APS' Administrative Processes Audit

The leadership of the APS recently audited themselves on
their administrative processes. There is the immediate issue
of the appearance of a conflict of interest, anytime that someone audits them self.

Never the less; the findings; (emphasis added)

Finding 1;

The Board Office and Instruction & Accountability departments did not respond to multiple requests for information on this audit.

It is apparently still possible for senior
APS administrators to ignore requests
from the Director of Internal Audit,
Margret Koshmider without consequence. link

This despite an APS Procedural
Directive which reads in significant
part;

"All ... employees of the district shall furnish the Internal Auditor with requested information and records ...

If such officials or employees fail to produce the aforementioned information, the Internal Auditor shall notify the APS Audit Committee ..."

The senior administrators involved have failed to obey an APS Procedural Directive.

You have to ask yourself why they would do that? except that there is something to hide, and except that there is no consequence for good ol' boys who ignore APS Procedural Directives.

The audit recommends that these senior administrators,

"... familiarize themselves with policies and procedural directives ..."

There is no recommendation that would compel them to actually obey the directive. There is no recommendation to examine the oligarchy that allows good ol' boys to ignore procedural directives without consequence in the first place.

Finding 2;

Minutes of Board Meetings and Committee Meetings are not consistently posted.

The spirit of the NM Open Meetings Act, requires that stakeholders know what is going on in meetings in which their interests are being decided upon.

According to the Journal, link;

The auditor said APS was violating the state Open Meetings Act by failing to post updated board and committee meeting minutes on the Web site.

School board president Marty Esquivel said APS is in compliance with open records laws, which do not require postings on the Internet.

Esquivel said state law requires only that minutes be made available upon request.

"This is probably a case where open government laws have not caught up with the technology of today," said Esquivel, an attorney who works with the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government.

APS School Board President, Marty Esquivel claims to be on the side of open government. He is a heavy hitter in the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government.

Yet;

here he is using legal weaselry,
loopholes and technicalities to
except himself from accountability
to the spirit of the law.

Esquivel believes that since they
removed the role modeling clause
from their own code of conduct,
they are no longer accountable to the
APS Student Standards of Conduct,
under which, legal weaselry is prohibited.

Frankly, I am not so sure that he is even right on the law.
Since APS has a "tradition", however spotty, of publishing
the minutes on the Internet, they have established "past practice" which I think is currently binding under the law.

If pushed, APS/Modrall lawyers will litigate that there really
is no such thing as past practice. They will argue that point,
against the public interest and, on the taxpayer dime.

Finding 3;

Policies and procedural directives are not posted in a timely manner after approval by or presentation to the Board of Education.

Finding 4;

The APS Directory has not been properly updated ...

Finding 5;

Public records requests are not handled in a consistent manner. The District does not have a written policy or procedural directive related to requests for the inspection of public records.

Finding 6;

Two versions ...of the APS Employee Handbook are currently posted on the APS Intranet and the APS Internet.

Finding 7;

The APS Policies and Procedures link on the Risk Management Department website is incorrect.

Two policies and eleven procedural directives are not contained in the Risk Management link to the APS policies and Procedures.

These findings together beg at least one question;

How is it that a hundred years into this effort, the leadership of the APS still isn't getting even the simplest things done correctly or on time?

The answer is that the leadership of the APS has not written or enforced meaningful standards of conduct and competence, on each other.

The leadership of the APS is an oligarchy where administrative
evaluations are "subjective and unrelated to promotion ..."

It is the Peter Principle on steroids and a complete lack of
accountability to anyone other than each other.



Per the intention previously
expressed by Paula Maes,
this audit, like every other audit
did not name the names
of the corrupt and
incompetent senior
administrators whose
corruption and/or
incompetence are the
proximal cause of the various problems cited in the audit. Nor did the audit name the "executive directors" who then failed to respond to repeated requests from the auditor for information related to the audit.




photos Mark Bralley