Update 2: So I have seen a message from President Liza Rankin on why she, Director Evan Briggs, and Director Michelle Sarju backed out of this meeting. In a nutshell: - She says there was no organization to the meeting which is just not true. They had a moderator lined up and naturally the board members could have set parameters for what to discuss, length of meeting, etc. All that was fleshed out. - She also claimed that if the meeting was PTA sponsored, they needed to have liability insurance to use the school space. Hello? PTAs use school space all the time and know they have to have this insurance. - She seems to be worried about the Open Public Meetings law. Look, if she has a meeting in a school building on a non-personnel topic, it should be an open meeting. It appears that Rankin is trying, over and over, to narrow the window of access that parents have to Board members. She even says in her message - "...with decisions made in public." Hmmm - She also says that th
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Check out the front page of the Seattle Times!!!!!!
-justmovedawaybecausespecialedissoscrewewdupinseattle
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014303247_audit23m.html
Financial scandal hits Seattle Public Schools
sigh.
And...is there any accountability of the money we just approved in the most recent supplemental levy?
If the supe and her CFO are at all involved or this happened due to a lack of oversight on their part, they will have to go and it will be up to us to pressure the board and/or replace board members to make that happen.
"Us" meaning "parents".
It will be up to us as parents and concerned citizens to make that happen.
Potter and Stephens were quite proud of their efforts, but Stephens (from the Times piece) is now trying to absolve himself from any oversight.
Oversight. Levy? The Board won't fire MGJ. Their oversight, or lack of, allowed Potter to do what he did and get away with it in plain sight.
The Reform crowd can spin this as yet another reason for their brand of reform. Scandal = opportunity. They'll embrace the word 'oversight' like an iron lung.
@ wsnorth: Agreed. The Board needs to fire MGJ, but since oversight is their primary job, it would smack of hypocrisy unless they absolve themselves, apologize for their failure and/or collusion, or quit. I'd ask McGinn to take over, but he can't even take over the tunnel.
At the risk of sounding like a carnival fortune teller, I predcit we'll continue to read it here first, and SPS will continue to bumble along and be the neverending cash cow for fraud. (Do an archive search on SPS and SPICE, go back 10-15 years. Money goes missing from this district all the time.)
What a shame. As if PRIVATE entities, non-union, are less prone to fraud, as if they have some higher standard of oversight...
Perhaps they do: The profit motive is a strong enticement to oversight - "are we getting the most dollars? Is EVERYONE (stockholders included) getting profit from the "business" (even if the profit is predicated on fraud, such as the mortgage frauds...)
The Board must act to admit culpability and act to guarantee future oversight. Privatizing won't help; our PUBLIC board and district must be held accountable.
(We should probably continue the scandal discussion in the new thread Mel just posted up.)
I listened to the segment today as I drove around doing errands before the Big Scary Snowstorm hits (a whopping zero inches so far), and I thought Mel did a great job.
I found it interesting that Mel and Paul (Guppy) had some areas of agreement: Paul went on and on about how lousy SPS is with money, and there's really no argument about that any more, is there? But the important thing is, this levy is NOT SPS money, it's City of Seattle money, and we can certainly hope there'll be more transparency and, dare I say, integrity?
http://www.cityofseattle.net/neighborhoods/education/
I really don't want to end up seeming to oppose this by asking questions, since in 1990 I was part of a team that campaigned for the original levy and have supported it many times. Nonetheless, when the support was eliminated for the after school programs for middle school, I don't think that was due to them not working. The exact reasons were never clear.
When one branch of government is asserted to be more trustworthy than another, just because it is different, my cautious side is alerted. If the District were more privatized much of what is coming out now would be buried and not subject to public scrutiny. The trust should be built due to the automatic built-in transparency and ease of obtaining details of expenditures and services received no matter which public entity it is.