Detroit Public Schools (MI):  $ 408 million

Miami-Dade County Public Schools (FL):  $ 88 million

Dallas Independent School District (TX):   $ 64 million

By Peyton Wolcott

Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008

(Links to source URLS on my website: www.peytonwolcott.com)

After national security at home and abroad, there is no more urgent crisis facing the United States today than to make sure our public schools remain strong, free and locally run. To do this, they're going to have to stop wasting money and learn to better educate our schoolchildren for fewer dollars.

Trustee ethics

All three school districts named above share one unfortunate common thread: school board members who are doing business in one way or another with their districts or challenged such that discharge of their responsibilities is difficult.

Such trustees are simply not going to be in a position to ask the tough questions they need to ask in order to hold their superintendents accountable. This is the only explanation for such whopper deficits having caught three major U.S. asleep-at-the-wheel school boards by surprise.

Dallas ISD board president Jack Lowe is a good example. His superintendent Mike Hinojosa's revelation yesterday that Dallas schools had overspent by $64 million last year reportedly came as a surprise to Jack: "I should have said, 'I'm not convinced yet, show me the numbers, prove it,' and I didn't," he said. "In hindsight, I wish that I had dug deeper. We have a great education plan, we made big strides, we just lost track of the finances. This is unacceptable. It's embarrassing." (SOURCE--Dallas Morning News)

Oh, gee. Might perhaps Jack have not dug deeper because he's also a district vendor? His day job is chair of his family's business, TD Industries, which has received at least $9 million from DISD since 2002.

Miami school board chair Gus Barrera's wife Alina Gallego was promoted earlier this year from school social worker to assistant principal at Glades Middle School, closer to the couple's recently remodeled house -- the remodeling done by Howard Diston, a full-time employee of district vendor Jasco Construction. Was Gus in a position to jeopardize his family's improved income not to mention the renovations to his $415,000 South Miami home by holding Rudy accountable?

No wonder Detroit Public Schools' $408 million deficit came as a surprise to Connie Calloway's school board; they can't even get Connie to provide them with an inventory of the $1.6 million in original art purchased by DPS from the Sherry Washington Gallery by Calloway's predecessors William Coleman and Ken Burnley. DPS board member Marie Thornton, one of the more active of the board members seeking accountability, may have been distracted currently by her upcoming court proceedings on charges of assaulting a minister, Rev. Loyce Lester of The Original New Grace Baptist Church, after a school board meeting, the trial set for October 20, 2008 in Judge Paula Humphries' 36th district court in Detroit. Lester is a member of the Citizen Tax Board and chair of the Detroit Public Schools police oversight committee.

Commonalities among Detroit, Miami & Dallas

Aside from all three being urban, other threads the three districts share are directly tied to lax board oversight: Declining enrollments and widespread reports of nepotism (Mike Hinojosa's friends the Viramontes are now both are key DISD executives, and when William Coleman was at the helm in Detroit his wife Deborah Bodrick headed the DPS Early Childhood program). There have been massive infusions of unsupervised-by-anyone federal dollars including grants and eRate ($200 million to Dallas during 2006-07, for example), connections to Eli Broad (one local wag has nicknamed Hinojosa's "Road to Broad" the "Road to Ruin"), credit card abuse ($78 million in the last three years of DISD's unsupervised procurement card program), large layers of administrative staff including PR professionals whose chief job appears to be to shore up the image of their bosses, and superintendents who were paid by Education Research & Development Institute ("ERDI") to consult with vendors. ERDI consultants include former Detroit supe Ken Burnley, former Dallas ISD supe Mike Moses, and former Miami supe Rudy Crew. *

Another common thread: The FBI

In addition to the FBI's investigation of $500 million spent in Detroit on their failed student retention program ("Retain and Gain"), there's the Yachtgate trial recently ended in Dallas which tied together executives who had worked in both Detroit and Dallas: former supe William Coleman, former DISD tech director and later would-be Detroit tech vendor Ruben Bohuchot, plus former DISD tech vendor Frankie Wong.

"Let them eat cake"

Another quality common to all three districts is a general perception that the folks at the top have become too removed from the common man and are primarily looking out for themselves. An incredulous reporter called me from Dallas ISD yesterday moments after Mike Hinojosa had announced his district's $64 million overspending. "They're feeding an entire roomful of people down the hall," she said. "How out of touch is that?" In Miami Rudy Crew recently refused to honor the teacher and staff raises he had earlier promised -- while insisting on receiving his own -- and yesterday collected a fat $368,000 exit check for doing nothing, leading us to wonder whether his superintendency has been about the kids or whether it's really been about Rudy. Connie Calloway tools around Detroit in a Town Car with a chauffeur -- at a time when her students and teachers are going without basics. And speaking of Detroit schools artwork, the first and largest image that greeted me this morning when I went to the DPS website was a poster for Ramadan, today of all days, the seventh anniversary of 9/11. Even though the Ramadan image fades to several others, none of them are of 9/11; in fact, there's no mention anywhere on the Detroit Public Schools homepage of 9/11.

Next steps: Baby or great strides forward?

As of yesterday Rudy's officially out of a job, tonight Connie's facing possible censure from her board, and folks in Dallas have begun calling for Mike

Hinojosa's ouster.

While such steps as censure and firing may be well and good if that's what the populace in each city wants, until school board ethics are tightened in Miami, Detroit and Dallas all three school systems are going to continue to see iterations of too-familiar problems.

For example, Alberto Carvalho, the member of Rudy's cabinet who's already been offered his boss's job, appears to come with baggage. Also, his job offer only arises from a split board vote from which point traditionally board relations go downhill. The dissenters have asked the rush-ahead trustees to open up the application process and wait until November when Larry Feldman is sworn in. There are the 10 pages of emails last year purportedly to and from a former Miami Herald reporter now employed by the Boston Globe, plus Alberto's traffic violations have been posted online. (Phone calls to Alberto, Miami-Dade County Public Schools PR guy John Schuster, and the reporter at the Globe, have not been returned.) All that aside, Miami still has a board chair who's been willing both to let a district vendor remodel his house and his wife accept a plum M-DCPS job from his superintendent.

Hinojosa might leave Dallas, but so long as DISD trustees such as Jack Lowe are in place who are doing business with the school district, Dallas will continued to have more "oops" situations like the one yesterday afternoon in which Mike's announcement about his district's $64 million deficit did not include the words, "I have failed you. I did not perform my fiduciary duty of care as your chief executive in charge of this district's $1.7 billion annual flow-through of funds." A predictable number of other people's heads will roll, none of them likely Mike's. Only when trustees get serious about a tough ethics policy for themselves -- no money stream of any kind from the district -- will DISD's trustees begin to truly hold their superintendent accountable. As University of Texas ethics expert Konstantin Constans told them in August, "disclosure is not enough."

What sized buyouts will Mike and Connie want?

Rudy's already named his price: $368,000. Such a price for work not done comes at the expense of the schoolchildren on whose behalf he's told us he's been working. Such a price also comes at the expense of the taxpayers who have funded his extensive travel while at the helm of Miami schools; surely Rudy's many trips over the past few years gave him an opportunity to land another job. Whether it's fellow Broad associate Arlene Ackerman's $375,000-plus buyout from San Francisco USD, or the $741,000 Keansburg, New Jersey supe Barbara Trzeszkowski was set to receive in severance and unused sick and vacation time (until disgruntled taxpayers protested and the state stepped in), the skyrocketing amounts of superintendents' contract buyouts are prompting increasing citizen and taxpayer questions and ire. (NOTE TO AASA: Surely you guys are taking note; six-figure superintendent buyouts have got to stop. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.)

Time for tighter trustee ethics

Big whoop, right? For the trustees in the three districts we've been discussing, I realize this may be about as appealing a prospect as welcoming a 32-man forensic audit team to your schools. I wish we could dress it up with pretty ribbons and pearls and flashing lights to make it more enticing. I wish we could give you each thousands of dollars (or millions as in the case of Jack Lowe) to replace any revenue you might lose.

I wish most of all that each and every one of you will want to tighten your local district's board ethics and forego all dollars and family employment and meals and travel from your schools and do your jobs as elected officials because you genuinely, with no element of self-benefit of any kind other than your community's gratitude, want to serve your schoolchildren and parents and taxpayers and teachers because it's the right thing to do, and because on 9/11 -- and every other day of the year -- you're grateful to be a citizen of the United States of America.

Copyright 2008 Peyton Wolcott

Published September 12, 2008