THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, November 10, 1995 TAG: 9511090155
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
Between the lines of some City Council and School Board rhetoric, I hear the scary mur-mur of a com-pro-mise:
If the city won't fully pursue the ``whodunit'' of the school-finance fiasco then the long-sought consolidation of school and city accounting chores is a done deal.
Whoa, Nel-lie.
Hopefully, I hear wrong. But thankfully, Com-mon-wealth's At-tor-ney Bob Hum-phreys just grabbed the reins on that one. Wednesday he asked that Circuit Court judges empanel an investigative grand jury. It would subpoena witnesses to testify under oath. It would then send the court a report that should go beyond the numbers to the names - and that the court (which has discretion) should let go to the public.
Why? Because having KPMG Peat Marwick recrunch '94-'95 numbers was a first step to two goals: budgeting school funds properly and fingering the guys who-du-nit improperly so they and their successors don't get to do it again. The public simply has a right to know who they are. The School Board simply stalls.
Nevermind the argument that so many people had their hands on the budget that no individuals can be held responsible for any individual hare-brained, even illegal action, or for the pattern of incompetence evident from the auditors' report.
Forget the old dodge that ``everybody's responsible so nobody's responsible.'' However many hands touched the school budgets, a distinct few had authority to alter the numbers, or to direct that they be changed.
The auditors' report confirms - in words comprehensible to any literate being - that what went wrong wasn't just unfamiliarity with arcane rules of encumbrance and fund accounting, though you would expect at least a nodding acquaintance with those rules in all top officials of a public-school system. In fact, the Virginia Beach public school system had plentiful knowledgeable finance people for years. But not lately, and not by chance.
No, what went wrong here - whether by design or default - was the emergence of a culture and a cadre that ignored (if it ever knew) the basic, fundamental, elemental purposes of any budget - yours, mine, the school system's: to reasonably estimate income and out-go, to monitor income and outgo, and to adjust outgo as necessary. That just plain didn't happen here. And while certainly there are reasons, there is no excuse.
Any School Board, school administration and City Council members who think all official duties done when the '94-'95 accounting was redone disregard what makes this school-budget bungle different from the occasional overdraft in the household account:
It dealt with other people's money.
It affects the ability to teach the city's children.
And it traces to some of the very people who've been entrusted not only with the citizens' money but with the education of their kids.
What an education!
What role models!
What farce.
Let's get one more argument out of the way: that if the schools had been ``adequately'' funded to start with, all this fund-shifting wouldn't have been necessary. On the contrary, look at the history: The same people who fumbled this $304 million operating budget - and nobody's vetted the capital budget yet - would just have had more money to fumble, all in the name of ``the children.'' ``For the children,'' the mantra of the Faucette administration - and how dare anybody challenge or probe any expenditure made in their name!
Somewhere in this investigative process, somebody has to ask questions like this: What did the Serv-ice-Mas-ter mess do ``for the children''?
Somewhere in this investigative process somebody has to ask Sid Faucette, his development di-rec-tor/chief financial officer Mort Smith and School Board members present at this abomination how it happened on their watch.
That somebody has to not only ask the question. That somebody has to refuse to take ``I didn't know,'' ``He made me'' or ``The dog ate my paperwork'' for an answer. by CNB