Gilbert Public Schools is in “good company” with some of the shenanigans involving the superintendency that have been coming to light recently. The St. Joseph School District, which is slightly ahead of the curve in comparison to events within GPS, has attracted the attention of the FBI in regard to the district’s finances and stipends. It took one board member asking questions to unravel a scheme much like what we’ve been chronicling about GPS Good Old Boys.
This post will explore commonalities between GPS and the school district currently under FBI investigation:
School board member Chris Danford raised questions last month about $250,000 in stipends paid to administrators, principals and assistant principals at the beginning of the school year. She also questioned why [HR Director] Flowers had promoted five staff members — including his wife — to technical director status without board approval. Danford said the stipends enhanced administrative salaries without going through the board, as required by district policy. A few days after the March 24 meeting where Danford raised her concerns, the district’s chief financial officer was placed on administrative leave. District officials have declined to comment on his status or say why he was placed on leave.
It’s important to know where the stipends went in GPS, because the Zero Based Budget will go before the Governing Board soon. We heard that when asked about information about stipends paid to employees, GPS staff claimed it was “too hard to do.” Apparently, citizens on the ZBB committee are getting the same mushroom treatment that board members have received in the past. A citizen who requested information about stipends under public records laws received information about some support staff stipends, but not certified staff stipends. Instead, GPS produced a list of costs associated with allowing lateral movement on the salary scale for teachers (who have been frozen in place for more than five years). The associated cost was $881,060 for teacher professional growth in 2010-2011. That was just too much for GPS, it appears. There’s one GPS employee who has been skipping around on the salary schedule, though!
Just like GPS avoiding public records disclosures, the St. Joseph School District seems to have a problem with those pesky public records laws. They’re called Sunshine Laws in Missouri:
In addition to the FBI and the State Auditor’s Office, The Missouri Attorney General’s Office is also investigating a Sunshine Law complaint against the district.
It appears that GPS GOBs have been using stipends for line-of-sight bonuses for support staff in recent years. Salaries were frozen even though an override was in place, but it appears the GOBS thought some employees were more worthy than others, just like some GPS students are more equal than others. Hint: a birdie told us the stipends were concentrated at the district offices, and that a few members of the superintendency were using stipends to reward their own staffers before the superintendency person retired. We also learned about special stipends paid in advance to two assistant superintendents who never managed to get around to doing the special project they were supposed to do in order to receive the stipends. Hey, that’s yet another parallel to the St. Joseph School District!
Here’s another parallel: the amount of stipends at issue in St. Joseph is about $250,000. Hey, that’s close enough for government work to the $150,000 paid in line-of-sight bonuses to GPS support staff! The question has to be, did the Governing Board approve all those stipends? Or were those stipends slid in under the radar the way Crystal Korpan’s promotion was done? Good Old Dave’s belated communication to the board claimed Crystal Korpan’s MBA made the raise worthwhile. We hear that Crystal Korpan says she doesn’t actually have an MBA, but who cares about a silly little detail like TRUTH when a superintendent communicates with his governing board?
It’s like a breath of fresh air when we discover that law enforcement agencies actually care about public officials who abuse the public trust and spend taxpayers’ money without accountability. Remember this sleight-of-hand trick? At one point in 2011, Good Old Dave Allison told the board, GPS employees and the tax-paying public that he had suspended administrators’ annual stipend in the amount of $800. We later discovered that what was really going on was incredible expenditures for conferences, travel, hotels and rental cars at exotic locations for administrator training rather than for the classroom or for teacher improvement, as the purposes of the grants that funded these trips would suggest. So why had administrators been receiving $800 annually in addition to taxpayer-funded professional training?
Maybe when the FBI gets finished with the St. Joseph School District, they can look at Gilbert Public Schools. There are so many of the same appearances of corruption. There’s also a question about who pays the tab for all the legal representation when the FBI comes to call.
The costs for the personnel issue will be covered by the district’s insurance carrier. The district will pay the cost for representation during the FBI investigation. He [the district’s lawyer] added that he didn’t think the FBI investigation would be a long-term proposition. “That’s my impression. I have talked with the agents, I’ve talked with the U.S. attorney. We have a very cordial relationship,” he said. “I told them that if there is any information we can get from them, or something we can assist them with, we want to get that information to them and facilitate their review.”
Look! Another parallel of sorts with GPS! Actually, there was a bit of controversy about giving information to the Gilbert Police Department and allowing them access to GPS to facilitate police investigation of a server that was wiped and $2 Million that was not available for use in classrooms. We can’t figure out why there should be a controversy when board members perform their fiduciary duties to oversee proper use and accounting for public funds, but this is Gilbert Public Schools: 100 years of tradition unhampered by progress.
We found another school district has been using similar tricks to enrich a chosen few at the expense of educating students:
Rank has its privilege for top administrators in Lewisville, Texas Independent School District, where in addition to high salaries, members of the Superintendent’s cabinet receive stipends and car allowances adding up to a combined $174,000 per year at a time when the district is facing huge looming budget shortfalls, and looking to trim $10.6 million in the coming year in part by cutting programs and increasing class sizes.
[Editorial Opinion:] If you hire a person for a position that has a functional role in the cabinet, then you pay that person what they’re worth, and they participate in the cabinet and attend meetings because it’s their job, and they want to keep it. When you have highly-compensated employees, they earn their money in part because of the responsibility for attending meetings and taking on extra duties to get the job done.
These Texas stipends came to light as a result of a public records request by the local media. This isn’t chump change: the spreadsheet the media obtained shows almost $6 Million per year going to stipends, over and above salaries and benefits paid to employees. Stipends, though, seem to flow to “special” employees only. Just like GPS?
Back to St. Joseph, where the FBI paid a visit to the home of a person being investigated. Hey, another parallel! We heard that Shane McCord and Jeff Filloon received visits from the Gilbert Police and local media at their homes, too. We also had a report of a police detective at the GPS Information Technology offices. Showing that someone is taking these matters seriously, St. Joseph is getting extra attention via a state audit:
FBI agents also visited the home of Human Resources Director Doug Flowers on Thursday afternoon. They were at the home for nearly an hour and a half. … Meanwhile, the board, during its monthly meeting Thursday evening, listened to a representative from the Missouri state auditor’s office lay out a timeline for its audit of district finances.
Maybe someone (Gilbert Police, FBI, Arizona Auditor General or similar) will get to the bottom of where all the money went in Gilbert Public Schools. It certainly doesn’t look like it went to the classrooms. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all this investigation stuff concluded before Dr. Kishimoto takes the helm of GPS?