Thursday, December 2, 2010

Fill-in-the-Blank Challenge

Get a Clue! Be the first on your block to complete this roadmap to uncovering corruption!

The (1)________________ School Board has abandoned its role to monitor the district's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) funds. The Board has remained silent after the district's Internal Auditor, (2)__________________, revealed the Board had not approved (3)___ million dollars in purchase orders referred to as (4)_______ P.O.'s. for the last four years. With preferential treatment in place and no incentive to provide quality-tutoring services, our students are being miserably shortchanged.


There is no better example of this shortchange than the district's Effectiveness Reports submitted to the (5)____________ Department (6)___________ for fiscal year 2010 for Supplemental Educational Services (SES) vendors. The report shows only 4 out of 72 vendors received an effective rating. This means the other 68 SES vendors allegedly serving our students received well over $3,000,000 for FY 2010, but were considered either not effective or needing improvement in tutoring basic reading and math.

In the Internal Auditor's working papers, (7)____________________ in FY 2009 was rated as needing improvement but was paid $306,188. In FY 2010, they were rated ineffective but still received $272,515 in payments. (8)__________________ was rated ineffective for both FY's 2009 and 2010 but received payments exceeding $171,000. These are just a couple examples among many of the significant payments made to ineffective SES vendors; yet, the district auditor concealed this information and left the Board as well as the public clueless to the enormous waste of the Nation's taxpayer dollars.

Auditor (9)__________ concealed other pertinent information as well. Part of the complaint filed by members of the district's community [on] (10)_______________ alleging fraud in the SES program, that initiated the internal audit, also alleged the Board had not approved the SES provider payments. The Internal Auditor's working papers used to construct a draft report dated (11)_____________ presented to the (12)_____________________ and copied to the full Board concluded the "Board approved the SES providers payments". This is a statement the (13)____________ later changes.

Less than two months later, on (14)_________________, the district's Assistant (15)__________________ on video contradicts (16)_______________'s conclusion that the Board had approved the SES provider payments. (17)________________ stated the multi-million dollar (18)________ P.O.'s did not have to be Board approved and that the (19)________ P.O.'s were considered blanket purchase orders. He further stated the (20)_________ P.O.'s were not vendor specific
.

Are you up for the challenge? Fill in the blanks below ... the correct answers will be posted in a day or two.

(1)___________________ (2)___________________

(3)___________________ (4)___________________

(5)___________________ (6)___________________

(7)___________________ (8)___________________

(9)___________________ (10)__________________

(11)__________________ (12)__________________

(13)__________________ (14)__________________

(15)__________________ (16)__________________

(17)__________________ (18)__________________

(19)__________________ (20)__________________

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is about Columbus, OH. See http://freepress.org/departments/display/18/2010/3994

Anonymous said...

This has nothing to do with DeKalb. It is an article from a newspaper in Ohio.

Anonymous said...

What's the point of posting this?! Do you have evidence that something similar happens in DCSS?

Anonymous said...

That Post was the most worthless thing I have seen on this board.

Anonymous said...

This is a worthless post.

Anonymous said...

As a future P'Tree Middle School parent, I looked at the school's website. HORRIFIC- especially the 6th grade VP's page. What's up with that? How is the school in general? Better than their own website would imply? Please say yes. I'm worried.

Anonymous said...

Not the subject of this blog, but if you want to REALLY be appalled at a school web site, look at Chamblee's. NO information, NO teacher e-mails, NO course info....awful to say the least

Anonymous said...

Idle hands are the devil's workshop.

Try some positive contributions.


There was an article in the AJC extolling the use of SpringBoard in Cobb county (although we frequently hae disparging remarks about SpringBpard in this blog). Maybe what our school system needs is some positive can do supporters. Kim would be an example of what we should be.

Anonymous said...

"Get a clue?"

No thanks...we've already had a clew.

Anonymous said...

THis is pretty typical for this blog.
Report anything and then delete the posters.

Anonymous said...

@ anonymous 9:13

"There was an article in the AJC extolling the use of SpringBoard in Cobb county (although we frequently hae disparging remarks about SpringBpard in this blog).'

I just read the article and I didn't see this. It didn't even say Cobb County uses Springboard. Here is the quote and the link below will take you to the article.


From the AJC article "Cobb grooms middle school students for college-level coursework":

"Advanced Placement courses are a trademarked brand offered by the College Board, a New York-based nonprofit. The company offers an official AP-prep program for grades 6-12 called SpringBoard, which is being used in almost 1,000 schools nationwide. "

Link to article:
"http://www.ajc.com/news/cobb/cobb-grooms-middle-school-764094.html"

Cerebration said...

@3:40 PM -- I checked the spam folder and found several comments in there. For some reason, Google has upgraded the comment filter and now it deems many more comments as "spam"... I'll try to check that more often. (Never used to have it at all...so I'm not used to it.)

Anonymous said...

anon 3:40

nail on the head regarding this blog.

If you dont agree with everything on this blog, your comments are removed.

Cerebration said...

That is absolutely not true. I am the only person who can remove comments (except that if you are logged in you can remove your own) and I do not do that. The only time I remove comments is when they name names, make unproven accusations or share personal info about non-public people.

Anonymous said...

If we're going to be off topic. Why have the continuing thefts of expensive new technology NOT been in the news? Over $300,000! Is DCSS trying to hide something ? Is it an inside job? Do the crime reports even to out beyond the DCSS security to the local police? With such a massive and expensive security department why haven't heads rolled?
Not to give more credence to the conservative critics but maybe DCSS doesn't care because it's tax payer's money.

Anonymous said...

Copiers have been stolen as well as computers from Dunwoody High School.

Why hasn't this been reported...

Anonymous said...

How about all of the AC units that went missing over the summer?

Anonymous said...

They have dubbed the thief "the creeper". Among some discussion that has come up at meetings is that he has keys to the cabinets that laptops are housed in and appears to know where all the security cameras are located.
Some of the larger items that have been taken include active boards. These are devices that have no use to the general public and would be difficult to sell by low level criminals. The thieves would also need to be using larger trucks in the commission of their crimes. This is way beyond petty theft.

Anonymous said...

We do pay $12,000,000 in salary and benefits for our security force. Where are they in all this?

Anonymous said...

Why do Fulton and others get the real police to investigate their crimes and DCSS is stuck with our expensive in-house security investigating ours? (see, the recent news stories about police departments arresting folks in other counties for stealing things). I wish we would mimic some of the good things taking place elsewhere (locally and nationally).