The leadership of the APS was audited in 2003 by
the Council of the Great City Schools.
They were auditing as the result of a corruption scandal in APS' Maintenance and Operations Division. The "documented" loss to taxpayers was north of $500,000.
The auditors wrote about the lack of accountability that allowed the corruption. They wrote about the system by which the good ol' boys evaluate each others conduct and competence as public servants and senior administrators.
The Council of the Great City Schools wrote;
administrative evaluations are subjectiveWhen I filed a request for public records of any change in policy or in procedural directives that specifically addressed any of the finding of the audit;
and unrelated to promotions or step placement.
I did not get one.
The leadership of the APS either did not change a single thing about the way they do business; or they are willing to violate the New Mexico Inspection of Records Act, in order to hide the fact that they did.
2 comments:
Continuous Improvement and Character Counts are just as you said - ways to siphon grant money into jobs for good old nephew and good old neices. Or good old cousins.
Danny Moon was an old fashioned evil principal - stealing money by vastly exagerating student numbers. But these guys? They are more refined, non-hillbilly criminals. City-fied Good Old Boys.
They graft the system because they have all gotten away with it at some time or another, thinking it was the PERFECT crime --- until LexisNexis and Homeland Security found a way to track EVERY penny of every dollar so they could keep terrorists from getting it. Retroactive to the Eighties, they have the records at Langley, apparently.
A funny thing, Sarbanes-Oxley, the thing civil libertarians point to as the start of the end of democracy, but the very thing that law enforcement needs to end corruption.
Charted views of what money went where among every top APS administrator would be ENLIGHTENING, to say the least.
Joseph makes a good point.
There is no excuse for "shabby book-keeping" because everything should be on software, and if they are like any 21st-century system, then all expense checks have to be imprinted through the computer software system (It even says it has to be computer printed on the checks to be valid).
I know personally that some "site-management" proncipals write sums$$ of money on receipts from Discretionary accounts, then pocket it... It never makes it to the declared cause, and the declared recipipient is not required to sign in receipt thereof... therefore if the money goes in a pocket... there's no proof it didn't, only a false declaration.
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