During Monday night’s meeting of the Brownwood ISD Board of Trustees, a public hearing was held on the district’s standing within the state’s financial accountability rating system, known as the Financial Integrity Rating System of Texas (FIRST).

The FIRST rating is for the previous school year as Brownwood received a ‘B’ rating, down from an ‘A’ the year prior, as the district received the maximum amount of points on 18 of 21 indicators.

Heidi Gardner, BISD Director of Finance and Grants, told the Board, “The three we did not score a perfect score on were dealing with number of days of cash on hand and current investments to cover current expenditures. Ideally they want us to be at 90 days and we are more like 45 days. Then there’s the district’s general fund revenues equaling or exceeding expenditures, which we knew we spent more last year than we brought in. And the last is dealing with the solvency of the long-term liabilities, the assets to the ratios, and again we passed but we didn’t have a perfect score on that.”