significant audit adjustments due to a lack of controls over component unit accounting.
The District made multiple material journal entries that were erroneous and required substantial work from the audit team to trace and reverse.
There is a lack of controls over review for journal entries, increasing the risk of error or fraud.
The District was not in compliance with CDE reporting requirements.
A lack of controls exists over grant reporting to CDE constituting both a material weakness and material non-compliance over the financial statements.
The district did not accurately account for salaries that should have been accrued.
The District does not have an effective process in place to ensure salary accruals are recorded or reconciled in a timely manner.
The District did not accurately reverse sales tax accruals or record the year-end sales tax accruals.
There is not a system of controls in place related to sales tax revenue and receivables.
The amounts recorded as debt services payments for interest and principal were not correct at year end.
Insufficient controls over posting debt services activity.
Controls over recording investment revenue were not followed. The District did not accurately record interest revenue that was received throughout the year.
Fixed asset additions were materially overstated.
The District did not timely file the annual financial report and the field report did not agree to the general ledger. There is a material weakness in internal controls over grant reporting to the CDE.
The District was unable to reconcile and close its books in a timely manner.
It is the District administration’s job to oversee hiring qualified financial staff and to exert sufficient controls and redundancies so as to avoid catastrophic errors like those listed above. When the majority of the Board of Education voted to extend the remarkably unqualified Superintendent Ken Witt’s contract in 2024 without a performance review, President Mick Bates stated that Witt’s “values” aligned with the Board’s. The BOE shares Witt’s values of negligence, inability to lead, ideological indoctrination instead of education, and sheer inability to lead. The current BOE and administration continues to masquerade as a group of classic conservatives who actually proffer a radical progressive agenda that sacrifices ethical and professional standards for ideological and religious ends.
Ken Witt, who is perhaps the least qualified and most disliked superintendent in the state of Colorado, has resigned from his superintendent role in Woodland Park effective 4/15! Here’s the email from the district about this:
Woodland Park, CO – 03/07/2025 — Woodland Park School District (WPSD) announced today the resignation of Ken Witt as superintendent, effective April 15, 2025, to pursue other opportunities. Aaron Salt, Chief Operating Officer of WPSD, will serve as Interim Superintendent after that date.
“Over the past two and a half years, I have been honored to lead an administrative team that has achieved remarkable milestones in advancing education for our students,” Witt stated. “I hold the board in the highest regard for your steadfast dedication and resolve to better education for all students. Your leadership and passion for creating opportunities have been a constant source of inspiration, and I am deeply grateful for the support and trust you have extended to me during my tenure.”
In recounting the achievements of WPSD in the past two and a half years, Witt added that he takes “great pride in what we have accomplished together, including lifting this district to the top 10% district performance in the state, implementing a laser-focus on academic achievement, instilling a tone of respect for our great nation, and purging DEI and gender ideology. Equally important are achievements including prioritizing the safety of our students by securing our schools with armed security personnel, improving utilization of our facilities while reducing their operating costs, and expanding CTE offerings, growing culinary arts and adding construction trades. Each step forward has been a testament to the power of this board’s vision and this administration’s hard work.”
Witt also stated, “I remain a steadfast advocate for the mission and values of the Woodland Park School District, and an unwavering supporter of this board of education. I am confident that the district will continue to thrive under your guidance, and I look forward to witnessing its continued growth and success.”
This is on the heels of some seriously sloppy financial leadership, leading to a late audit filing and lots of controversy with the local city council which was seeking greater transparency into how supplemental sales tax money was being spent.
Some months after Ken Witt took a ‘full time’ job here in WPSD, his other employer, ERBOCES, cut his salary to reflect the part-time effort he was going to be putting into that. Well, they reversed that in their May 2024 board meeting. Ken Witt’s ERBOCES salary is back to the full base amount, PLUS he gets a 5% cost of living increase, PLUS he gets a 10% bonus. Scroll to the end of the meeting minutes here to read the details for yourself. So now Ken Witt is back to milking the taxpayers for two full-time salaries (ERBOCES executive director, and WPSD superintendent), plus generous benefits and bonuses.
If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I’ve been hounding the board and Witt about transportation cost sharing for over a year now (read part 1, part 2, and part 3 if you need to get up to speed on this). I believe it’s unfair to not ask Merit Academy to pay a proportionate share of this cost, and when I’ve confronted the board, I’m met with either silence or denial and spin.
I first pointed this out to Witt and the board in May of 2023 both in public comment at a board meeting and via email, but did not receive any constructive feedback. In my email, I said,
“parent fees, mentioned to be $50 per child, only cover approximately 1.3% of the total cost, and this is expected to rise slightly next year. The state contributes around 15% towards the total cost, leaving the remaining burden to be shouldered by the General Fund of the five traditional public schools. Astonishingly, Merit Academy has not been asked to share this cost, which is undeniably unfair.”
In the May 10 board meeting where I talked about this in public comment, the board broke with their own rules and replied to the concerns I had raised, and Witt said,
“…every student and every family in Woodland Park pays the same amount to ride those busses…”…which totally ignored my point about where the bulk of the money for this service was coming from.
We saw this topic come up again in the 6/12/2024 board meeting, when Witt gave the budget presentation to the board (our CFO’s last day was in the weeks prior to this). When talking about transportation, Witt said, “…our transportation costs are fully covered by state reimbursement”, and went on to explain that the transportation fund was for transportation to and from the school, and all activity, extracurricular, and sports transportation costs were covered by fees and the general fund.
The thing is, he’s wrong. As I had pointed out to him back in 2023, the state only provides a small portion of the actual cost of transporting students to and from the school. He’s stuck to his story this whole time, but in the past year, I’d learned much more about school finance and was able to challenge him after the meeting, via email. I was able to point to actual expenses recorded in our General Ledger which showed how some of the monthly charges for transportation were charged to the transportation fund, but the majority was being charged to the General Fund. Further, I was able to show the worksheet used for calculation of the state reimbursement the previous year, which further shows how the state reimburses only a small amount of the actual cost. Faced with these facts, he finally admitted he was wrong, saying “So, simply stated, approximately one third of the to and from school transportation was covered by the state-provided funds (accounted in Fund 25), and two-thirds were not covered by the state-provided funds (accounted in Fund 10). I apologize for the error.” (I think the one-third is high but it’s in the ballpark so no need to dwell on that).
Why does this matter? As enrollment in Merit Academy grows and enrollment in the public schools declines, the per-pupil cost of daily transportation services is increasing, while total revenue into that General Fund decreases (due to declining enrollment). This reduces the money available for teacher salaries, by hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s just another way that Witt and this board are providing preferential treatment to Merit Academy, and sabotaging the other public schools.
UPDATE 5/30 – I’ve received updated general ledger information which shows three additional charges in this current fiscal year FY’24, bringing the total to $53,700 paid out of ESSER grant money, and $97,050 paid out of general fund 10 reserves (carryover from last year as per the specific budget resolution). No change to the conclusions in what I wrote below – Ken Witt lied to council about sales tax money being used for this.
For the current school year, the district implemented the Capturing Kids Hearts program, a social-emotional learning tool. People following this matter closely might be curious where the money is coming from, as in Ken Witt’s presentation to City Council on 5/16, he highlighted this as how sales tax money is spent on ‘innovation’ in the current fiscal year (’23-24 school year):
Another slide from his presentation showed the district was spending $80,000 on this innovation aspect in FY24 (when asked about the ‘other’, he said there currently are no examples of that nor have there ever been):
Just to be perfectly clear, his presentation to council was solely on how sales tax money is being spent by the district. So $80k on this Capturing Kids Hearts program could probably be considered an OK expense for that ‘innovative programing’ category of sales tax money expenses.
Except it wasn’t.
Sales tax money goes directly into the General Fund, which is fund 10. So when reviewing expenses, based on Ken Witt’s statement one would expect all Capturing Kids Hearts expenses to be charged to that fund. When reviewing the general ledger though (my data is only current as of 4/11, it’s possible new charges have been added), we see that $5,610 was spent on food service (for training events, presumably):
Then, $8,000 was spent from the general fund on software. That’s it for charges which could be tied to sales tax money. But that’s not the extent of charges related to this program. The bulk of the cost of Capturing Kids Hearts this year, $53,700 was paid for with ESSER grant money (aka, Federal Covid Relief funds). NOT sales tax money. Note fund ’22’ below (designated purpose grants), and grant number 4414 (the specific grant):
In other words, Ken Witt was not being truthful when he told City Council the district was spending $80k of sales tax money this year on innovation programs, of which only Captured Kids Hearts was named.
So for the current FY’24, where Witt says we’re spending $80,000 in sales tax money on Capturing Kids Hearts, at most we’ve only spent $13,610 – the rest came from a federal grant. But even that $13,610 is called into question when you look at the specific budget resolution passed for FY’24. This resolution authorizes expenditure of fund balances for specific purposes – or to word it differently, spending our reserve fund. The specific budget resolution for the current fiscal year, FY’24, authorizes spending $100,000 from our reserve fund – NOT sales tax – on Capturing Kids Hearts:
I mentioned my general ledger data is only current as of 4/11/2024 – new charges may have been added since. If that’s the case, and more than $13,610 has been spent, just keep in mind that the board authorized $100,000 of reserve funds to be spent on this program, so the district would have to exceed $100,000 in charges, to fund 10, in the current fiscal year for Ken Witt to be make the argument that the district is using any sales tax money on that program for this year.
If you’d like to view the invoices for details on the money paid to Capturing Kids Hearts, you can view them here (provided via CORA).
Looking at the previous fiscal year, FY’23 (school year ’22-23), we see when the district first paid Capturing Kids Hearts for the program, a $108,500 charge in June. This was charged to fund 10, the general fund, so it could be argued that the district used sales tax money in the previous fiscal year to pay for Capturing Kids Hearts.
So, the facts do not support Ken Witt’s claim that the district is spending sales tax money on Capturing Kids Hearts in the current fiscal year.
HB24-1039, recently signed into law by Governor Polis, requires schools to abide by a student’s wish to be called a name which may be different from their legal name but reflects their gender identity. Or to look at it another way, it advances LGBTQ+ rights for students.
Not surprisingly, Ken Witt, Brad Miller, and their allies in the Woodland Park school board freaked out and at the 5/8 board meeting, issued a resolution which, well, doesn’t do much more than state the obvious, that they are required to draft a policy that complies with the law. Their resolution can be read below (I cut out the signature section just to save space here):
Note point 2 in the resolution though, notification of parents. This is similar to the unwritten currently policy, explained to staff last August by board attorney and conservative education reform activist Brad Miller. Board director Barkley asked some excellent questions in the board meeting about this point, expressing concern about how that information would be communicated and that it would be best done in person with a counselor present. It remains to be seen whether the policy ultimately includes this.
As the board discussed this resolution, director David Rusterholtz, not present but calling in remotely, launched into a pretty offensive tirade about parent and even teacher rights in these cases, totally dismissing the rights of the young adults facing these decisions (you can listen to that here).
Following the meeting, Superintendent Ken Witt sent an email to districts across the state, seeking to rally support for his bigoted anti-LGBTQ+ position:
Kudos to Summit School District superintendent Tony Byrd for this well written response:
