Nathan Straus
Jacksonville Progress
JACKSONVILLE — The Jacksonville Independent School District finance department reported the district won the gold award for the Texas Comptroller Leadership Circle.
Assistant Superintendent of Finance and Operations Lindy Finley said the award marks a high level of transparency in how the finance department operates.
“I participated in a teleconference the comptroller put out on transparency,” Finley said. “I sat through that because I think we do a good job of having our books open and responding to questions, but we can always get better.”
She said while she participated in the telephone conference in October she heard about the leadership circle program. Of the things the voluntary scoring system graded for, all of them were already out in the open, Finley said, but she rearranged them on the district’s Web site so they were centralized.
The gold award, a perfect score for the school, means the state recognizes JISD makes its financial information available to the public.
“We can say all day long we have an open-door policy,” Finley said, “but when an outside organization recognizes that, it’s excellent.”
The district heard it won the award in December 2009, when the district was recognized for “setting the bar for financial transparency and opening its books to the public,” Finley said.
She also said she has since been requested to speak at schools in the Dallas-Fort Worth area about what JISD’s finance department does.
Superintendent Dr. Joe Wardell said the results show the quality level of the business services portion of the Jacksonville schools.
“The fact that it is a voluntary program and the fact that they got a perfect score on the rating system shows we’re at the very top we can be in that particular area,” he said.
The school has a financial transparency Web site located through a link on the school’s main page at www.jisd.org.
