Following a decision last week to table the vote on whether or not to make Toll Gate High School the home school for all students enrolled in programs at the Warwick Area Career and Technical Center (WACTC), the School Committee Tuesday night unanimously approved the measure to be implemented in the fall of 2017, giving school officials more than a year to evaluate the change and do it right.

After the vote was tabled last week when parents came forward expressing concern that their children wanted to drop out of WACTC programs in order to remain with their friends at their home school, Superintendent Philip Thornton met with teachers from the career and tech center to talk about what they thought was best.

“One-third said they wanted to do the move, one-third said they wanted to leave things as is, and one-third said they wanted to wait a year and take a look at the schedule,” he said.

Thornton also spoke to the superintendent of schools in West Warwick, as there are approximately 105 West Warwick students attending WACTC programs.

Thornton said one of the reasons for his suggestion to make the change to Toll Gate being the home school for all WACTC students is due to the amount of lost instructional time for students that are bused from Pilgrim and Warwick Vets, which totals about seven instructional days over the course of a year.

“I think a change is needed, but I’m mindful of all the moving parts,” he said prior to the vote.

Now that the department has a full year-and-a-half before implementing the change, Thornton said a number of things would be looked at, including optimized scheduling models from similar programs in Connecticut and Massachusetts; introducing a career and technical exploratory course with fundamental elements of the program at the ninth grade level to ensure a smooth transition from ninth to 10th grade since WACTC programs start at the 10th grade level; and looking at bus routes.

“Right now Pilgrim is used as a depot,” Thornton said of the high school, where students are first dropped off before taking a bus to Toll Gate. “We need a good model that picks students up in their part of town and makes sense.”

Committee member Terri Medeiros said she would be more apt to support Thornton’s recommendation if updates on the progress of how the change would be implemented would be made available.

Thornton said monthly progress reports would be made available to the School Committee and the public.

In other committee news, Chief Budget Officer Anthony Ferrucci presented a fiscal year 2015 Year End Fiscal Report-Under Audit update and explained how the school department ended up with an additional $760,699 in surplus funds.

Ferrucci said after reporting year-end budget results in November, the school department typically presents city auditors with the year-end report and waits until the audit is completed to report any adjustments, which have never exceeded $100,000 (FY 2014 audit adjustments totaled $34,000).

Ferrucci said there were a number of things that contributed to FY 2015 not being a typical year, including a new controller joining the school department in September 2014, which occurred concurrently with the conversion of the department’s accounting systems from Pentamation to Alio.

“We initially planned on converting the payroll system by January 1, 2015, however unavoidable delays caused us to push back the payroll rollout for a full year,” he said, which meant that for the entire 2015 fiscal year the department ran an old payroll system while operating the new accounting system that required “extreme amounts of reconciling and duplicated data entry.”

In addition to the software conversion, Ferrucci said the department was attempting to address internal accounting issues associated with accounting for cash on hand.

“All of these issues caused considerable backlogs by year end,” he said, adding that setup issues also came to light at the end of the year that had to be corrected by Alio. “Given all of these operational issues, when preparing the November 2015 report, I spent more time personally analyzing the reported year-end results than I typically had done in past years.”

During this analysis, Ferrucci said medical expenses appeared to be off trend considerably.

“Based on the premium increase and a manual recalculation of actual bills paid, I determined that medical costs appeared to be under expensed by close to $700,000,” he said. “With the balance sheet still in flux in November and thinking that an audit adjustment might be required after the balance sheet was audited, I conservatively anticipated an audit adjustment to medical costs of $750,000 in my financial report to the school committee in November.”

Ferrucci said the two budget lines most impacted by the analysis were Medicaid Revenue ($237,968 variance), due to a correction to the accounts receivable, and Medical Expense ($533,385 variance). A minor adjustment of a $10,654 reduction brought the total budget surplus increase to $760,699.

In further committee news, Toll Gate Assistant Principal David Tober was chosen from a pool of six candidates to be named principal of the new Warwick Veterans Junior High School next year and Lynn Prentiss, the current principal at Globe Park Elementary School in Woonsocket, was named assistant principal for the new junior high. And in an election of officers, Beth Furtado was elected as chairwoman succeeding Jennifer Ahearn, with Eugene Nadeau and Terri Medeiros remaining as vice chairman and clerk, respectively.