Recap: January 21st Joint City Council & School Committee Meeting to Discuss the Audit
Written by: Dan Shibilia
On Wednesday, January 21, the City Council and School Committee held a joint meeting to discuss the long-awaited round 2 audit recap. Given the tone of the discussion and some of the claims made during the meeting, it’s important to recap the meeting cand learly lay out how this process actually unfolded.
I was on the audit subcommittee from the very beginning, alongside then-Mayor Perry and School Committee Member Donovan. That means I had a front-row seat to the decisions, constraints, and realities of this process, not a secondhand or political version of events. I will try to recap the meeting while adding commentary. I feel as though there is a good chance this article gets a follow-up.
The Audit Firm and the RFP Process
This is background and wasn’t discussed during the meeting. However, it’s important to know, and it will help frame the reality that was lived.
The audit was conducted by CBIZ (www.cbiz.com), who were ultimately the only bidder for the work. That point matters because it wasn’t for lack of effort. This RFP was issued twice:
The first RFP bundled operational and financial components and was simply too broad. We received no bidders.
The second RFP narrowed the scope, focusing on operations. That revision resulted in a single bidder: CBIZ.
There was no hidden shortlist. No quiet steering. No backroom deals to make the district look good or bad. This is just a market reality that many firms were unwilling or unable to take on this work.
In my opinion… the scope of this RFP was always doomed to be insufficient purely because of funding. The audit the district needed, much like that of the PD back in 2019, would have required every employee to be interviewed. That means about 1,200 interviews. For reference, that’s about 900% LARGER than the PD. That’s not a typo, it does say nine hundred percent. It would have cost the city about a million dollars to do this right.
The Google Drive link below contains the RFP documents for review.
Who Selected the Participants?
A significant portion of the meeting focused on who was interviewed, and, implicitly, who wasn’t.
Here are the facts, and this was confirmed during the meeting by CBIZ.
An initial list of potential participants was prepared collaboratively by myself, the Mayor, and Member Donovan. It was a long list and intentionally broad. It included staff from all buildings, across many roles and unions, parents, former staff and more. That list was provided to CBIZ. They reached out to these folks. It was explained to us that many people declined. There was never any second request to provide additional names.
CBIZ independently identified and added additional participants through their engagement with those who agreed to be interviewed. It was also noted in the meeting that the folks interviewed were questioned to provide information to help scope the questionnaire.
For clarity, participant outreach and selection were entirely in the hands of the audit firm. The working group was never made aware of who the final interviewees were, the issues/questions discussed, or anything coming from the conversations.
Survey Response Rates: Context Matters
Questions were also raised about survey participation and whether individuals could have submitted multiple responses. This concern was reviewed directly with CBIZ, and it’s important to be clear about how this was handled. This was also covered by the working group as a concern at the time we were working towards the completion of this project.
CBIZ responded stating they take data accuracy and integrity very seriously. As part of their standard methodology, they reviewed and monitored multiple technical indicators designed to detect duplicate or invalid submissions. These included, but were not limited to, IP address tracking, browser and device information, time stamps, response patterns, and completion timing. These tools are commonly used in professional survey and audit work to identify anomalies and filter out unreliable data.
Where potential issues were identified, responses were evaluated and addressed using those controls. In short, the survey data was not blindly accepted. It was reviewed through established technical safeguards to ensure reliability.
Based on those controls, CBIZ determined that the final response set was credible and usable for identifying trends, risks, and systemic issues.
It is also worth reiterating that the overall response rates themselves were strong for a voluntary, district-wide survey. Online surveys of this nature typically see average response rates in the 10–15% range. Methuen exceeded that benchmark across staff, parent, and student groups, providing a statistically meaningful data set for an operational audit of this type.
At no point did CBIZ indicate that data integrity concerns undermined the findings. Framing the survey results as unreliable ignores both the technical safeguards in place and the professional standards under which this work was conducted.
Custodial Staffing: The Data Is Not Ambiguous
One of the more frustrating moments in the meeting involved custodial staffing levels.
According to Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), the district should have approximately 82 custodians. The current number is 42. That isn’t a subjective opinion. It’s a data-based benchmark drawn from nationally recognized standards for non-student-facing roles based on the square footage of our buildings.
Custodial staff are also, historically, the first positions cut during budget pressure. Despite their critical role in building safety, cleanliness, and operations, the reality is that they were once easy to cut as non-student-facing positions. That clearly had consequences. The confusion expressed during the meeting over these figures was surprising, given how clearly the standard is documented.
Councilor DiZoglio was focused on what happened in the last budget and how we added two roles. Acting Superintendent Golobski expanded on the scope of work the custodial team takes on, specifically on 2nd shift, while outside organizations use the rec space.
Redaction?
There was significant discussion about “redaction” throughout this meeting. Much of that discussion has blurred an important distinction between legal guidance and editorial control.
Punchline… we didn’t have editorial control at all.
The audit working group did not redact content in the way that term has been implied. Nothing was removed, altered, or suppressed beyond what was explicitly advised by legal counsel. Despite Member Maxwell’s statements that we should have publicized the complaints against staff by name, we were advised that this would quickly be costly to the City. It is also worth noting that these submissions were never independently verified so these complaints could be true or they could be targeted baseless attacks.
As the Mayor stated during the meeting, the working group was advised not to include the names of individuals who were the subject of complaints in written submissions. That guidance was provided for legal reasons, including exposure and liability concerns.
It’s also important to be transparent about internal disagreement on this point.
I opposed broader redaction and broader disclosure, as did Member Donovan. The Mayor ultimately chose to go further by allowing roles to be labeled in a way that made individuals identifiable, based on legal advice and his judgment, which was not the preference of the full working group.
Beyond that narrow issue, nothing else was redacted.
Just as importantly, the working group had no control over:
The underlying data
The survey responses
Interview content
How the findings were analyzed
How the results were presented
Those elements were entirely within the control of CBIZ, consistent with the independence required for an audit of this nature.
The suggestion that the working group shaped, filtered, or sanitized the audit findings is simply not supported by the facts. Legal redaction to avoid naming individuals is not the same as altering outcomes and conflating the two only distracts from the substance of the work.
A Meeting Focused on Blame, Not Use
What stood out most was the tone of the meeting.
The disappointed faces of some around the table when the auditor from CBIZ read the last question were priceless. The question was “based on your professional opinion give the data collected, would you say that our district is underperforming with respect to management or administration?”
The answer….”No, we do not. That is not our professional opinion.”
At times, the discussion felt like a witch hunt. That approach doesn’t help staff, doesn’t help students, and doesn’t help residents understand what comes next.
Audits are tools. They’re meant to inform decisions, highlight risk, and guide improvement not serve as proxies for unresolved political or institutional frustration.
This audit is far from perfect. But, if we want this work to matter, we need to start using it for what it is and not what people wish it could retroactively justify.
Support documents
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tOt8BL1Ig50JfgJgJzisvJyWdCqSLx3q?usp=sharing