For years the Red Plan School Board members claimed that no money was being transferred from the General Fund to pay off Red Plan bonding debt. The State (non) audit makes it clear that the general fund was looted to pay off these bonds. You would think that the CFO would quietly sidle up to these Board members to warn them they were out of their minds and would end up looking like chumps if they kept repeating such twaddle. Evidently no one corrected them. One of them was the same Board member who signed millions of dollars of change orders without bothering to inform the Board or asking for a vote to do approve the expenditures. That was the subject of another editorial this week which called such actions less than transparent.
Now I can’t let this go without a little story.
In the early 1990’s, the futile early years of my running for the school board, I got to know a recently laid off Duluth administrator who had come to the District with a high falutin resume. She had walked into a snake pit of local administrators who didn’t want an outsider in their midst. IV Foster might have felt the same way.
She told me horror stories about what she endured. She complained about one administrator, a big shot by the time I finally got elected to the Board, who she was sure rummaged through her desk and got into her computer looking for the stuff she was in charge of to warn the CFO. (He was a piece of work too) She was undermined until she left the District.
I had contacted her about an investigation I was conducting at the time. I was worried about the student dropout rate in Duluth. Some old confederates of mine, who were school counselors, told me to look at the “dropout report.” What I found was that the number of students Duluth officials claimed we had didn’t match up with the students we graduated. We had an economic incentive to claim more students than were really enrolled. The state gave us something like $5,000 for each secondary student that (we reported) attending Duluth. What I found was that a couple hundred fewer seniors graduated each year than we got money from the state for. That was big money and we didn’t deserve it.
I called up the MDE, back then it was called the CFL, (Children Families and Learning). The MARS administrator, who kept track of all students numbers in the state’s attendance system, seemed as dumbfounded as me but disinclined to do anything about the state being ripped off on the strength of my phone call. On her recommendation I called one of the Education Dept’s auditors (they no longer have any auditors today). He told me he had a backlog of schools to visit and that there were far too many School Districts for the auditors to audit each year. Duluth could count on the auditors never turning up to uncover its fraud against the state.
As it happened the State Legislature had a hint that this was happening all over Minnesota. After some squabbling about whether the state could use student Social Security numbers or apply some other individual number to each of its students it finally managed to set up a system that would track students. From that point on when two or more school districts claimed to have the same student the state would know which one to give the money to rather than pay for students multiple times.
I raised a little stink about this in one campaign just before the 1991 primary. The administrator who sent the state the fraudulent numbers said I should have taken my figures to the Administration. Fortunately for him I lost the primary and my charges were no more trouble for anyone. Oh, and one school board member of that Era who I described this to didn’t deny it but told me that any such actions were done “for the students.” I wish I could say the same of JCI. [I put my report on the dropout report and MARS fudging< a href="http://www.snowbizz.com/DuluthSchools%20Page/WhoWon/DropoutSham/dropouts1.htm">dropout report on my old website. Its a little dry.]
The administrator who had been spied upon and harassed out of Duluth told me something I’ve never forgotten. She said school Superintendents, being educators, are desperately dependent upon their Finance Officers to help them understand the fiscal health of the District is. If that is true then its been some time, based on our CFO’s tenure in office, since we’ve had a Duluth School Superintendent who knew what the hell was going on.
