PAWTUCKET — An organization created by the General Assembly to save local school districts money by splitting the cost of educating disabled students has accumulated a multimillion-dollar surplus, a consultant told the School Committee yesterday, rolling in cash even as the member school districts are tightening their belts.

The Northern Rhode Island Collaborative, a consortium of 11 school districts, including Pawtucket, Central Falls and Woonsocket, has a cumulative surplus totaling $7,350,502, Walter Edge of B&E Consulting, reported during last night’s School Committee meeting.

Even though the collaborative has tried to give the member school districts refunds, voting on three occasions to lower tuitions, Edge said, it hasn’t succeeded in returning the money.

In fact, Edge said, the collaborative is still awash in cash.

Edge’s analysis came amid speculation that the collaborative, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Cumberland, is sitting on a hoard of money.

It was presented less than a week after City Councilor Donald R. Grebien got the council to ask the collaborative’s executive director to explain how it had accumulated a surplus totaling $8 million.

“I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding relative to this,” Julian E. MacDonnell, the executive director of the collaborative, said over the telephone Monday.

“We do not have an $8 million surplus. That is not the case,” MacDonnell stated.

The collaborative’s financial statements show the organization has $7.6 million in fixed assets, he said, not cash.

MacDonnell said the assets were built up during the years that the collaborative decided to admit students from nonmember school districts.

“They opened up the doors. They brought in a lot of students from nonresident communities. That’s how the surplus was generated.”

As school districts cut costs by educating disabled students in-house, rather than paying tuition to have them taught at the collaborative, the surplus will dwindle, MacDonnell predicted. At the same, the collaborative intends to refund the money to member districts by holding down tuition increases, he said.

Edge said that, according to his analysis, the collaborative accumulated its multimillion-dollar surplus by overestimating expenses even as it failed to project revenues.

Even when the collaborative, which has a board of directors consisting of the school superintendents of the member school districts, tried in 2004 and 2005 to refund the money, it continued to run surpluses, he said.

“B&E believes that the reason why these previous attempted refunds were not successful is because the conservative budgeting approach used by the NRIC was not tightened up,” he wrote in his report.

Edge’s analysis of a big surplus at the collaborative had a provocative effect on the School Committee, coming as it did when the School Department is facing a $2.8-million budget deficit.

But Edge advised against seeking a big lump sum payment from the collaborative, warning that it would create a “structural deficit” in the school budget because the payment wouldn’t be repeated in subsequent years.

School Committee member David Coughlin disagreed. “There’s $1.3 million that it looks like Pawtucket has been overcharged,” he said.

Wouldn’t it be better to demand that $1.3 million, and use it to reduce the $2.8-million school deficit, Coughlin reasoned, rather than go to the taxpayers for the full amount?

Edge replied that, even if Pawtucket managed to get the full $1.3-million refund, the money wouldn’t become available in time to reduce the current deficit.

jcastell@projo.com