Show me the money!” Cuba Gooding Jr. shouted in “Jerry Maguire.” Too bad the D.C. Board of Education didn’t do the same. A grand jury is now looking into allegations made by former employees that Brenda Belton, executive director of BOE’s Office of Charter Schools, passed out $307,000 of federal funds in no-bid contracts to companies run by her relatives and friends.
In Wednesday’s Examiner exclusive, reporters Bill Myers and Scott McCabe reported that Belton — whose officewas raided by FBI agents in May — is suspected of steering charter school funds to five companies with close ties to her. Three allegedly shared the same tax ID numbers and were not even registered as D.C. businesses, including Equal Access in Education, whose listed address proved to be a vacant Northwest row house once owned by Belton and now co-owned by her daughter.
When members of Congress passed the D.C. School Reform Act a decade ago, it designated two official charter school authorizers: the Board of Education and an independent Public Charter School Board. This was their first — but not last — mistake. They should have seen it coming.
A November 2005 Government Accountability Office report pointed out that the federal law “does not require the BOE Office of Charter Schools to obtain an annual financial statement audit,” although PCSB is required to do so. Another key difference: Bolton’s office “relied on the schools‚ annual financial statement audits for key information related to financial oversight, [and] has not developed a system to assign priority to schools whose audits identified ongoing problems.” PSCB, on the other hand, “targeted additional monitoring on schools that needed more oversight.”
Congress should never have allowed two different entities to oversee the city’s charter schools, much less let them operate under such totally different standards of accountability. Particularly when the city’s education establishment was openly hostile to the whole charter school concept from the get-go. If the Department of Education now considers D.C. at “high-risk” for misusing federal funds, this poorly crafted legislation is partly to blame.
The GAO report also noted that “when the BOE Office of Charter Schools gave its Board monitoring information on its charter schools, the Board … did not regularly review that information.” Not surprising for an incompetent school board that spends $12,565 per pupil — and still can’t provide city youngsters with a decent education.
“This office has never been audited,” BOE Vice President Carolyn Graham admitted in June. With nobody on the board looking over Belton’s shoulder for the past 10 years, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to misdirect funds just like all the money for books, sports equipment and school maintenance that has disappeared over the years, skimmed off by crooked employees — and leaving a generation of already disadvantaged District children permanently crippled by the shoddy education they received.
Charter schools were supposed to be at least a partial solution, but it’s clear that the school board has failed the city once again.
