The District of Columbia’s special education department paid $160 million in 16 months to send some 2,000 children to outside schools. But don’t expect school officials to be able to give a full account of where the money went.
More than a year after the Department of Education threatened to cut off federal funds to the schools because of shoddy accounting practices, the schools and the city finance office continue to mismanage their dollars.
In fiscal 2006, the legislated budget was $82 million for the education of the 2,000-plus children attending facilities outside the city’s public school system. Officials spent more than $114 million, records show.
Between October 2005 — the beginning of fiscal 2006 — and February 2007, nearly $10 million per month was spent. Each of the 17,805 transactions was approved by officials in the D.C. finance office.
Top school officials, including special education director Marla Oakes, declined comment for this story. Finance office spokesman Eric Balliet said that his office followed “normal accounting procedures.” But he would not provide backup documentation for the transactions.
D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty is scheduled to take control of the schools today. He has endorsed a call to bring in forensic auditors who will look for waste and corruption in the $1.3 billion school system.
It’s not clear what effect the audit will have. A finance official who spoke to The Examiner on condition of anonymity said that lieutenants of Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi are quietly fighting to limit the scope of the forensic audit to spare their boss embarrassment.
There are problems throughout the school system, critics say, but nowhere are they as acute as the special education department, which is supposed to teach and nurture some 10,000 students.
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ABOUT THIS SERIES » More than 10,000 children in D.C. public schools require special education. The schools last year spent more than $236 million on them. » In a three-part series, The Examiner takes a look at how this multimillion-dollar, federally funded system is failing the children of the District. » On Friday, The Examiner wrote about the D.C. Alternative Learning Academy, which remains in business despite complaints about its staff, its cleanliness and its effectiveness. Read that story. » On Monday, the story of two women struggling to protect children from what they say is an indifferent and sometimes brutal bureaucracy. Read that story. |
“This is a publicly funded agency that’s supposed to be serving the interests of disadvantaged kids,” said David McBride, a former D.C. special education official who now helps parents challenge the school system as a paid special education advocate. “And there’s no oversight as to how these kids are being served. None. It’s not even on the radar screens.”
‘Questionable arrangements’
Until this year, the schools were notrequired to screen special education vendors. Critics including McBride say that has allowed unqualified insiders to take advantage of their political connections to strike it rich at the expense of the city’s most vulnerable children — special education students.
“I’m confident that many of these arrangements are questionable,” McBride said.
The Examiner reported Friday on the D.C. Alternative Learning Academy, which has been paid more than $5 million since October 2005 despite audits that found unclean facilities, unqualified staff and violations of city code.
Officials at the academy did not return several calls for comment from The Examiner.
But there are many questionable vendors.
Records show that $3.8 million from the special education program were paid to ATEL Bus & Truck Co. in fiscal 2006. ATEL general counsel George Lowe told The Examiner that the money was paid to settle a breach-of-contract suit filed against the school transportation department, a separate department of the system.
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Federal law makes it a crime to spend congressionally appropriated money for anything other than its appropriated purpose.
When ATEL was an active contractor, Lowe said, it wasn’t unusual to receive checks drawn from different funds.
“They were always taking money from one pot to another,” he said.
That is not the limit of the problems in the system.
The financial records obtained by The Examiner show countless “credits” coming in from vendors. The finance office source said the credits are there to make up for duplicate payments. E-mails previously obtained by The Examiner show that school officials were warned more than a year ago that there were numerous vendors being paid for work they hadn’t done.
The Examiner already has reported on the Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Institute. Officials at the institute did a routine audit and discovered the school system had overpaid them by nearly $250,000. The institute tried to give the money back, but it took more than a year for school officials to accept it.
The records also show that more than 200 transactions occurred without a vendor being named. Such transactions cost the public nearly $2.2 million in 16 months, the records show.
Balliet, the finance office spokesman, said that those transactions were for “personal services.” But he would not elaborate on what he meant by that, nor would he provide the paperwork that would explain the transactions.
Why won’t officials hand over their supporting documentation? The source at the finance office said it’s probably because they don’t have it. School officials are sending out tens of millions of dollars in payments without demanding contracts, invoices or other basic anti-fraud measures used by accountants around the country, the source said.
At public expense
Beyond budget records, there are concerns about who’s receiving these expensive services. An audit by the finance office last year sampled a few hundred children in the special education system being sent outside the public schools. The sample produced at least a dozen children who weren’t eligible to have the public pay for private tuition and another 385 whose paperwork was missing.
Gina Arlotto is the co-founder of the Save Our Schools Coalition, a nonprofit group that is trying to reform D.C.’s education system. She said that it wasn’t unusual for the children of top national political figures to show up in D.C. schools, get themselves declared “special education,” and then attend expensive private schools at public expense.
D.C. schools lawyer Abbey Hairston would not identify the 2,111 children receiving outside educations at public expense, citing privacy laws.
McBride, the special education advocate, said he wouldn’t be surprised to find widespread fraud in the system.
“School officials know about these problems,” he said. “They just don’t care.”
