Trenton’s Sped Spending Could Be Telling of State-Wide Problem (NJ)
November 23, 2010
The misspending of millions of dollars in special-education funds uncovered in the Trenton School District earlier this year might be part of a more pervasive problem, state Auditor Stephen M. Eells said.
"Do I think these performance issues are in other districts?" Eells said. "Of course."
In Trenton, which gets about 90 percent of its $238.4 million budget from the state, Eells found that the district was paying the private-school tuition bills of disabled students who either never showed up to class or were chronically absent. Of the 11,000 pupils, an estimated 2,000 are classified for special education.
Teachers were submitting bogus time sheets for home-instruction lessons they never taught, he found. In one case, a teacher was cutting and pasting parents’ signatures to time sheets totaling $51,000.
Meanwhile, the district’s accountant was trying to hide out-of-control spending with "misleading" budget figures, Eells reported.
The district’s own audit subsequently identified $10 million in out-of-district tuition and employee health-benefit bills that administrators deliberately kept off the books.
Now a Mercer County grand jury and the state Attorney General’s Office are investigating, and legislators are raising questions about the New Jersey Department of Education’s oversight role.
At the time, the department had a budget supervisor working with the district. But because of home rule, such staff members work only in an advisory capacity, Eells said.
"They can make suggestions of correction ac tion, (but) they don’t have the teeth to force change," Eells said.
In the Trenton audit, Eells looked beyond the district’s budget to see whether sufficient controls were in place to monitor private-school attendance and home-instruction time sheets. In the latter instance, in addition to apparently fraudulent billing practices, he found that out of 136 students he sampled who were supposed to be receiving home instruction, 115 had no lesson plans on file.
"That, to me, is worse," Eells said. "What are you teaching them? . . . Are we spending money in circles here?"
On the heels of the audit’s release in March, a state fiscal monitor, Mark Cowell, was appointed to take control of the district’s finances. Eells, Cowell and officials from the district and the state Education Department were called to testify on Sept. 15 before the state Senate Education Committee.
In his testimony, Cowell said the steady flow of state aid into the district, coupled with poor administrative oversight, created "a perfect storm in Trenton."
"When you have a lot of money," he said, "you can cover up a lot of things."
But in the wake of recent draconian cuts in state education aid, he added, no amount of accounting slight of hand could mask Trenton’s fiscal mess.
In addition to working with Cowell to address its accounting problems, the district has hired a new administrator for its special-education program. Meanwhile, acting state Education Commissioner Rochelle Hendricks said her department is working to tighten its fiscal oversight procedures.
State Sen. Shirley K. Turner, D-Mercer, a former Trenton school teacher, said she was not satisfied.
"Everybody there was saying: "We don’t know. We weren’t there then. It’s not our fault,’ " she said. "Nobody wanted to accept responsibility for anything."