Superintendent of 5th largest district accused of cashing in at taxpayers’ expense (Denver area)

FOX31 Denver ^ | February 6, 2013 | Josh Bernstein

[george76]

Over the last three years the Adams 12 Five Star School District has cut its budget by more than $56 million, eliminated more than 200 jobs, cut after school programs and passed educational costs on to parents. “I can barely afford to send my kids to school,” said, Brie Abrams, the mother of four.

But a three-month investigation by FOX31 Denver exposes how the superintendent, the man behind those cuts, may have been cashing in at the taxpayers’ expense, and possibly breaking the law

...

the superintendent may have provided his wife, Carolyn, a local real estate agent, with unauthorized access to the district’s internal web site. “A blatant violation” of the superintendent’s own policies

[E. Pluribus Unum]

I thought he must have stolen millions.

He let his wife post a few ads on a website at zero taxpayer cost.

Dumb, yes. Scandal, no.

[DPMD]

Nothing illustrates the new ethic surrounding public corruption like the following sentence:
“...cashing in at the taxpayers’ expense, and possibly breaking the law.”

Possibly?

Cashing in at taxpayer’s expense can actually be legal, in other words?

We’ve come a long - straight down - baby.

[Wuli]

I had an employee that had responsibilities that took him around to all the departments during the day.

He - at some time - started using his official visits to the company staff during the day to solicit and get orders for his wife’s Amway business.

I knew nothing until I started noticing a lot of boxes in our large computer room (where he worked out of) that did not look like boxes that belonged there or that had anything to do with anything we ordered for our computer department.

They turned out to be the Amway deliveries for the orders he had obtained for his wife from our staff.

He was using his regular delivery duties to not just obtain Amway orders but to deliver what had been ordered.

I ordered our mail room to return any future Amway product boxes, marking them “addressee unkown”, and waited for the employee to come asking what had happened.

When I did, I thanked him for confessing that the Amway deliveries were his and due to the fact that he had no business using the time we paid him to be working, or our facilities, to conduct his wife’s business, he was fired.

We also did not permit employees to solicit contributuions to their kids school fund raising campaigns at work. If I had dared to ask my mom or dad to use their co-workers to help boost the sales/contributions supposedly coming from me with such activities, they would have told me they not only they would not do it but that it was wrong of me to ask. That was the 1950s/60s - the “bad” time in American culture by all the media’s reckoning.

What the school superintendent did fits with the sense of privilege so many people in public education think they have - rules don’t matter if you have privileges to bend them for yourself. These are people “teaching” our children.