It seems that Diane Douglas, a TEA partyer, and her entourage, have decided to finally disclose the travesty of their chief financial controller’s misspending of Title 1 federal dollars. The blame is being cast upon staff that is gone from the agency. It is also being blamed on previous administrations. This is all transference or simplly put; buck passing!
The tab is 62 million dollars. The Fed wants it back. The incompetents at the Department of Education have decided to punish the schools for the agency’s transgressions. They handed it out wrongly and want to take it back by reducing what gets paid to the schools. The idea of the State paying the bill and not the schools has completely escaped their thinking.
How this all came about is the result of the federal governments Title One monies being dispersed incorrectly and allowably by the main money man at the agency all during the administrative changes resulting from elections. Yes the same guy with different bosses did this. Now his missteps, or outright illegal activity, are going to cost the children of Arizona 62 million dollars before they every get a high school diploma.
In an effort to cover up the malpractices the head of the agency’s Title One was dismissed after 28 years. All during that time she was against the funding practices of the agency, but powerless to control it. Title One was the “slush fund” for the agency’s pet projects or a backstop for overspending in other areas of the administration. Regardless of the elected bosses who came to the forth floor of the Department of Education, basic fund accounting was not being done correctly and the federal governments auditors caught them.
Now what is common in Arizona politics is to transfer the responsibility to someone down the chain of command or organizational hierarchy. Yeah…buck passing! Somewhere in the convoluted thinking of the leadership of these state agencies the idea that passing blame is sufficient to exhonerate the bossman or bosswoman. Yes modern ethics do not require the simplest test of responsibility nor even a hint of cupability. I think even the humblest of us looks at that as dishonest, deceitful, disengenuine, and an action with premeditated distain for the public expectation of “honesty in public service”.
So who is hurt and what are the consequences? It seems no one can know what the state agencies will give for funding in education until the money arrives and some clear explanation is made for how the money is to be spent. They may return long after dispensing the Fed’s money and take it back and hand you a bill for what they come up needing. Yes they give money to the schools and take it back….often! Our children are beaten repeatedly without explanation or reason.
The lastest scheme the Department of Education has cooked up involves taking dollars from other Federal program sources, let’s say Title Two, and consuming them in the secretive processes in the agency so that the shortages caused by the governor’s corporation favoring tax policies and the Arizona State educational revenue shortfall can appear to be working to further educations interests; ostensibly the children. Nothing could be further from the truth. The children are still being punished and now even more severely.
It is time for the public to take note of this and begin to push for a cleanup of the Arizona legislatures arrogant abuse of the taxpayers and their children. Voting will not be enough. Money will have to be formed in PACs and the funding of foundations like the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest should flourish. It will take years and generations of activism to dismantle the disfunctional legislative and executive branches of the State of Arizona. Teach your children well. The governor, the legislature, and the Department of Education have not and will not.