Portfolio Management At LAUSD: Private Security, Promotional Hats, Outsourced Instruction, No-Bid HighTech Contracts
In mid-May, 2020 the LAUSD board reviewed the Deputy Superintendent’s weekly lists of purchases and contracts for March 16-May 8, 2020, part of “the $540m in expenditures for Covid19” approved through the LA County Office of Education (LACOE).
That $314m is detailed below, authorized under the emergency conditions declared two months earlier at the board’s special meeting of March 10, 2020. This is also when last the board met in regular session prior to 5/19/20; three days later the District shuttered ordinary operations on March 13, 2020.
Under this “Emergency Resolution” the Superintendent may “…enter into necessary contracts to respond to emergency conditions.” That is, these expenditures are subject to neither venerable bidding protocols that control waste, fraud and abuse, nor oversight by the school board, which sets District policy. LACOE now approves these expenditures but according to what directives?
The Superintendent who now controls purse, policy and process, was appointed with a tenuous mandate, by a school board elected under an avalanche of ideological school-privatization money. That board unethically extending the tenure of its slim majority just long enough to appoint this Superintendent by failing to censure its swing board member charged with felonious campaign fraud. What priorities does the former investment banker Superintendent Austin Beutner’s emergency spending reveal?
Figure 1 shows the relative distribution of the two broad categories of CONTINUE READING: Portfolio Management At LAUSD: Private Security, Promotional Hats, Outsourced Instruction, No-Bid HighTech Contracts – Los Angeles Education Examiner
