SF Schools Rogues Gallery
Superintendent of San Francisco Schools, Carlos Garcia, has vowed to reform his administration and make accounting more transparent, in an attempt to clean up the image of SFUSD in the wake of the Trish Bascom embezzlement scandal. (Didn’t Arlene Ackerman do this already?) Garcia plans to tighten district accounting practices, hire an internal auditor and require competitive bids for future contracts with organizations running after school programs.
Bascom and four others in the Student Support Services Department are accused of diverting tens of thousands of dollars to their own personal bank accounts. Garcia continues to play dumb and to deflect all blame onto rogue elements in the district. “We were pretty shocked…” he said. “Our systems were good, but they could never ensure that our system could control someone doing something stupid.”
SFUSD has a long history of corruption and scandal reaching up to its highest echelons. Garcia should not only have been aware of this history, but actively working to destroy its remaining vestiges. Bascom, for example, had been an administrator since the Bill Rojas days. Considering how corrupt Rojas was, it would not be surprising to find out that Bascom picked up a few of her tricks from the expert himself. At the very least, Garcia had a