Charter School of Wilmington is up for their charter school renewal with Red Clay Consolidated School District. The Red Clay board discussed this charter renewal with Dr. Sam Paoli, the President of CSW, at their meeting tonight. It came out that CSW is breaking state law in a very major way.
In Delaware, the use of petty cash comes with some very strict requirements. One of those stipulations is you can’t have more than $5,000 in petty cash funds at any given time. CSW, it was revealed tonight, was keeping $70,000 in petty cash reserves. This is 14 times the limit! The Delaware Budget and Accounting Manual (BAM) is very clear about this.
This isn’t the first time CSW got busted for petty cash abuse. The first time was two years ago when State Auditor Tom Wagner, instead of doing an actual investigation, wrote non-transparent letters to several charter schools about what they were doing that is against the law. It wasn’t until State Representative Kim Williams sent his office a FOIA request that the truth came out. The second time was last summer when I conducted my own audit to see if schools took what Wagner sent them to heart. CSW obviously didn’t as they had 14 petty cash payments going out over the limit of $500 which totaled $12,268.52.
I hope the State Auditor’s office is reading this. They are in clear violation and were given official notice by Wagner two years ago. They obviously don’t care and think rules don’t matter. They just do what they want. I hope Red Clay puts them on formal review!
CSW also failed to have all their board members get the official training required by law to be a board member. More rules they don’t think they have to follow.
If they are breaking those kind of rules, which are fairly basic, perhaps they need a full audit investigation to determine what other rules they don’t think they have to follow.
The Season Of Myths 
Actually, I didn’t hear this part during the presentation, unless it happened at the end (I left during Hugh’s presentation). I was referring the the insightful discussion between Jose Matthews and Sam Paoli regarding numbers of minority groups in CSW.
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Can’t see McGuiness doing anything about this and I hope I’m wrong but probably not
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If McGuiness were to focus on truly material risks, rather than spending her time box-checking minor faults, then she will have fulfilled the aggregate expectations of the Delaware taxpayers. The blogger here has not shown that there was any actual misuse of public funds. He is simply demanding perfection of process rather than importance of outcome.
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I didn’t say they abused those funds. I didn’t say there was theft either. However, it is a perfection of process. Especially since they were warned about it already. Jed knows better. This isn’t some honest mistake. That process is in place so there isn’t an abuse of funds. It’s called a safeguard.
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Charter School of Wilmington? The one that shares the building with Cab Calloway, so neither can grow and thus perhaps compete with Newark Charter?
Fascinating how it all rewinds. Limiting one’s growth (mostly due to unfortunate accident that the area both occupy, a working Sam and Joe neighborhood, is impossible to grow anywhere – it is too small and the overall growth of the area is basically tepid 1% at best) is a sure way to make sure where everything stays where it is but sooner or later there comes inflation, expenses keep go up and up so sooner or later the crunch time will arrive uninvited (and it is predictable for those who ever done basic accounting – amortization due to wear, price adjustments due to this and yes, the “planned inflation” that our beloved FedRes inflicts upon those the least equipped to deal with – public schools).
Now to the topic of “abuse of funds”. Have the latest Superior Court case been done already? The one where all the charter schools of Delaware sued DoE for withholding funds under the mostly artificial made-up excuses? How is it going? Has it been progressing through the court or has it been already quietly dropped by the court? Yes, THIS HAS TO SPEED UP! Because the tax money funds that were illegally withheld (and, quite likely, already illegally spent on administrators’ fancy projects) are ours, the parents who paid them! And this is darn more important than anything, but I digress.
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