School Board Rubber Stamp Begins with Checks

Checks written by the school district are reviewed twice monthly at the school board's Finance Committee.

On average, 300 checks are issued and reviewed at each meeting. The number of checks ranges from 175 to 450.

Check totals average about $1,700,000 each meeting. Since January, nearly $30,000,000 of checks have been written.

The school board's Finance Committee is charged with reviewing these expenditures and approving them to be forwarded to the school board for approval and release to vendors. The school board president historically even goes so far as to place the check run under the "Consent Items" portion of the full school board agenda. "Consent Items" are deemed to be those assumed to have unanimous school board approval. This clearly indicates that the intent is to simply rubber stamp the checks.

Every other meeting, the Finance Committee meets for only 15 minutes, from 7:15 to 7:30. That means an average of 20 checks are reviewed and "approved" every minute. On average, $100,000 of school district expenditures is "reviewed and approved" per minute."

Wait! Did we say approve? Silly us! One would assume that during this "review", checks written for questionable expenditures would be "denied"....right? Nope. Doesn't work that way.

According to school board member Caren Diedrich, neither the Finance Committee nor the School Board is in a position to "deny" approval of any checks because, "...the vendor has already provided a service or goods [SP-EYE: or pizza!] to the District and we can't deny payment for something we've already received."

Using that logic, what value added benefit does either the Finance Committee or the school board provide in even looking at the checks??? Why not just let' em fly??? Why even bother putting them on an agenda and meeting to discuss them...because no matter what is brought up during the discussion, approved the checks are (as Yoda would say).

Hello! I hate to break this to you, school board members, but there have been NUMEROUS cases of misappropriation and plain abuse of taxpayer funded school district monies. This is just more of the same inane reasoning that was used to make the ludicrous boundary decision.

When are we going to have a school board member that will stand up and say, "This is not right!"?

We haven't had an advocate for such common sense since several years ago when Jim Gibbs successfully convinced the rest of the school board members that paying Bray Associates before receiving money from bonds issued for construction of Horizon elementary made absolutely NO SENSE. He successfully argued that architects are used to having to wait for payment until after the bonds have been issued and the school district actually has received referendum funds for construction of a particular project.

We need to define what constitutes an appropriate expenditure, and actually AUDIT the checks being written. In the event of an inappropriate expenditure, the district employee who authorized the purchase should be made to reimburse the taxpayers. Do you seriously think that in the real business world, you can just take the company checkbook and purchase pizza for lunch or flowers for an ill co-worker? In many (but, no, not all) businesses, that would be grounds for termination. Instead, our school board...with Caren Diedrich leading the charge...feels that there rejecting any check or checks for payment is not an option.

It's plain and simply poor fiscal management practice to take the attitude that all checks must be approved for release because the "goods have been received". We're not saying that the vendors shouldn't be paid...we're saying that it's a question of WHO should be responsible for paying the vendor....and it may not be the taxpayers.

We also need accountability at the district administration level. Instead of loosey goosey policies with bigger loopholes than Dumbo's ears, we need clear written policy outlining what constitutes an appropriate purchase and the consequences associated with a district employee making an inappropriate purchase on behalf of the district.