Seattle Schools Community Forum

Charlie posted the district's news release on the audit. I always enjoy the minimizing that goes on in these things. One of the most clearly called out issues of the audit was lack of Board oversight of BEX spending to the point where the Board was not even being told about spending. What does the press release call it ( in the middle of a paragraph): ".. .communications with the Board ..." Like staff forgot to send the Board an e-mail. So what did the Board have to say? At first, when Steve asked for comments or questions, there was dead silence. That wasn't a good sign. He then handed the microphone over to Michael DeBell, noting that Michael was the only current Board member who was on the Board serving during the audit time period. Michael pointed out that there were 3 different Boards over the time period. Then Michael started something I thought I would see from other Board members but not him. He started the CYA period. He asked the auditors to expand ...

The District sent out a press release on the State Auditor's report of the BEX audit that was full of happy talk. The District has already posted the audit findings and response to the audit response web page .

As I reported before, tomorrow is the day when the district has their " Construction Management Exit Conference " with the State Auditor's office. This is an audit of the capital building program known as BEX (Building Excellence). I believe it covers the last 3-5 years. I've said repeatedly that this is important because: this audit has taken the Auditor's office two years to get through (not normal at all) that on the first reading of the audit more than a year ago, members of the BEX Oversight Committee starting talking about how to cover themselves and because Garfield went nearly double over its original construction budget (the early published number was $60M) and it costed out at about $120M. That is not a sign of a well-managed project or program. we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when we have a huge backlog of capital work I want to be clear that we have gotten a lot of building done under the BEX program. But, like ma...