Newport - The school district in the Newport, Corinna and St. Albans area is in trouble. Just weeks before the school year begins, RSU 19 is facing a major budget shortfall.

Only one month ago, Gregory Potter took over the reins as Superintendent of RSU 19, and it was around that same time school district officials became aware of a serious cashflow issue, totaling $1.2 million dollars.

Potter said, "As I began to dig a little more to find out why, it became evident fairly quickly that the district had been overly optimistic about having fund balances to bring forward, unexpended balances to help meet expenses in last fiscal year, 2012."

Those anticipated balances never materialized, causing a major budget gap.

School board chair Dan Costain said an auditing company had made the former superintendent and the board's finance director aware of the problem back in January, but the rest of the board didn't find out until this summer.

The new superintendent isn't interested in placing the blame.

"This is a revenue issue, it is a fund balance anticipation issue, it's not that the district's been overspending its budget, it's not anyone's doing anything illegal or anything like that," said Potter.

Now that the entire school board and the new superintendent are aware of the problem, they're focused on moving forward to fix the budget so that the schools and students won't suffer.

Potter said, "Our first step is to articulate the problem, get that out there, answer people's questions, and make sure people understand the issue first and then from that point I think we can really go forth with a plan."

That includes paying back vendors, some of whom have been waiting for checks for weeks.

Potter said one option would be asking the public to take out a loan to fill the gap.

Whatever the school district comes up with, Potter said it will be a team effort and taxpayers will be informed of their decisions every step of the way.

Potter said as of right now, the district doesn't have the funds to pay for supplies for the upcoming year.

There's a meeting scheduled for August 14 at Nokomis High School at 6:30 PM to discuss the cashflow problem and the district's plans to fix it.

Potter said there will be plenty of time for questions.

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