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Herald Editorial - Cutting the waste Massachusetts
spends nearly $2 billion to provide services to children with special
educational needs, and both their families and the taxpayers of the
commonwealth deserve every assurance that the money is well spent. State
Auditor Joseph DeNucci has provided one troubling example where that
just wasn’t the case. In
a report issued recently DeNucci’s office found that because of
“inadequate accounting and budgetary controls,” The Education
Cooperative, a public collaborative that provides services to 16
Metrowest school districts, mismanaged funds and doled out generous
benefits to employees, all while sitting on a $1.4 million surplus
funded with public school dollars. TEC’s
board of directors padded benefits for employees, eliminating a rule
that they work at least 10 years before qualifying for health care at
retirement in favor of a requirement of only one year of plan
participation. The
board also granted its former executive director an astonishing $77,111
annuity to supplement his earnings, despite the agency’s own survey
that found his $154,157 salary higher than his peers. He was also paid
by TEC for days he worked for a private consulting company, and
collected $44,520 to buy his own health insurance, DeNucci said. (Now
that’s a Cadillac plan.) TEC
has taken steps to correct shortcomings identified in the audit. Still
the report remains a troubling reflection of the failure to treat every
dollar in tuition collected from school districts with the care the
students and their families and the taxpayers deserve. As well it
reflects the failure of TEC’s board and state education leaders to
provide proper oversight. Collaboratives
like TEC are designed to be a cost-effective way to provide services to
students with needs that can’t be met in-district; 40 percent of
students placed outside their districts in the 2007-2008 school year
were placed in settings like this one. With
numbers like those and the stakes for these students so high, there
should be zero tolerance for waste. |
| Mailing Address:oseph DeNucci
P.O. Box 600252 Newton MA 02460 Office Location: 259 Walnut St Newton, MA 02460 Phone: 617.630.0600 Fax: 617.630.0625 E-Mail: HDQ@JoeDeNucci.com |
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