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Michael Davis
David Tuthill
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12/06/06 DISD
Super doesn't cut it.
Allen Gwinn (www.Dallas.org)
exposed the absolute lack of management at every level of the Dallas Independent
School District when he put the credit card expenditures by DISD employees on
line. Dallas Morning News
did a great story on it, but the numbers and data came from Allen's
efforts.
With the embarrassing waste of taxpayer dollars and obvious deficient
supervision by his assistant superintendents on down, you would think
Superintendent Michael Hinojosa would be firing some high dollar managers
who were not paying attention to business. Instead, Dr. Hinojosa just shruggs
it all off with an
"It's not my job, man" attitude.
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New DISD watchdog quits
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
By KENT FISCHER / The Dallas Morning News
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The accountant hired by the Dallas public school district to head its new fraud-busting Office of District Integrity quit Tuesday after The Dallas Morning News discovered his CPA?s license was revoked in 1996.
Yet when David Fryar applied to DISD last month, he claimed on his resume and job application to be a CPA.
?If he is using the title of CPA, he?s doing so illegally,? said William Treacy, executive director of The Texas State Board of Public Accountancy, which licenses CPAs. ?He?s not supposed to be calling himself a CPA.?
?Obviously we can?t have the director of the Office of District Integrity on board with that kind of misrepresentation on his resume,? said district spokesman Celso Martinez.
David Fryar started his new $125,000-a-year job at the district last week, where he was to ?marshal the resources necessary to maintain the integrity of all aspects of district operations,? according to DISD?s Web site.
... But the state board revoked Mr. Fryar?s license in 1996 after he failed to complete mandatory professional development courses required by all CPAs in Texas.
When asked Tuesday if he was a CPA, Mr. Fryar replied after a long pause: ?I passed the [CPA] exam in 1980; however, I am not in good standing. I have not kept my certification up, which is not uncommon.?
When asked if he disclosed his revoked license to the district, he replied: ?I told that to them when they hired me.?
Said Mr. Martinez, the DISD spokesman: ?We were not aware? of the revoked license.
Mr. Martinez said that Superintendent Michael Hinojosa himself checked Mr. Fryar?s references and found them to be ?glowing.?
... Texas law states: ?A person may not assume or use the title or designation ?certified public accountant,? the abbreviation ?CPA? ? unless the person holds a certificate under this chapter.? Violating that statute is a Class B misdemeanor.
Dr. Hinojosa created the new job of District Integrity Office in August after the News detailed millions of dollars in questionable spending on district credit cards.
... Mr. Fryar did not need to be a CPA to get the DISD job. The job description states that a degree in finance or criminal justice is required, but that being a CPA was merely ?preferred.?
... Mr. Martinez said the district will begin contacting other finalists to see if they?re still interested in working for DISD.
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Pay attention to this Mr.
Martinez (Mr. Celso Martinez). You will be reading more about him later.
Dr. H responded to his credit card scandal like a typical bureaucrat.
Rather than demand to know why all his high dollar managers and assistant supers
were asleep at the blackboard and terminating those who should have been
monitoring credit card use by DISD employees, Dr. H created a new position.
A new $125,000 position!
Dr. H did not fire the managers who had failed to supervise the credit card use
or catch the abuse. As far as we've heard, he did not even demote or
discipline the incompetents. That's what happens in the world of
bureaucracy, but it is not what happens in the for-profit world.
Dr. H has reinforced my belief that educators do not make good administrators,
at least not top administrators. They know something about educating
children, but the status of unacceptable DISD schools speaks volumes about the
expertise of current DISD management under Dr. H.
Things are so bad in the DISD system that Balch Springs residents want to secede
and join the Mesquite Independent School District.
Secession from DISD is
sought
(Dallas News.com,
12/04/06).
How embarrassing! Balch Springs residents would rather have their kids
attend Mesquite schools than Dallas schools! Mesquite?
Management skills do not require a degree in education. As a North Texas
co-ed way back when, I initially wanted to be a business education teacher.
Things went great until I took my first teaching methods course. It was
the dumbest class I experienced in college until I took my second teaching
methods course. All of my "education" professors were Ph.D.'s in Education
(B.S.), and they were just awful. The next semester I changed my whole
degree program to a liberal arts degree in History.
Any office manager could have taught a much better class of prospective business
education teachers than those "education" professors. They had no idea of
what goes on in a real office. That was way too many years ago for my ego
to specify, but not a whole lot has changed if Dr. H and his administrators are
indicative of current education management.
The DISD and most school districts could use new blood in the form of
non-educators in their management. Plain-speaking Betty Culbreath has made
an offer to the DISD that this taxpayer would like to see Dr. H accept.
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msbettypolitic.blogspot.com
Free work Offer to Dr. Hinojosa
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Free work
Offer to Dr. Hinojosa
Saturday,
December 02, 2006
I made a very serious offer to volunteer to help
Dr. Hinojosa. I know the people
in his arena will not want me to work for
the District for fear of what I will find and
what I will recommend to the superintendent.
Also,
the Political types
that want to run the District do not want me
down there.
Poor Dr. Hinojosa needs
help bad. He has
a lot of people, but
what do they do? When
he asked Ren?/font>
Martinez to take care of the Preston
Hollow school problem,
he had no idea that Ren?/font>
would do it in a Political move.
I know the man is in shock that it ended
as it did. How
could an Hispanic not
take care of Hispanic parents in a situation
like that? Ren?/font>
has been in the political arena a long time and
that is how he solves problems.
Is his only job
to deal with Hispanic parents problems?
Do they have
administrative personnel
to deal with parents problems of all other
races?
I Told You
So!
Tuesday,
December 05, 2006
I told Dr. Hinojosa I
would help him for free. As a manager,
I know the first thing you do about before
hiring a person in a position who claims some
sort of title requiring
a license from the State is CHECK THE STATE
AGENCY that issues the license.
I learned
that from my last job because I hired people who
had to be licensed and reported if they
committed an offense
against the license.
DISD Teachers are required by law to be
licensed so they
should have known to check with the State it is
FREE online.
Fryar could be good at
what he does but it is illegal to claim
something you are not that is FRAUD. How can
a FRAUDER check on
FRAUDEES?
Once again, someone
call Dr. Hinojosa and tell hIm
needs me.
I would have checked the State site and
simply deleted the CPA claim if all else checked
out. Very simple
process, but you need
a mind to think of problem solving.
However, I
would have told the
superintendent I had an integrity problem with
Fryar. He knew
he did not have an active
CPA license so why add it to
his resume when it was
not a requirement for the job?
Someone call them.
They need help badly.
Sooner than
later, the
School Board will be sick of this type of
embarrassment and take some action.
When it happens, do not say I did not
offer to help for free.
People hate to admit they need me,
but they do. I
love former County Judge Lee Jackson.
Lee called upon me to Direct the
Juvenile
Department along with my department after the
death of its
director.
Laura Miller called on
me to help turn the Plan Commission
around. You have
not heard any bad news
from City Plan Commission or questions of
integrity since.
Many people call on me for help.
I will not name them all,
but I knew Lee and Laura would not care if I
used their names.
I want so bad for Dr. Hinojosa to be successful.
A hometown man
from the DISD returns
home to make it better. There
could not be a better story with good outcome.
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Does the chairwoman of the Dallas Plan Commission really want a behind-the-scenes role in the ongoing soap opera at 3700 Ross Ave., headquarters of your No-News-Is-Good-News school district?
She says she does.
"I'm a professional manager," she emphasized repeatedly. "And what's going on at DISD is that nobody's managing."
I called Ms. Culbreath right after reading a letter in which the political firebrand suggested Friday that Superintendent Michael Hinojosa "needs a go-to person to solve internal issues."
She concluded her letter to The Dallas Morning News with three words that probably made the hairs stand up on the necks of many DISD employees: "I will volunteer."
Did she say, "volunteer"?
"Absolutely," said Ms. Culbreath, known for saying whatever's on her mind ? good or bad. "I ain't looking for no job."
... Ms. Culbreath, former director of Dallas County's health department. "I'm more concerned about what's happening in this city.
"All I know is that my [personal] city taxes are $746 a year, and my school taxes are $1,973 a year ? and I ain't getting value for my money. My child's 40 years old, so what am I getting from the DISD?"
Not surprisingly, no one from the school district contacted her about her offer.
... District spokesman Celso Martinez, speaking for the superintendent, said his boss might call Ms. Culbreath "to say hi and have coffee, not to hire her."
I reminded him that Ms. Culbreath offered to work for free.
"That's what troubles us," Mr. Martinez shot back.
Mr. Martinez said the superintendent is not in denial about the district's persistent problems and is addressing them as fast as he can.
... He reminded me that the superintendent's only been in office a little more than a year.
... When I asked him if the district had an operations manager in place, he said, "We have 225," alluding to the number of campuses in the district. "But what she's requesting is that we have one in the central office. We don't have someone in the central office."
... One key question was raised in a recent series in The News that found holes or flaws in the school district's screening of job applicants. The News found that, despite an outside firm doing background checks for the district, some employees with criminal records still won DISD jobs. Why?
"That's a waste of taxpayers' money," Ms. Culbreath said of the money spent on the vendor that performed background checks on employees.
Ms. Culbreath said two low-paid clerks could screen applicants and then route the applications to the district's human resources office and its own police department.
"I wish it were that easy, but it's not," said Mr. Martinez, noting that there are 18 criteria factored into the application review process. "A clerk clearly can't do it."
Ms. Culbreath said it's easier than DISD administrators and lawyers make it out to be. "I wish that man [Dr. Hinojosa] would let me help him," she lamented.
That's not a knock on Dr. Hinojosa, who Ms. Culbreath still suggests is the right man to point the district in the right direction.
She just thinks he's being blindsided by bureaucrats.
... "For Betty to say we're asleep at the wheel is a bit disingenuous," Mr. Martinez said, "because these are things you can't fix overnight." ...
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Martinez doesn't know what he's
talking about, and Betty Culbreath does. Martinez is a PR dude, and
Betty Culbreath is a retired administrator and a taxpayer. Betty gives Dr.
H too much benefit of the doubt. She thinks "he's blindsided by
bureaucrats", but Dr. H is the ultimate bureaucrat who surrounds himself with
"yes men".
Martinez says DISD hiring problems and credit card abuse problems can't be fixed
in only one year. They could
be corrected in a matter of months, if not weeks. Find out who did it, who
let it happen, and fire those responsible. The DISD supervisors of the
credit card abusers were obviously not doing their jobs, which indicates their
jobs were not necessary in the first place. Rather than keep an
incompetent on the payroll, fire them, leave the job open and save taxpayers
some money until a qualified person can be hired to fill the position -- a
person who will actually do the job.
Betty Culbreath has volunteered to do just that for the DISD. Clean
out the riff raff and incompetents. She would train low-level employees to
do basic new-hire screenings, as she did for the County.
Betty is a plain-speaking woman who knows the value of a dollar. No doubt
she would ruffle some feathers in the DISD bureaucracy. Ruffled?
Lord, she would leave those turkeys plucked and ready for roasting.
The fact that Dr. H personally
himself checked Mr. Fryar?s references and found them to be ?glowing.?
is proof positive that his
education expertise does not transfer to management ability. If a little
old DMN
reporter could learn that Fryar is no longer a licensed CPA, one would expect a
Ph.D. to be able to do the same thing.
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Holes in DISD's screening process;
Employees with
history of serious offenses slip through the cracks
Sunday,
November 26, 2006
By TAWNELL D.
HOBBS, KATIE FAIRBANK and TANYA EISERER / The Dallas Morning News
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Weeks after Roosevelt High School baseball standout Edward Randolph was picked in the Major League draft, he was arrested for forcing sex on a 14-year-old girl in Arizona.
... In 1997, while playing for a minor league team in North Carolina, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault on a female. It was for attacking a booster club member who had let him spend the night in her basement.
Three years later, he was back in Dallas and working for DISD. In 2005, he was a part-time baseball coach at Roosevelt and a hall monitor at O.W. Holmes Middle School. It was at those schools that he encountered the 13-year-old girl he's now accused of having sex with and the 15-year-old girl he is accused of groping. He's been indicted in connection with both.
The Dallas Independent School District fired Mr. Randolph after his arrest in October 2005. Officials said no convictions had shown up in a background check when he was hired.
... a Dallas Morning News investigation has found a system that still has holes and, at times, ignores district and state rules. Problems include:
?DISD doesn't report all educators with criminal histories to the state certification office, as required by law.
?The district's screening process sometimes doesn't find serious offenses until years after a court has ruled.
?The district doesn't automatically fire employees who did not report past crimes on their employment applications.
?The district has allowed employees to keep their jobs even though they failed to notify the district after being arrested for a serious crime while employed by the district, as required by DISD policy.
... When serious crimes turn up, district panels review cases to decide whether to reject applicants or fire employees.
Even with those procedures, The News' investigation found at least 80 current DISD employees who have been convicted of felonies or received deferred adjudication probation on a felony charge in Dallas or surrounding counties.
... Nearly 60 percent of the employees went through the district's review process and were approved for being hired or keeping their jobs.
... Several hundred other people have misdemeanors on their records, The News found in an extensive search of court documents. Their records include offenses such as assault, drug possession and indecent exposure, and many included offenses such as drunken driving and writing hot checks.
Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said he was concerned about problems found by The News and vowed to investigate to see whether some procedures need tightening.
"There need to be some clear expectations," he said.
... Problems with DISD's background checks are not new. In 1992, a News investigation found 185 district employees who had felony criminal histories.
... Since 2001, the district has used Safe Advantage Services to check backgrounds of all new applicants and to run annual checks on current employees. This year, the district is paying $156,280 for background checks
... When Mr. Randolph was arrested last year on charges of assaulting the 13-year-old, a DISD spokesman, Donald Claxton, told the news media that the staffer's earlier record should have been found during a criminal history check when he was hired in 2000. It wasn't.
... "If they did something that was inappropriate, regardless of how we find out, we have to check it," Dr. Hinojosa said.
... Dr. Hinojosa said the district counts on application information to be accurate.
"Being truthful on the application has a lot to do with your ethics," he said. ...
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Dr. H is probably a great
educator who understands teaching methods and excelled in "lesson planning" and
the other mind-numbing stuff that goes on in education courses. He is not
a great administrator. For him to make a statement that the "district
counts on application information to be accurate" is exactly why he desperately
needs Betty Culbreath running things at the DISD.
Betty Culbreath might not kiss his rear like he gets from his current staff of
incompetents, but she would get things in order so Dr H would have fewer
sessions with the press explaining the daily embarrassments at the DISD under
his watch.
When you are dealing with public monies, not to mention the public's children,
you must trust and VERIFY. What kind of naivet?does it take for the head
of a billion dollar operation like the DISD to make a statement like "Being
truthful on the application has a lot to do with your ethics."?
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Dr. H seems to think if he says nothing, keeps his eyes closed and his
ears covered that no bad news will come to his attention.
The real world doesn't work that way. Bureaucrats don't understand
that the real world is not all that impressed with their tenure,
seniority or advance degrees. |
In the real world, an
administrator must anticipate unpleasant realities. Keeping smooth talkers
around who say what he wants to hear might make for a more peaceful day in Dr.
H's bureaucratic world, but he's not doing himself any favors. Just
because Dr. H is not around when the old tree falls in the forest, does not mean
he isn't responsible for clearing it out of the way when the problem is found.
With someone like Betty Culbreath on his staff, Dr. H would get the unvarnished
truth about the sad state of affairs at the DISD. The question is could
Dr. H handle the truth? From everything that has happened under his watch
to date, it looks like the answer is a definite NO!
I don't want Betty Culbreath working for Dr. H. I want Betty Culbreath to
be the DISD Superintendent and Dr. H to work for her. Betty would let Dr.
H do what he does best, focus on education matters, and she would whip all
those bureaucrats into a lean, mean, functioning machine.
I guarantee you that Betty Culbreath could do more to shape up the DISD in 3
months than Dr. H and his assistants have done in his first year.
sb
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