Photo by Stephanie Elverd BOE President John Miller reviews the district’s audit report while listening to Schools Treasurer Nan Hartley discuss the findings during Tuesday’s meeting of the Marshall County Board of Education.

MOUNDSVILLE — With the end of the school year approaching and only a brief agenda before them Tuesday, members of the Marshall County Board of Education spent much of their meeting reviewing the district’s finances and the results of a recent routine audit.

Schools Treasurer Nan Hartley walked board members through the audit findings, emphasizing the importance of the district’s unrestricted fund balance.

“The most important one is the unrestricted fund balance,” Hartley said. “That is what the state is always looking at — they are always looking at the unrestricted because that’s the money there is no restrictions and can use for anything if it’s not already been pledged to something else.”

Hartley said the district reported nearly $161 million in revenue during the fiscal year, with expenses totaling approximately $109 million.

“The total revenue for this year was almost $161 million in revenue for this year and the expenses were $109 million,” Hartley said. “The excess revenue over expenses in 2025 was just over $51 million so that’s just over $51 million revenue over expenses that we can carry into the next year.”

She added that future budgets are expected to reflect rising construction costs as the district moves forward with several major capital projects.

“So if we have the same year this year as last year, then it’s going to be about the same, but our construction will go up,” Hartley said. “Everything else will pretty much stay consistent and our budget will reflect our construction because you have two major projects going on.”

Board President John Miller noted the district is preparing for significant future expenses tied to those projects.

“There will be some big checks in the next two years,” Miller said.

Marshall County Schools currently are moving forward with several large-scale projects funded through oil and gas revenue and local levies, including the planned $37.4 million John Marshall High School Aquatic Center and a new Center McMechen Elementary School building. Groundbreaking for the aquatic center is expected in early 2026, with the facility projected to open in 2028.

Hartley said the audit found no major issues or disagreements — no discrepancies, difficulties encountered, disagreements or issues.

She added that auditors did note several minor findings related to segregation of duties, timely collections, cash receipts and negative balances in certain accounts.

“We have a hard time segregating duties in the school with finance,” Hartley said. “We don’t have somebody collecting the money, depositing the money and counting the money. That would be three different people, but we are going to have to look into something because we really can’t have these findings for more than two years.”

Hartley explained that findings related to timely collections involved ensuring money collected by schools is deposited promptly.

“Timely collections — that just means that if they are collecting the money they have to make sure they deposit it before a weekend, deposit it if it’s $500, before a major holiday,” she said.

She added that negative balances often involve small school activity accounts temporarily falling below zero.

“The final one is negative balances which is not really that big of an issue,” Hartley said. “The schools have many different funds, some of them $20 or $50. Many go into a negative even by like $20 and if that happens we can get written up for that.”