BROOKSVILLE — The Hernando County School District still doesn't know how big a hit it will take for failing to properly document attendance of students at Suncoast Elementary School three years ago, but it does know it will be much smaller than the original amount — $3.6 million.
That sum was set in the state Auditor General's Office report of the 2013-14 school year, completed in 2015.
The problem, the audit found, was that a clerk at the school thought copies of school attendance reports could be shredded after they had been submitted electronically to the state Department of Education.
But the records should not have been destroyed, the auditors said, and doing so had left the district without proof that nearly 900 students had attended the school in 2013-14 and, therefore, without the means to collect the $3,752 it was to receive from the state for each student.
The good news, said Heather Martin, the district's executive director of business services, is that the DOE agreed to accept other documentation that the students had attended, including teacher grade books and lunch and busing records.
Late last year, the district was close to reaching a settlement with the state that brought the original amount down to about $300,000.
In a November conference call, however, the state informed the district that some of the records it had provided were unacceptable.
While that canceled the agreement, state officials also provided an opportunity to provide more records, which could bring the final amount down even lower.
"They have been really good about letting us go line by line through thousands of documents," Martin said. "We feel it's definitely going to be close to $200,000 or $300,000, which is certainly a lot of money, but it's not $3.6 million."
A state DOE spokeswoman, Cheryl Etters, said only that a settlement has not been reached.
Martin said that the settlement process is complex, requiring negotiations with a panel that includes funding experts who are not affiliated with the DOE and final approval by state Education Commissioner Pam Stewart.
That means a final deal may not be reached before the district sets its budget for the 2017-18 fiscal year.
Contact Dan DeWitt at ddewitt@tampabay.com; follow @ddewitttimes.