Paul Clark of the Rhino Times has the details,
Guilford County Schools Chief Financial Officer Sharon Ozment announced at the Guilford County Board of Education’s Thursday, June 30 meeting that the school system has $9.7 million left over from the 2011-2012 fiscal year, which began July 1, which it will save for the 2012-2013 school year. In other words, the school system doesn’t even need all the money it already has for this year.
[snip]
The truth of the matter is that Guilford County school superintendents and chief financial officers have an apparently infinite number of ways of hiding large sums of money in ways that leave the Guilford County Board of Commissioners – and for that matter, even the school board – unaware of their existence. After months of gloom-and-doom predictions about how the school system’s funding is going to be cut, the North Eugene Street central office pulls the money out of its hat, slaps itself on the back and continues to spend increasing amounts of money on whatever it wants.
All large school systems do something similar to this. They get away with it because it is extremely difficult to monitor district finance (unless you are the NC Department of Public Instruction). But Guilford school officials appear to have perfected the art of manipulating the public. As Clark notes, “This year, the rhetoric was more extreme than usual, with [Superintendent Mo] Green and Board of Education member Darlene Garrett speaking at a May 26 “Fund Schools First” rally at which Garrett proclaimed that there was an “attack on education” in the state.”
My guess is that Mo learned his “ends justify the means” style of leadership from his former boss, departing Charlotte-Mecklenburg superintendent Peter Gorman.
