During a
Fairfax County
,
Virginia
, school board meeting last week, Karen Keys-Gamarra, an at-large member who served as the board’s audit committee chairwoman for two years,
gushed
to the school district’s internal auditor, “I personally wanted to thank you for being a partner … and for making us look good.”
Keys-Gamarra and the other 11 members offered platitudes for roughly 30 minutes about the greatness of the school district’s internal auditor,
Esther Ko
, who is charged with reviewing the district’s operations. I was sitting in the audience at Luther Jackson Middle School with other parents and winced. We had just stood on Gallows Road at a rally for transparency, urging other parents to sign our
petition
demanding transparency for parents regarding our children’s academic progress reports, recognitions, awards, and postsecondary scholarship eligibility. We plan to send it to the school board, and I encourage everyone to sign it.
THE SCHOOL CHOICE MOMENTUM CONTINUES NATIONWIDE
The school board’s effusive gratitude toward Ko doesn’t pass the proverbial smell test. Fairfax County’s schools are facing serious allegations of discrimination following reports that they deliberately withheld academic awards from students to promote “equity.” The school district is even under investigation by the Virginia attorney general. And yet the person with the task of scrupulously bringing corruption to light and making sure things are done right seems to have far too familiar a relationship with the school board. The board’s members even unanimously passed a special resolution to make May an “Internal Audit Awareness Month.”
Frankly, the resolution and excessive praise from school board members are suspicious.
In case school board members need to hear this, the job of an auditor is not to make the organization being audited “look good.” When it was my turn to speak my two minutes during the board’s meeting, I looked Keys-Gamarra and other board members in the eye and
said
the school district’s attempt to have its own independent and objective internal audit office is comparable to a cigarette company funding an investigation into the correlation between smoking and lung cancer.
The internal auditor’s job is to find mistakes, fraud, and abuse. In fact, the previous auditor, Goli Trump,
claims
to have found evidence of corruption in a school district contract with Cenergistic, an Enron-linked, for-profit “green” firm. Trump asserts that the then-school board president, Sandy Evans, fired her and the whistleblowers for investigating the Cenergistic contract because it implicated Evans and the then-superintendent, Karen Garza. Trump is now
suing
for wrongful termination.
In short, the school board has a complicated history with the Office of Auditor General, but something seems to have changed.
I was already skeptical of the current auditor general’s independence when I filed a complaint this month against the school district for
charging
me $280 to access my son’s curriculum materials. Access to curriculum is a parental right guaranteed under the federal Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment.
I had initially requested my son’s social-emotional learning lessons for the 2022-2023 academic year in February. The school’s principal informed me that she “had been told” to send my request to the office overseeing requests under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. Despite the mountain of evidence that I presented in my claim indicating abuse, the auditor responded, “We have reviewed your claim and did not find credible evidence of fraud, waste, and abuse.”
When I listened to the school board members’ torrent of compliments this week, the decision made by the auditor about my request, and the several nonresponses other parents received, suddenly made perfect sense.
Earlier this year, mother Norma Margulies filed a complaint against the $455,000 sole-source
contract
to Performance Fact for strategic consulting. She hasn’t heard back. Mother and journalist Asra Nomani filed a complaint with the auditor general against the withholding of National Merit awards from students. She never heard back.
The school district can claim that its Office of Auditor General is independent and objective, but that simple assertion doesn’t make it true. Objectivity is lost when the auditor’s livelihood is contingent on the school board’s approval of the auditor general’s performance. Given that the district has a history of firing auditors who find problems, it seems clear that what the district needs is a truly objective external audit of its $3.5 billion budget, vendor contracts, and curricula.
At the end of the meeting, we gathered up our signs, mine with a copy of the district’s payment demand for $280, and we, as parents, left even more committed to our cause. Parents deserve transparency, and we will not tolerate Fairfax County’s efforts to deny us that right.
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Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and a member of the Independent Women’s Network.
