Sacramento City Unified officials slammed by fiscal adviser | The Sacramento Bee
‘No confidence’: State adviser slammed Sac City Unified officials in fiscal crisis, emails show
An independent fiscal adviser blasted the Sacramento City Unified School District this spring while it was calculating huge cuts to jobs and programs, saying he had “no confidence” in its business staff or their data.
“It appears to me your staff has again demonstrated that they don’t have the capacity or willingness to produce accurate data,” Mike Fine of the state-created Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team said March 7 in a string of emails to Superintendent Jorge Aguilar and board President Jessie Ryan, expressing distress over the data the district was presenting in its second interim budget report.
“That may seem like a strong statement, but I need you to hear me clearly so I’m being direct,” Fine continued. “It appears they load data in a system and then press the print button and add it to the board agenda without reviewing it, analyzing it, etc. They must take responsibility for that and you must hold them accountable for that.”
Fine copied Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Sacramento County Superintendent of Schools Dave Gordon on the emails.
The records were received by the Sacramento City Teachers Association through a public records request and independently obtained from the district by The Sacramento Bee. The teachers union said it requested the emails “because of the lack of transparency at the district and because the district has been so badly mismanaged.”
CAPACITY, LEADERSHIP QUESTIONED
Fine said in the emails that he had long raised issues about cash flow and budget oversight, but felt the district was not taking his advice. He expressed concern about the capacity and leadership of the business office.
He also said the second interim budget data was “not adequately reviewed and vetted by the county before they were published, publicly or privately,” and that the district seemed to be disengaged with the county Office of Education.
Ryan in an email response to Fine rebutted the notion that the district was not communicating with the Sacramento County Office of Education, citing weekly meetings with Gordon.
“I also am not aware of any feeling by Superintendent Gordon that our district has disconnected from him, his team, or otherwise rejected SCOE’s assistance in this process,” Ryan said in an email response to Fine.
“When districts fall into severe fiscal difficulty such as SCUSD is facing, the County Superintendent is empowered by state statutes to take various steps to tighten oversight and provide assistance to the district to help get them out of fiscal distress,” Gordon said in a statement to The Bee.
Aguilar defended the business staff in his email response to Fine. Noting that the financial recovery plan required negotiations with the district’s unions, he said Sacramento City Unified had CONTINUE READING: Sacramento City Unified officials slammed by fiscal adviser | The Sacramento Bee
FROM
FCMAT Emails: No Confidence in District Administration, Challenges Board Secrecy
|
|
We strongly encourage you to read the article that was posted Friday (July 19) by the Sacramento Bee. The FCMAT emails referenced in the article express strong concerns regarding the District's fiscal mismanagement and the Board's secrecy and lack of transparency.
In addition, for those who are further interested, we are including the actual emails cited in the story, which include several items not included in the Sacramento Bee story.
Later that same night--March 7--the Sacramento City School Board voted to significantly cut Child Development, and to layoff 170 certificated and 200 classified staff.
At least one board member has confirmed that she was not provided copies of the FCMAT emails, the letter from David Gordon, or Mr. Aguilar's April 1 confirmation email.
The mistake was not made public until the mid-May 2019, where it was included, but not called out, in the middle of the District's Third Interim Budget.
Since then, the District has either rescinded the layoff or made a job offer to all but two of K-12 classroom teachers who were laid off. The District has not yet addressed PE teachers, social workers, counselors or the psychologists who were laid off. The District has also not addressed Child Development.
|
|
