Few details have been released so far regarding a recent Justice Department settlement that requires Fairfax County Public Schools to repay the U.S. Department of Education $1 million. The school district stood accused of forging signatures on a five-year, $2.7 million grant it received in 2000. However, judging from what little information is available, the school system got off easy.
As The Examiner’s Lisa Gartner reported, the federal government initially wanted to impose multimillion-dollar damages and fines as allowed under the False Claims Act. But after eight years of negotiations, during which time county residents were kept completely in the dark, DOJ eventually agreed to limit the damages to $1 million, presumably because FCPS self-reported the fraud by an unnamed employee and suspended the Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, or GEAR UP, grant before spending all the ill-gotten funds.
But the settlement agreement raises more questions than it answers. FCPS says an internal audit uncovered the forged signatures in 2004, a year after the unnamed perpetrator had already left the school system. The forgery had been used to falsely convince the Education Department that FCPS had secured $2.9 million in matching funds from private companies — a condition of the grant.
Forgery and fraud against the federal government are both criminal acts, but there’s no mention of any legal action taken against the employee in question. An FCPS spokesman would not even disclose whether the anonymous employee left voluntarily or involuntarily. Why the secrecy?
And the numbers don’t add up, either. The GEAR UP grant was used to fund a mobile computer lab with 20 wireless computers and a full-time “Career Center specialist” at Glasgow Middle School, enabling 1,200 underprivileged children to research possible careers and then formulate specific academic goals to prepare for college and beyond. Glasgow also held several career days, inviting parents to come in and talk to students about their occupations.
These are laudable goals, but neither the Education Department nor FCPS explained why achieving them at just one Fairfax middle school would cost millions of dollars. FCPS contends that “all funds received by the grant were spent on student programs at Glasgow,” but doesn’t elaborate.
Elected members of the Fairfax School Board should ask school system employees these same questions, and then let Fairfax taxpayers, who have been stuck with the $1 million tab, know what really happened.
