School boards' spending: Districts a study in financial folly

Given the imminent start of another school year, we wish a few Atlanta-area school boards’ members would consider auditing accounting and management classes as taught in their own districts.

That might prevent costly future problems of the type that have made headlines as Georgia’s 180 public school districts struggle through this current economic storm.

School boards and education administrators have tussled with difficult choices across the metro area. Both programs and educators have been cut, or threatened with same, as districts excise millions of dollars via a budgeting process that can stretch across several months.

When the system’s functioning as it should, school boards set both budgets and broad policy. It’s then up to administrators and staff to make things work in the field. When problems arise, boards should address them quickly and also examine whether sufficient safeguards and procedures are in place to ensure taxpayers’ money is spent wisely and well.

When that doesn’t happen, a community’s trust is eroded and students are shortchanged as waste consumes money better-spent on other endeavors.

Consider DeKalb County schools, Georgia’s third-largest district. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported last week that DeKalb schools spent more than $15,260 to buy an autobiographical account of a district official’s struggle against academic failure. While up-by-your-bootstraps lessons have their place in motivating lagging students, DeKalb would have done far better by taxpayers to point underperforming youths to libraries to seek out the scores of works published on this topic since Ben Franklin first opined that “energy and persistence conquer all things.”

This wasteful expenditure is merely the smallest among a larger set of examples.

DeKalb’s former superintendent was indicted in May, along with the district’s former chief operating officer and two others on felony charges alleging malfeasance in the handling of construction projects.

Not surprisingly, the AJC reported in July that DeKalb spent six times the budgeted amount for legal expenses in the fiscal year that ended last June. The $5.79 million spent exceeds that incurred by the Cobb, Fulton and Clayton county districts combined.

Although DeKalb’s issues undoubtedly increased both the need for lawyers and their subsequent bill, it should trouble taxpayers that the board voted last year to spend nearly $1 million more to ensure they had a black female attorney’s firm on their legal team. Other firms that had proposed doing the work for half a million dollars less also sported diverse staff rosters, which is no surprise in 2010.

And this region’s diversity should be considered against DeKalb’s recent decision to spend $4.18 million with two employment firms to hire 67 teachers who will be brought in from abroad.

If there truly are not enough competent science, math and special education teachers to fill the DeKalb openings in a time when the state Department of Labor is holding special job fairs for unemployed educators, then that’s a pretty damning insight on education in the United States. Taxpayers should ask hard questions to determine whether that’s truly the case.

DeKalb is not alone in questionable spending. The AJC reported in June that Atlanta Public Schools apparently continues to violate federal rules intended to curb waste and abuse in technology projects. The allegations could put the district at risk of losing more than $30 million in requests under the federal E-Rate program.

Earlier problems with the program cost the district millions and sent two former employees to prison for bribery.

So far at least, these types of issues seem to be exceptions to competent, common-sense governance. “Boards are doing yeoman work in trying to come through this school crisis,” said Jeannie M. “Sis” Henry, executive director of the Georgia School Boards Association. “It’s hard to manage money you don’t have.”

These tight times make it all the more important that school boards and administrators keep a watchful, ethical eye over shrinking tax coffers. Improper controls and poor decisions can’t be allowed to waste scant public monies.

Students, taxpayers and Georgia’s future itself deserve better.

Andre Jackson, 
for the Editorial Board

Atlanta Forward: We look at major issues Atlanta must address in order to move forward as the economy recovers.

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