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Welcome to the 2023 “Summer Edition” of District Deeds!

As we outlined in our 2023 “Summer Edition” Introduction on June 25, 2023,, District Deeds this summer will curate San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) related material for your leisurely summer vacation review during the SDUSD Summer break highlighted in magenta below:

 

In those weeks are providing our readers the District Deeds Sunday Reads Summer Edition (DDSRSE), an abridged version of our school year blog offerings.  The format of these posts is a simple 3 part design.

  • District Deeds Introduction
  • News item quotes/District Deeds Notes
  • Conclusions

DD NOTE:  The material listed below includes selected text along with DD Tips and Notes.  Please click on the title to read the full story at the source.

ENJOY!

District Deeds Introduction

Over the past nine years we have exposed many forms of financial corruption in virtually every area of the SDUSD by the Board of Education lead by Trustee Richard “Tricky Dick” Barrera, former Supt. Cindy Marten and current/past senior departmental leadership.

Over SIX YEARS  ago in our February, 2017 post titled “Resolution Con Job Withdrawn!!! The San Diego Unified Board of Education/Supt. Marten Bullies Lose Their Nerve – Cancel Invitation Insult to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos !!!“, we offered a solution to the rampant financial corruption in the SDUSD:

The Solution!

District Deeds has a better way for Secretary of Education DeVos to “visit” the SDUSD Board and Marten using the same ruthless methods employed by the Board and Marten against Teachers, Administrators, Staff, and the families of sexually assaulted 5-year-old kindergartners …and AVOID protesters…here it is:

Have the Department of Education Auditors “visit” the books and interview (under oath) past and present employees of the San Diego Unified School District with a forensic audit:

  • Uncover and expose the ways that NCLB and ESSA federal funds have been unethically and improperly redirected away from the students the money was meant for.

  • Uncover and expose any and all the Marten administration Title IX sexual assault cover-ups

  • Uncover and expose any and all the FERPA violations complaints that teachers, administrators and staff were bullied and forced to drop by the Marten administration and Union leadership.

  • Uncover and expose all the REAL Graduation Rate numbers and fine the District for the errors

  • Uncover and expose all the past and present “Marne Foster Typr” Free and Reduced Lunch violations.  

  • Uncover and Expose all the fake LCFF and LCAP initiatives and force the SDUSD to follow the rules or risk suspension of Federal Financial Support. 

With the forensic audit and any luck, Secretary DeVos will solve two problems:

  1. Uncover and expose all the SDUSD corruption so ALL Stakeholders fully receive the educational funding, fairness and justice they deserve.
  2. Throw the SDUSD into financial default so the Board and Superintendent will have to be replaced.

Obviously this forensic audit has not occurred and financial/moral violations in ALL areas have continued as evidenced by the article highlighted this week from the San Diego Union Tribune below.  As noted, we provide our conclusions AFTER the featured article.

NATIONAL and LOCAL MAGAZINE/NEWSPAPER/BLOG NEWS/POSTS

‘Ripe for fraud’: San Diego school employees were paid for thousands of hours without documentation, audit finds

Auditors described an ‘inefficient and a labor-intensive process that is error prone’

BY KRISTEN TAKETA –  JULY 22, 2023 5 AM PT

DISTRICT DEEDS CONCLUSION:

Just another SDUSD case of the willfully blind leading the willfully blind!

Taking away all of these politically correct phrases like “no supporting documentation” and “unsupported hours” and “inefficient timekeeping setup” for the powerful and highly educated $1.4 billion SDUSD can be boiled down to 4 words:

Willfully Allowed Payroll Theft

Here is the report supplied by the SDUSD to the Union Tribune: Time and Labor Reporting – Internal Audit Report – June 30, 2023.

The “INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND” section defines the approximate number of SDUSD employees but actually provides ZERO real introduction OR background:

End result:  19,000 active employees and 13,000 salaried employees are employees but the “Audit Scope” only mentions the number of schools and departments that were audited but not the total number of actual schools and departments they were selected from.

The SDUSD Internal Audit Team chose 12 schools and 10 departments for the audit  according to their report.  There are many holes in audit procedures that were neglected.  For instance the report DOES NOT SHOW THE:

  • Name, school level, enrollment, staffing or area of the schools audited.
  • Name, staffing and employment levels (management/staff ratio) of the Departments that were audited.
  • Auditing standards and guidelines for selection and deployment of the audit (i.e.: HOW and WHY those unknown school sites and departments were chosen for the audit.  Was it a random drawing to chose the schools and departments targeted?  Was it by senior management referral?, etc.).
  • Total number of actual employees audited in those SDUSD schools and departments.

Through our own research we found 90 departments listed on the SDUSD website “Departments” page but, based on the lack of SDUSD veracity, we have no idea whether there are more or less ACTUAL departments in the SDUSD or even what the Audit team determined to be “relevant” to their report.

We also did some research on Audit guidelines.

The guidelines for REAL audits vary widely depending on the scope, scale and conditions of the audit.  We researched this factor and found the following “AS 2315: Audit Sampling” definition,  from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB):

As indicated above according to the PCAOB, “to assess control risk at a low level” a “tolerable rate of 5 percent or possibly less” is acceptable but if the item being audited needs to be assessed “at a higher level”, then a “rate of 10 percent or more is reasonable”.

The lack of these facts completely negate the report since there is no way to determine the “TOLERABLE RATE” that defines accuracy risk.

THAT is INTOLERABLE!

But wait…IT GETS WORSE!

According to the same Union Tribune article:

But, the BIG but:

So why has the district been slow?

Why did the SDUSD Leadership know about this payroll theft for over 3 years without making any SDUSD Community Stakeholders aware of it?

Answer (as usual):  It would have upset their political agenda.

We all know what has been the “highest priority” to the corrupt Board of Education.

Getting elected and re-elected at any cost.

Just connect the dots.

How would the current board of Education Trustees do in the coming election with Union Members whose friends and colleagues were being prosecuted for payroll theft?

Two weeks ago in Sunday Reads we profiled another article from Ms. Taketa in the La Jolla Light that said:

Teachers get a 10 percent retroactive raise and 5 percent for the coming school year. The district projects a $128.9 million shortfall for 2024-25 but expects to balance the budget by then.

And now we discover those same employees getting a raise may have been allowed to give themselves “ad hoc” raises (in other words, payroll theft), for over 3 years already (and probably more)  through the blessing and negligence of the same SDUSD leadership that approved the raises to get their votes.

This is described in Wiktionary in the following way:

Obviously the SDUSD Senior leadership and corrupt Board of Education led by Trustee “Tricky Dick” Barrera imposed “willful ignorance” to “avoid becoming informed” about this payroll theft before they approved raises to the cronies that got them elected.

Just do the math:

These final numbers represent SDUSD “Internal Auditors” work:
  • 12 Unknown Schools out of 163 audited
  • 10 Unknown Departments out of 90 Audited
  • 500 Unknown Work Hours without documentation
  • 3,000 Unknown Absence Hours without documentation
  • No clue as to how long this payroll theft has occurred.
  • No clue as to how many thousands of dollars this payroll theft has cost SDUSD Stakeholders for the last 15 years since Trustee Barrera has been in office.

And now, after at least three years, and maybe a decade more, the SDUSD Director of Payroll and Benefits tells SDUSD Stakeholders it is up to them to “send more of a unified message” to convince the corrupt leadership that payroll theft is a priority?

What a sad joke!

The “blind” Audit with no defined standards is just another example of intentionally blindly corrupt SDUSD leadership leading the innocently “blind” SDUSD Stakeholders off the fiscal cliff and distracting them from the horribly poor education their children receive.

And still asking for more money to run schools.

No wonder families are RUNNING AWAY from the SDUSD.

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Thank you for reading District Deeds Sunday Reads Summer Edition!  We will be back next week with more material for you to review during this Summer season..

Now for our District Deeds Summer Edition 2023 Quote of the Week:

“Abiding in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, fools go aimlessly hither and thither, like blind led by the blind. – Katha Upanishad

IF

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