“We’ve got our work cut out for us, fellas.”

Former Snow Rogers Elementary School principal Karen White summed up the task at hand for herself and the four others on the new Gardendale Board of Education, as they met together for the very first time.

The meeting took place Tuesday night at City Hall, put together by city councilman Alvin Currington. The new board members – White, Chris Lucas, Chris Segroves, Dick Lee and Dr. Michael Hogue – had barely taken their seats before they were each presented with a two-inch-thick three-ring binder.

“I have some homework for you,” said attorney Donald Sweeney of the law firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, whose firm worked with the city in setting up the new school system.

The binder included hundreds of pages documenting state laws for municipal school systems, state ethics laws, the Alabama Open Meetings Act, a model for the separation agreement the system will negotiate with the Jefferson County Schools, and much more – an instruction manual of sorts for a board that is starting from scratch.

Brian Barksdale, partner-in-charge from the accounting firm of Carr Riggs Ingram, also gave the members advice on the financial matters they will face early on. The firm prepared the pro forma financial statements for the city as it presented the then-proposed system plan to voters for the property-tax increase required to fund the system.

Barksdale and partner Jason Harpe told the group about Alabama’s uniform accounting practices for school systems, a modified accrual accounting method with its own quirks. Barksdale told of how he was sent early in his career to audit the books of a local school system, and came face to face with the peculiarities of the educational accounting system. It was the first time Carr Riggs Ingram had taken on such an audit.

“After I was done, I told my bosses, ‘We either need to do a lot of these, or none at all – there’s too many weird things about it,’” he said.

School-system accounting has since become one of the firm’s specialties.

But the state system’s method of assigning account numbers to certain items actually was a benefit when the firm prepared the statements for Gardendale, he said. “We could get numbers for specific accounts from other school systems of similar size and geography to Gardendale, and use those to give estimates for this [new system],” Harpe said.

Sweeney works with several school systems in metro Birmingham, including the Shelby County Schools – a system that is seeing Alabaster and Pelham break away to form local systems. One of Sweeney’s first suggestions to the members was that they should visit board meetings of other similar systems in the area, such as Trussville – which itself broke away from Jefferson County a few years ago.

The members peppered Sweeney, Barksdale and Harpe with a wide range of questions over the three-hour meeting. The topics covered such items as whether to hire an interim superintendent before selecting a permanent one, how long negotiations with the county system for the separation agreement would take,

The new board doesn’t even officially exist yet – the members won’t be sworn in until April 1. But there are many action items that will have to be “teed up and ready to go,” as Houge put it, at that first official meeting.

Tuesday’s organizational meeting is the first of several that will take place before April 1. The next scheduled meeting is Tuesday, April 18 at 6 p.m. The members have invited Dr. Jody Newton, a faculty member in the Beeson School of Education at Samford University and a colleague of Hogue, who is the college’s interim dean of its pharmacy school. Newton is a retired superintendent of the Homewood City School System.