Superintendent Kevin Smith sought to soften any concerns about the re-designation of the chief financial officer role for the Wilton Public Schools, joined in support by the district’s new financial leader at Thursday night’s (Aug. 21) Board of Education meeting.
On Friday, Aug. 15, Smith announced that Laila Rudinas, who has served as WPS’s assistant director of financial planning and operations since January 2024, would become the new CFO. The decision shortly followed the sudden departure of Dawn Norton, who had previously been tasked with being CFO for both the Town of Wilton and the school district, at least in name, but had not handled any of the school-related duties for over a year, according to Smith.
“As you know, Dawn Norton resigned suddenly and rather dramatically about a week ago,” Smith told the BOE, referencing the bombshell disclosure that the former CFO had for several months also been serving as town administrator-CFO for a municipality in Wyoming, living there full time, but supposedly without anyone’s knowledge.
“We had set up a plan back in late ’23, early ’24, when we hired Laila, to re-segregate our respective business offices,” Smith said. “We weren’t anticipating having to do that until later this year, but because of the change at Town Hall and because of just the current operations, it made a lot of sense for us to just kind of bring our people (and) just have a clean operation here.”
Continuing to Collaborate
“That’s not to say that we won’t continue to collaborate deeply and partner with the Town,” Smith said, noting areas of overlap between their financial operations, including some software systems.
Smith noted that an unnamed member of the Board of Finance had expressed some trepidation to him relating to the history between the two boards harkening back to 2017. At the time the BOF, owing to concerns about the escalating BOE budgets, had helped motivate the change to a single CFO for the town and schools in order to foster efficiency and save money, with then-First Selectwoman Lynne Vanderslice a strong advocate of making the move.
“I think things are night-and-day different,” Smith said. “It’s relationships. It’s personalities. It’s kind of shared systems, so I am not anticipating that we are going to wind back that clock and be in a place that people might have remembered … where there was animosity, hard feelings or difficult working relationships.”
BOE Chair Ruth DeLuca said the cooperative relationship between boards enjoyed more recently is something she sees continuing.
“I do think that our working relationship with Town and the Board of Finance is something that we’ve worked hard at and built over time, and is a priority for us,” DeLuca said. “I appreciate a concern of looking back at how things were in the past, but I too think there’s a shared commitment between all the boards to continue with how well we’ve been working and moving forward.”
She said that Rudinas, along with Maryann Salvato, assistant director of finance for the WPS, has been of “tremendous support and advantage” to the BOE in budget planning in particular.
Protecting the BOE
In bidding welcome to her new role, Rudinas shared a message that both emphasized working in tandem with the Town and simultaneously making the BOE’s needs her priority.
“My job is to protect the Board and to make sure that all of the money we’ve been entrusted with is used properly and efficiently and effectively,” Rudinas said, “and in order to do that, we have to be able to work with the Town.”
“Even if they’re separating the position out, there’s still not a huge separation,” she said. “We’re still working together.”
‘We are the largest tax consumers in the town,” she said. “We have to make sure that our systems have a lot of integrity and that people are focused on our systems and insuring dollars well spent.”
“No matter who works in the finance office on the Town side, our two departments have to work together in order for things to be run efficiently, and that would always be my goal,” Rudinas said.
Smith echoed the idea of the Town and WPS working together.
“There will be plenty of opportunities to partner well and communicate well,” Smith said.
Software Strains
Schools officials mulled over some of the issues relating to finance software, with both the Town and the school still trying to land on a standard.
Smith said that two years ago, Town Administrator Matt Knickerbocker had suggested the town and WPS switch over to a government budget software program called ClearGov.
“Because of everything you’ve been reading about and all kinds of other things, it just hasn’t gotten off the ground yet,” Smith said.
The district and Town alike have been using New World Systems software, but have wanted to phase it out. Smith described what has been a “protracted changeover to Munis,” but there is still an interest in settling into ClearGov if and when that can ever happen.
“We’ve done all the backend work to get the systems set up, so we can start running some reports to see what ClearGov can do,” Rudinas said. “With everything that has happened, it’s kind of slowed us down a little bit.”
She said that, as of this time, only the accounting area has been moved over to Munis within the WPS.
“We’re not 100 percent yet,” Rudinas said. “We can always fall back on using New World again, but we would like to use either Munis or ClearGov. My gut feeling right now is leaning more toward ClearGov and then uploading the information in Munis because I think there’s more opportunity to present things in different ways in ClearGov, but we have to test it a little bit more.”
“It’s been a lot implementing Munis this year and also setting up ClearGov at the same time, so it’s just a matter of having enough hours in the day, but we want to give it a fair shot,” she said, describing ClearGov as “very robust, with a lot of things it can do.”
Smith also spoke in favor of the program, which the town had licensed for the school last year, but now will have to be paid for within the BOE budget.
“There are some really attractive features from an end-user perspective that might make the budget interpretation more user-friendly than what you’re seeing (but) we’re not there yet for the decision,” Smith said.
BOS To Revisit CFO Question
At the Board of Selectmen meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 19, in which the BOS discussed hiring an interim town-side CFO, Selectwoman Kim Healy noted that members of the public have expressed concerns that the decision to again split the CFO positions back into two separate ones was made without discussion.
“The public outcry is that they wanted us to discuss it and I think we should have and we need to,” Healy said.