Former Lynwood school official charged with embezzlement

By Stephen Ceasar, Los Angeles Times
February 17, 2012

The Lynwood Unified School District’s former chief business officer was charged Thursday with embezzling more than $700,000 in public funds and filing false tax returns.

William Douglas Agopian, 60, of Santa Ana allegedly used the money from a district bank account to pay for tickets to professional baseball games, gas and his personal taxes over a four-year period, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

“The allegations do involve a significant violation of public trust involving funds that are intended for the students of the Lynwood Unified School District,” said prosecutor Dana Aratani.

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Houston ISD officials’ defense of contracts for friends ‘idiotic,’ ‘questionable’: Critics

Tuesday, Aug 23, 2011, 08:14AM CST
By Mike Cronin

Answering questions about no-bid contracts and business deals awarded to school board members’ friends, Houston Independent School District officials have replied that no laws or rules were violated.

That explanation troubles those such as Gene Maeroff.

“It’s idiotic. People know right from wrong,” said Maeroff, author of School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy and founder of the Hechinger Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York. He’s also board president of Edison Township public schools, the fifth-largest school district in New Jersey, with about 14,000 students.

Nothing in the HISD code of ethics bars board members from voting on contracts if he or she is a friend of the respective vendor. State law does not require competitive bidding on work that falls under the category of “professional services” like legal or consulting services.

Those omissions allowed HISD board President Paula Harris to vote to approve four contracts that included work for Westco, a Houston-based company owned by Harris’ friend, Nicole West. Harris and West are close enough that they traveled to Italy together in April. Westco has also done more than $100,000 in smaller projects for HISD that did not require the school board’s approval, and has been paid about $1.7 million by the district in total.

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Court documents reveal how controversial contract for Jordan-Elbridge official Paula VanMinos was negotiated

Wednesday, August 03, 2011, 9:19 AM
By John O’Brien / The Post-Standard

Jordan, NY — A Jordan-Elbridge school administrator was having a romantic affair with her boss when the two of them used deception to sneak her lucrative contract past school board members, a lawyer for the district argued in court papers this week.

Those secret dealings should absolve the district of its duty to pay for the legal defense of former interim Superintendent Lawrence Zacher and former Director of Operations Paula VanMinos in a lawsuit filed against Jordan-Elbridge, wrote John Sickinger, a lawyer for the district.

The court filing is the school district’s first public acknowledgment of the alleged affair and the conflicts of interest it posed. It also sheds light on a mystery that has surrounded VanMinos’ contract over the past three months — how the contract came into existence.

Zacher helped VanMinos “perpetrate a fraud” on the district by not disclosing their personal relationship and the highly favorable revisions to VanMinos’ contract before the board approved it in February, Sickinger wrote in the court filing. VanMinos arranged to have the district’s former lawyer, Danny Mevec, who was fired five weeks earlier, help her write the contract without board approval, Sickinger wrote.

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You be the judge: conflict of interest & ethics with public funds

A large, urban school district in central California has an ethics issue developing. Below is the information that has been uncovered so far. Senior district officials have been apprised of this situation. An official investigation has not yet been ordered.

To protect the identity of those that will/might/should eventually be investigated, individual names, company names and supporting documents are not included with this post.

1. A department director employed by the school district recommended the purchase of a new technology using $102,000 of Title I funds.

2. The department director, while employed by the school district, operates a one-person education consulting practice outside of his/her full-time employment.

3. The company that owns the technology recommended in #1 lists the department director’s consulting firm as a “partner” on their website.

4. The recommended technology purchase was approved by the district’s board of education.

5. The department director appears to have registered his/her consulting firm’s website address (domain name) two weeks before the school district’s board of education approved purchasing the technology.

What is not known is whether the department director disclosed to senior district officials his/her involvement with the firm that owns the technology. A disclosure was not included with the materials provided to the district’s board of education.

You be the judge. Based on the above information, what action should be taken against the district’s department director?

A. An investigation should be performed by the county’s District Attorney/Grand Jury.
B. An investigation should be performed by the State’s Attorney General.
C. Employment suspension.
D. Employment termination.
E. Jail.
F. No action.
G. Not enough information to make a decision.

Amidst layoffs and pay cuts, DPS buys emergency manager brand new $40,000 SUV

Posted: 08/05/2011
By: Ross Jones

(WXYZ) Detroit, Mich. – Most say the hardest job in Michigan doesn’t belong to the governor, not even Detroit’s mayor, but the new emergency manager for Detroit Public Schools.

So far, Roy Roberts has asked teachers, students and parents to share in some deep cuts, but tonight Action News Investigator Ross Jones has details on a costly new perk that’s raising eyebrows.

He’s ruffled some feathers with his straightforward and sometimes blunt approach to getting Detroit’s troubled schools out of a decades-long drought. And while there’s no doubt about Roy Roberts’ passion, there is concern tonight that a purchase made under his watch is sending the wrong message.

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Grand jury blasts Luther Burbank School District — again

By Sharon Noguchi
snoguchi@mercurynews.com
Posted: 07/03/2011 05:02:40 PM PDT
Updated: 07/04/2011 06:55:39 AM PDT

For the second time in three years, the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury has issued a biting report on the tiny Luther Burbank School District, which the jury alleges has wasted $900,000 on consultants and on buyouts of fired superintendents.

In a report issued last month, the jury called for the district to merge with one of its larger neighbors such as San Jose Unified. The report harshly criticized interim Superintendent Richard Rodriguez, who recruited and campaigned for a new board majority that took over in the fall. The jury alleged that trustees governed poorly, may have conducted business in secret and granted excessive authority to Rodriguez, whom it hired first as an unpaid consultant then named interim chief.

“Time really has come for this district to be consolidated with a larger district,” jury forewoman Helene Popenhager said. The biggest problem, she said, is “the naiveté of the board,” which the jury said has been misled, ceded authority and lost control of personnel and financial records. Also, the jury said the board has not responded to a 2009 grand jury report, lacks training and is inaccessible to constituents.

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Grand jury criticizes East Side Union school district for lax financial controls

By Sharon Noguchi
snoguchi@mercurynews.com
Posted: 06/28/2011 06:11:13 PM PDT
Updated: 06/29/2011 02:43:26 PM PDT

The East Side Union High School District has dragged its heels in putting its financial house in order, the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury found.

In a concise report issued this month, the jury criticized the 25,000-student district for not completely complying with state recommendations to tighten fiscal controls, particularly those over construction contracts.

“We felt that 18 months was an awful long time to correct some of the issues,” jury forewoman Helene Popenhager of San Martin said.

Those issues had been highlighted in a January 2010 state audit that found East Side awarded multiple no-bid contracts, rehired ex-employees without requiring conflict-of-interest statements and lacked sufficient documentation to judge allegations of wrongdoing.

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Robstown ISD must repay $1.27 million in misused federal grants, state says

By Rhiannon Meyers
June 3, 2011

The state wants Robstown Independent School District to repay $1.27 million the district misused in federal grant money aimed at helping migrant children.

The district intends to appeal the decision, said Superintendent Alfonso Obregon, who was not employed at the district during the time period under question.

State auditors found Robstown ISD, between 2002 and 2006, misspent funds on unapproved expenses, lacked an adequate record-keeping system to account for its spending, failed to show how its use of the federal grant money helped migratory children and continued spending after the grants ended.

Robstown is one of seven districts statewide that the Texas Education Agency has asked to repay federal grant money designed to provide migratory children, who move from school to school following their migrant worker parents, with tutoring, language lessons, health services and counseling.

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Washougal School District misspent portion of federal grant money, audit says

By Elliot Njus, The Oregonian
May 24, 2011

A state audit report released Monday says the Washougal School District misspent $31,687 in federal grant money by using it to pay a teacher who wasn’t highly qualified in the area he was teaching.

The audit says the district reported to the state the teacher was highly qualified to meet requirements for a Title I grant, which is intended to improve the teaching of students in low-income areas who are at risk of not meeting state standards.

But the teacher didn’t meet those qualifications, the audit said, and the school didn’t keep a required plan for Title I teachers who aren’t highly qualified. The district also didn’t notify school parents that the teacher wasn’t highly qualified.

In response to the audit report, the district said it had believed it met the requirements because the teacher was monitored by another teacher who was highly qualified in math. The district acknowledged it should have properly reported the teacher’s status to the state and to parents, but said its plan to mentor the teacher was enough to meet highly qualified requirements.

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$824,000 discovery generates questions for Toledo Public Schools

Miscalculation blamed on complex accounting
By CHRISTOPHER D. KIRKPATRICK
BLADE STAFF WRITER
September 5, 2010

How did Toledo Public Schools miss an extra $824,000 in the transportation budget desperately needed to increase student safety?

School district leaders and administrators agree the miscalculation was too large for comfort and shouldn’t have happened.

But they also say coming up with spending plans based on projections of revenues and expenses is never an exact science.

“Nobody was hiding anything, and nobody was intentionally understating anything,” TPS Treasurer Dan Romano said. “When I see a number like that, it’s important to me to find out: How did that occur? Why did that occur? And how does that detail get worked out as we go forward?”

Budgets are produced by individual department heads under the authority of the superintendent’s office.

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