This is a developing story.
Lisa Pearce has announced her intent to resign as the Juneau School District’s chief financial officer, the second resignation of an official in charge of overseeing the district’s budget since last December, according to an announcement Friday afternoon by district Chief of Staff Kristin Bartlett.
Pearce, hired as a consultant last December to assess what turned out to be the worst financial crisis in the district’s history, helped craft a fiscal plan that included cutbacks and a consolidation of schools that took effect on July 1. That was also the date she officially became the district’s new CFO.
“Ms. Pearce has worked many late nights and many long hours for JSD,” Barlett wrote in her announcement. “However, she has a new grandbaby and has decided to spend more time with family.”
Barlett stated that Pearce “will continue to work with the District during the interview process for a new CFO. She will also assist with the transition to and onboarding of the new CFO.”
Pearce could not immediately be reached Friday evening for comment.
Juneau Board of Education President Deedie Sorensen said she isn’t surprised by the announcement since Pearce was originally hired specifically to deal with the budget crisis.
“I never believed that she was like a permanent, forever replacement,” Sorensen said. “I knew that she came in to help us and that she stayed with us probably longer than she’d planned.”
The announcement comes a week after a contentious meeting with the school board, when Pearce told board members a preliminary audit shows a $738,000 shortfall in food service and activity funds for the 2024 fiscal year that ended June 30.
She said quick action by the board using surplus funds could cover the gap before it becomes part of the final audit, but got pushback from a few board members uneasy about such action without knowing more details. The board voted 5-2 to further discuss the matter at its upcoming meeting Tuesday.
Sorensen said she doubts tensions from that meeting were a factor in Pearce’s resignation given her many years of experience in such work for school districts. Also, while a draft of the annual independent audit of the district is scheduled to be presented to school board members later this month, an administrative report prepared for Tuesday’s meeting states “at this point, we do anticipate that the audit opinion will be an Unqualified (Clean) Opinion: No significant misstatements; financials are fairly presented.”
The hiring of Pearce for a permanent CFO job marked a change from her work as a consultant for numerous school districts on a temporary basis since 2018. Prior to that she was the chief financial officer for the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District from 2014 to 2018, and has worked in school finance since 1993 and in Alaska since 2012.
She was hired by the Juneau School District following the resignation of Cassee Olin as administrative services director last Dec. 1 after an audit revealed faulty practices and a large deficit. Olin, who was subsequently hired as the finance director for the city of Wasilla, has been blamed by local school board members for providing what they said was flawed data that resulted in huge errors in both revenues and expenditures by the district.
An analysis presented by Pearce in early January stated the district was facing a $9.5 million shortfall in an operating budget of roughly $77 million for the 2024 fiscal year and similar shortfall for the following year. A series of actions including budget cuts, the city taking over millions of dollars in operating costs of “shared buildings” and less-than-projected health insurance payouts resulted in the district ending the 2024 fiscal year with a surplus.
“I think things have gone very well with her,” Sorensen said. “I think that we are in a much better place both financially and in terms of our accounting practices. So I think that her time with us has been very much to our advantage.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
