The Baltimore Sun is reporting, in a series of stories, most by Erica Green, that Baltimore City Public Schools staff in the central office spent an excessive amount of money on things like a $7,300 office retreat at a downtown hotel and a $1,000 dinner at an exclusive members-only club.
City officials, namely Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, were focused yesterday on the start of school, but the mayor has asked the school board to review expenses incurred in a credit card procurement program begun by schools CEO Andrés Alonso in January 2011. Items included lunch at Hooters for students, $13,600 in office catering, plus about $5,000 in expenses that were deemed inappropriate (those who spent on inappropriate items will have to pay the money back to the school system).
We started hearing a few months back, also through investigative reports in the Baltimore Sun, that a renovation of office space for the school system’s Information Technology Department was costing an inordinately large amount of money. It was argued at the time that, in order to attract talented technology workers to the schools, the office space itself had to be on par with modern offices in corporations that were head-hunting the same talented tech workers.
When that story got reported, my first thought was, I used to be one of those talented tech workers, keeping databases in line for a major nationwide banking operation. All I honestly wanted to do was figure out how I could work at home.
The office wasn’t the draw, trust me; it was the work itself, the excitement of writing machine-level instructions for some pretty fancy gizmos. Some of my best work was done, in fact, at a big long table with a few mathematicians, sitting around in a room, not an office or even a cubicle, with the carpet being threadbare, in a building where the windows had mold on them, with take-out food containers laying around.
And seeing some of the stuff we developed in action, boy, seeing the loan officers at banks easily make their way through this screen that I designed or that utility that let them adjust CD rates on the spot, that makes you feel pretty good, like you’re never going to leave.
So the talk about office space at Baltimore City schools I was reading in the Sun was like a foreign language. I couldn’t really figure out where the Baltimore City school system was coming from.
Now I work for the Maryland State Department of Education. My job requires that I spend a few months every year in hotels in other cities, so this story hits a little close to home, though I hope I have followed the lead, more, of my own department, which is substantially different, from a culture perspective, from Baltimore City schools.
For example, when I spent six weeks in Houston a few years ago, I let the department know that I had received a personal email from the manager at a hotel in Houston’s Westchase district, advising me that I qualified for a discount because a fire alarm had accidentally gone off the one night I stayed there in advance of my long stay. So, I passed that info on to the people who arranged my travel, and next thing I know, I get a hotel room for $89 a night for the entire six-week stay. They didn’t even charge us the tax on that, you’ll be happy to know, because Texas has a law where long-term hotel stays, like mine, don’t incur any room tax.
So, my point is not to say what a good employee I am when it comes to controlling spending, or to say that state or government workers should shop for bargains. The bargain sort of got dropped on me, and I saw an opportunity to save the state some money. And once or twice every six weeks, I’ll go out for a nice dinner, spending maybe $25 or $30, instead of my customary $15, but it gets a little old to eat out every night, so I also buy groceries for my hotel room.
But modest expenditure is not what this story is about. The problem in Baltimore City schools appears to be repeating and ingrained in the culture. Not only do they spend your tax dollars freely, it seems they don’t even think about it very hard. Dr Alonso “claimed the vast majority of such expenses were perfectly legitimate,” the Sun reported.
Legitimate? Yes, but “perfectly”? People need to eat, and if you ask them to work away from home, you do have to feed them, so that legitimizes the expense of meals. But $1,000 for one meal? That kind of spending has been happening “with virtually no controls or oversight,” one article said, and it’s just unconscionable. Apparently, rules were published and made available to staffers about spending on the department-issued credit cards, but no one actually enforced those rules.
Here’s the thing: school systems (or any business, really) can’t exactly hire an accounting staff to enforce how much people are spending. Accounting staffs at schools have to do things like make sure somebody pays the bills for heating, electricity, lunch-food suppliers, and so on. Worrying too much about individual staff spending would take too much attention away from the system’s real line of business: turning kids into lifelong learners and encouraging them to grow.
Spending in a nonprofit operation, like the public schools, requires the development of a culture at the central office. Establishing a culture takes a long time and leadership that leads by example. If it’s true that Dr Alonso paid an inappropriate amount of overtime to his chauffeur, as the Sun reported, that sets a tone for everyone else. If the I/T Department gets lavish offices, that sets a tone for all the other departments, which, obviously, need to attract high-level talent as well.
Dr Alonso has a few things on his plate besides how much he pays his chauffeur, but when you’re spending public money, you have to try to get a handle on spending. It sounds like they are not even trying. The news headlines are just too easy to write when you take kids to Hooters for lunch. I don’t even eat at Hooters.
