School Finance Can Be Complicated

But this was clearly a bad IDEA

I promise that I am not just beating a dead horse when I once again revisit the topic of the CMSD contract with The Sister Accord. The $200,000 contract caught my eye and raised several questions, and it turns out, I was right to think it smelled. I think it is wrong for our unelected school board to allow the CEO to enter into contracts for large amounts without board approval. I think the program directed at empowering powerful women working in administration at 1111 Superior is silly waste of public dollars. I suspect there are some personal relationships between the owner of The Sister Accord and someone in the CMSD administration. I think spending public dollars on a program that is quasi-religious is always wrong.

However, all of those thoughts and suspicions are nothing compared to what I found after further digging and public records requests. After looking at the funding source code on the $200,000 contract, I did some research, and it is a code used in school finance for special education funds. Every funding source gets a code from the Uniform School Accounting System (USAS). Money for IDEA Part B Special Education and Education of Handicapped Children is coded as 516. I sent a records request to CMSD to ask for a full accounting of their 2023-24 spending from fund 516. This week I received my records and about one minute after opening the spreadsheet and executing CTRL+F for The Sister Accord, I found the line:

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District, in a contract signed by CEO Warren Morgan, paid for The Sister Accord with funds given to the district to pay for the expense of providing education to students with disabilities.

This is what The Sister Accord promised to deliver to CMSD for $200,000 and not one word of it has anything to do with providing education to students with disabilities.

The state of Ohio provides school districts and anyone with a curiosity, a document on the IDEA Part B fund spending guidelines. You can read them here. But for those who don’t have time to click the link, I’ve got the highlights for you.

Women’s empowerment woo is not on the acceptable expenditure list. This contract absolutely should not have been paid for with IDEA Part B funds. I thought it was a little odd that the two other absurd contracts with The Sister Accord came from different funding sources. They were signed by the CFO, not the CEO, and presumably the CFO was aware of which funding sources could and could not be used.

Perhaps, if this contract had to go to the school board for approval, someone would have noticed that it was using IDEA Part B funds for something unrelated to providing special education services. Perhaps, oversight would have stopped this before signatures were affixed. Perhaps the school board will revisit the idea of endowing the CEO with this kind of power. I’ve submitted another record request to find out if the use of this fund for this contract was discussed at 1111 Superior.

Additionally, I submitted The Sister Accord contract to the State Auditor for frivolous spending and added that I suspected the funding used was unallowable. I’m now going to send them the spreadsheets that I received from CMSD. I’ve already come up with a big list of other questionable 516 fund spending that I’m going to look into.

Special education has always been underfunded. Every dime that a school district receives to serve children with disabilities must go to serve that student population. Any other use of those funds in unconscionable. Using them for The Sister Accord contract is gross and immoral. Last May, Dr. Morgan disdainfully referred to students with disabilities as SPEDS, over and over as he lamented how their lack of growth was a drag on the growth of regular education students and on his resume. But what if some of the lack of growth can be attributed to the misspending of educational dollars meant for their very specific educational needs? Could that $200,000 have gone to better use than self-love coaching sessions for adults who almost never come in contact with students, let alone contribute to their education in any meaningful way?

As soon as Dr. Morgan arrived at 1111 Superior, he started spending public dollars in questionable ways. While I have been appalled by the spending on personal awards and knick-knacks for his 2023 state of the schools speech, I was assured by people in the know, that he was likely using CEO discretionary funds and while that can be repugnant it is acceptable in school finance. It wasn’t until I started looking through this massive 516 fund spending spreadsheet that I have come to realize that there has been a lot of unallowable spending out of the IDEA Part B fund.

Remember how I mentioned being unable to come up with the magic words to get the people in Public Records to give me copies of the contract with Equity Matters? Well, the payments for Equity Matters, listed under Sonya Murray, are right there in the 516 fund spreadsheet. Three payments of $127,038.00 each to Sonya Murray. Now I have the magic words - the exact fund source and invoice numbers to request contracts. While I am sure that Dr. Murray believes the services she sells to school districts are worthwhile, it definitely falls under the unallowable expenditure category because it is “district wide PD not specifically directed at meeting the identified academic or developmental needs of students with a disability or for CEIS (coordinated early intervention services) activities.”

CMSD does not have enough paraprofessionals and the ones that we do have are still underpaid. We do not have enough intervention specialists. We have students in need of special education services who are incorrectly placed in schools because we do not have the staff to properly serve them. Those incorrect placements are wearing down the school staff and leaving these children without the services and the education they are legally entitled to receive. What money the government provides for their specific educational needs MUST go to them and not team building consultants.

I have been counseled by people with jobs in the school district to give Dr. Morgan and his team the benefit of the doubt and time, before I criticize what they are doing. Well, in fewer than 365 days, Dr. Morgan spent a half a million dollars of special education funding on The Sister Accord and Equity Matters. I’ve also submitted public record requests for ten more contracts/invoices listed in the 2024 516 fund spending spreadsheet. Multiple caterers were hired with this money. And a DJ. I don’t recall either of my sons in special education getting a fancy lunch and dance party written into their IEPs last year. But some of the spending coincides with the 2023 HEART Champions celebrations from the CMSD office of Customer Service. Weird, right?

The federal Office for Exceptional Children is charged with monitoring school districts for their use of IDEA Part B funds. I will be contacting them and sending them what I have collected. Since our unelected school board, which is still down several members, refuses to provide oversight on school district spending and our local media has just two reporters to cover all of the school districts in NEO, somebody has to do something.

I am happy to share the spreadsheets with anyone willing to look through them for items I have missed. There are so many expenditures, and it is daunting. Send me an email to pollykarr@gmail.com and I will forward what I have. I would love some guidance from others out there with more experience in this area. My expert-in-her-field (special education policy) wife is now locked down on studying for finals and will be of little assistance to me until December.

Gratitude

I am grateful for all of the people who take the time to read this blog. Especially grateful for everyone who finds it interesting and shares it with others. When I started writing this last May, I had no idea what it would turn into and how many amazing people I’ve gotten to meet or interact with online. Thank you, too, if you have chosen to join the Publicly Cleveland Conversations group on Facebook. We now have 500 members, not all of them bot accounts, and most of the time the conversations are interesting.