DALLAS—The superintendent of the troubled Dallas schools said the district’s financial system will be overhauled by the end of the year instead of over three years, but Michael Hinojosa declined to give details of how it will happen so quickly.

“By January, we’ll be implementing everything,” Hinojosa said in a story for Tuesday’s online edition of The Dallas Morning News, after a three-hour closed-door meeting with a group of Dallas business leaders.

Hinojosa announced in September that the Dallas Independent School District ran $64 million over budget last year and faced an even larger potential deficit this year. In October the district released hundreds of employees, including hundreds of teachers, to avoid the deficit.

“We need to have the systems in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Hinojosa said.

But he declined to explain how he and school board members could be unaware district spending was so far over budget. He has blamed the deficits on poor coordination among DISD departments and said administrators inadvertently hired more teachers than were budgeted.

“Everything we’ve seen tells us these issues are fixable,” said Phil Ritter, senior vice president at Texas Instruments.

He and others declined to give details about what they had learned Tuesday in their third meeting with the superintendent.

The business leaders say they are focused solely on implementing recommendations from a “management letter” DISD received from an outside auditor, before the budget deficits were disclosed. The letter, released in June, detailed significant deficiencies and weaknesses in the district’s financial controls. In response, Hinojosa launched an $11 million “financial transformation plan” to remedy what he said were “long-standing problems” that arose over 20 years.