The ST. Johnsbury school board has finally found out where its deficit came from. The school is suffering an almost 1.6 million deficit and has been conducting a forensic investigation with the help of outside contractors.

The St. Johnsbury school board met to give its findings to the public and the public had plenty of questions as to where the money went.

Tom Zabek the board’s clerk ran down a series of numbers that told where all but $162,000 of the money was lost. The rest he was told was too complicated and esoteric to get into.

$191,000 was lost because interest on a tax anticipation note was not factored into the budget.

$180,000 was an error as that money has already gone through revenue.

$378,000 was due to an over budget influx of 22 juniors and seniors.

$224,000 was lost because a number of teachers were incorrectly expected to be paid through grants

Zabek did not mention $42,000 that he later told News 7 were due to complications in the food service budget and the other $76,000 came from groups too small and numerous to mention. A final $305,000 came as Zebek said from a “snowballing effect” of paying back tax anticipation notes after the school year ended and another note came in.

Tom Zabek explains "The note was due on June 30th of '07, but it was paid in July of '07. Our year ends June, so it flipped over from two years. Some of the funds from the new note were used to pay off the previous note."

Essentially the answers the answers the investigation came up with pointed to accounting errors, and failures in setting up and paying for the budget, errors made by the previous finance committee.

Lisa Rivers a school board chair explains that "This is as good of an explanation as we're going to get on that deficit."

But Zabek ended his list of losses with an encouraging note about how the 1.6 million dollar will look next year.

"The early draft of the financial statement showing that that deficit's gone down 650,000 dollars you know proper bookkeeping, knowing where we are at, you know, up to the present as opposed to a year behind."

The board says its books are now in “fabulous shape” and the deficit should be dropping to around $900,000 next year. In order to get accurate factual information out to the public in the future the school is starting to work on a new portion of their website titled “Keeping up the Budget.”