R-5 school board hears audit report

By Steve Moyer

Nevada Daily Mail

The Nevada R-5 school board met with B.G. Wolfe of Daniel and Associates, auditors for the school district, at their regular meeting Wednesday. Wolfe told the board the district had a clean bill of health and stated the only thing that needed to be mentioned was the lack of adequate separation of duties in handling funds.

"All governmental bodies have this reportable condition," Wolfe said. "You can't afford to hire enough people to avoid it, and if you did you would probably be voted out the next year because of the cost. This is the only reportable condition. Other than that you're in good shape."

In a reveiw of services provided, Denise Nelson, the district's health services coordinator, said that the district is not seeing outbreaks of the childhood diseases of the past, but new conditions are impacting Nevada's students.

"We're not seeing the childhood diseases like we did before but there are new challenges -- chronic allergies, teen pregnancies and others," Nelson said. "A lot of the problems can be traced to poverty and homelessness. It's amazing the number of students who live on their own and have no health care provider, so they rely on us. As the world has become more complex so have school nurses."

The school nurses see an average of 200 children per day and 90 percent of the school population over the course of a year.

"Of the visits 10,000 were for medication, 4,500 were diabetic and 1,200 for asthma," Nelson said.

In addition to caring for the students in the district the nurses also work with the staff.

"We educate the staff to reduce the number of lost days from illness," Nelson said. "We trained 175 in CPR, first aid and use of the AED (automatic external defibrillator). We've established policies and procedures to provide medications to students."

The board also heard a report relating to the No Child Left Behind Act from Christie Peterson, assistant superintendent.

The board also approved a bid from Global Technologies to install 28 Web-based cameras in the school for security purposes. Only school administrators and the police and fire departments will have access to the archived video.

"This isn't to monitor students. There will be no cameras in bathrooms and locker rooms," Noah said. "This is for security purposes. It will be password protected and only administrators and the police and fire departments will have access. If something happens, the police can log on and check to see what is happening."

The winning bid was for $34,990. A competing bid from ISG Technology was received in the amount of $55,076.58.

In other business the board:

* Approved entering into a full service agreement with the Missouri School Boards Association. The MSBA will review all of the departments policies, handbooks, regulations and procedures to make sure that everything meets legal requirements and will be available to answer questions the board has. The agreement will cost $8,379 to upgrade and review all materials and $2,788 per year thereafter.

* Approved issuing a letter of support for a group looking into the possibility of building an ethanol plant in Vernon County.