In 2004,
the worst case of fraud and theft in any school district in the United States was uncovered in Roslyn, NY, by a school board member who worked for Home Depot. The scandal dragged on for over two years and involved the superintendent, the business official, account clerks, board members, and who knows how many others, to the tune of $11 million.
Now, in a district like Dryden, you would be fairly likely to miss $11 million right away. Be that as it may, the state's answer to this is to mandate a six-hour workshop on finances and fraud for every BOE member in New York. That's what I did today, in Horseheads, having put it off until the very end of the year.
The workshop leaders were game and pleasant, but the information could not have been duller, and I cannot get past the sheer injustice of requiring any kind of all-day training of a volunteer. BOE members already go to New School Board Member training, which is not required but fairly useful, by which I mean that assuming you're new, you might learn perhaps one piece of information per hour. And I don't doubt that the message of today's workshop, which was approximately "You are the stewards of the taxpayers' money," is one we should repeat to ourselves more often around budget season. But this new joyful mandating of training for volunteers (Paul has "required" training for ZBA, which he has thus far ignored) is just another way for the state to spend taxpayers' money, provide consulting jobs for people who have paid their dues in other ways, and justify the existence of arcane departments in Albany. Do you suppose now that we're attending six-hour sessions that there will never be another financial scandal in the schools? It's kind of hard to assess the usefulness of this, don't you think? But, then, assessment isn't really Albany's strong suit.
We had our first snow day yesterday, mostly due to blowing snow and whiteout conditions. I get no days off, but I managed to come down with some horrible stomach bug with fever and headache, so after a halfhearted morning of work, I took the rest of the day off. Paul and I watched Netflix movies. O had neighbor Quinn over for the whole day--they sledded, played computer games (in tandem, with O on her computer and Quinn on mine), and made a godawful mess in the kitchen mixing up various concoctions, none of them edible. Today it's business as usual--O sledded down to the bus stop, Paul plowed and drove off to Newfield, and I'm at my desk.
