Public school districts and charter schools are required by statute to provide at least a bare minimum number of instructional hours. An Arizona Department of Education (ADE) audit has found that TUSD failed to provide even the bare minimum to some of its students.
The ADE must now “recoup from the District approximately $1.9 million in Basic State Aid,” for the district’s failure to provide its students with enough instructional hours.
The ADE conducted a limited scope Average Daily Membership (ADM) audit as a result of the discovery of the deficit in instructional hours by the district’s independent auditors during the district’s required annual financial audit. The scope of the audit was “instructional hours to students in grades 7 and 8 for the fiscal years of 2008, 2009 and 2010, and whether the district, “received the correct amount of Basic State Aid in accordance with statutes.”
TUSD’s middle schools have been failing most of their students for the past few years, and are the greatest source of student flight from the district. The administrator in charge of middle schools Jim Fish, called them the “arm pit” of the district at the Board’s retreat this past winter. The audit states that there were processes in place to monitor the instructional time, but administration failed to follow them.
District insiders say that they are bracing themselves for the audit of the high school’s instructional hours.
The audit was discussed at the last TUSD School Board meeting. Superintendent Pedicone warned the new CFO Awwad at the School Board meeting, to broach the subject of the ADM audit “carefully only because we know that we are going to get penalized for that, we just don’t know exactly what the dollar amount of that will be, and that information will be coming… forthcoming very soon..”
Only Dr. Stegeman addressed the audit penalty, and called it “an embarrassing event.” He further admonished Pedicone that “that we are ensuring that that won’t be repeated.” Pedicone laughed and offered his assurances that it will not happen again.
Rich Kronberg, a co-founder of TU4SD, who taught for 39 years in New York and Alaska before retiring from teaching said, “In more than four decades of following schools and school districts, I have never seen a school district fail to track instructional hours. I taught in districts that had strikes…including lengthy ones…and weather conditions that caused multiple school closings, and this is a first for me. Every central administrator who failed to track instructional hours for the various divisions and for the district as a whole should be fired.”
The audit concludes, “Assuming that more time spent in the classroom results in a better education, some of the District’s students received fewer educational opportunities because the District did not provide all of its students with the statutorily-required minimum number of instructional hours.”
Auditors determined that there were three factors that led to the deficit; “These reasons included 1) simply not scheduling enough instructional time, 2) not properly calculating passing time to and from instructional and non-instructional activities or 3) counting non-instructional activities as instructional time.”
The ADE audit found “that 17 of the 26 TUSD schools that provided education to students in grades 7 and 8 did not provide sufficient instructional hours for one or more of the three fiscal years audited.”
Improvement in compliance was noted in the audit. In the past, “auditors found significant variance in the number of hours provided per school, ranging from 105 percent of the minimum hours required to less than 86 percent.” However in 2010 only 8 schools were “out of compliance as opposed to 15 schools for each of the previous two years.”
From the Arizona Daily Star….
$4.4M in technology improvements OK’d for TUSD Alexis Huicochea Tuesday, July 19, 2011
The Tucson Unified School District has been approved for $4.4 million in federal funding for technology improvements.
The funding, awarded by the E-Rate program, is on top of the $920,000 the district was recently awarded.
E-Rate money is awarded annually to eligible schools and libraries across the country. However, wide-ranging problems in TUSD’s technology department have prevented the district from receiving any of that funding since 2002.
Since then, TUSD has applied for funding each school year. Some applications were denied, one was withdrawn, and four with a combined face value of about $12 million have been held in abeyance. For the rest of the article click here.
Loretta Hunnicutt