ALBANY, N.Y. – The City School District of Albany won’t be purchasing any new uniforms for its sports teams, or supplies or improvements for its athletic facilities.

District officials slashed funding for those seemingly unimportant things this year – along with some high school elective classes, money for after-school programs, and numerous teaching, school security and maintenance positions – to balance the district’s budget.

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The cuts are part of a plan that will also pull $11.4 million from the district’s fund reserves and impose a 2.95 percent tax increase to fund the district’s $212.9 million budget in 2013-14, Capital Education reports.

It’s a sad annual song and dance that Albany residents have grown accustomed to as district officials eliminated 360 staff positions over the past five years. The situation also forces district leaders to prioritize student learning over employment perks for administrators and educators.

Or does it?

EAGnews recently analyzed spending records obtained from Albany schools for the 2012-13 fiscal year as part of an ongoing national series.

The findings highlight numerous questionable expenses that raise legitimate questions about what school leaders value most in the capital city. They include an unusually high $756,458 on legal expenses, roughly $50,000 on travel and mileage reimbursement, another $50,000 on arts and entertainment and $216,065 on an academic consulting firm.

The district also paid 84 employees over $100,000 in salary in 2012-13.

District officials all but ignored EAGnews’ repeated requests to explain the spending to taxpayers in more detail, although some of the expenses seem to speak for themselves.

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None of the spending appears to have impacted academics in any positive way. Despite the district’s ever growing budget – and high pay for employees – student achievement remains horrific. None of the city’s schools are in good standing and less than half of traditional public school students graduate high school, according to district data.

Taxpayer-funded resort stays, other travel expenses

Albany school district’s check registry and credit card statements show officials spent nearly $35,000 on hotels, $20,000 on travel, $50,000 on arts and entertainment, and about $14,000 on restaurants and catering in the 2012-13 school year.

Travel expenses included about $2,400 for car rentals and $1,400 for travel agency fees, as well as roughly $16,000 for airline tickets to Las Vegas, Baltimore, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, Tulsa, Tampa and Albany throughout the year.

The trips included stays at numerous high-dollar hotels.

Credit card statements from 2012 show hotel charges included $1,339 at the Sheraton Commander Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 14, $2,943 at the Embassy Suites in downtown Washington, D.C. in July and October, $4,949 at the Philadelphia Marriott on Aug. 3, $1,064 at the Courtyard by Marriott in Englewood, Colorado Oct. 29, and $802 at Providence, Rhode Island’s Courtyard by Marriott Nov. 6.

School employees capped off the year with a $1,656 stay at the lavish Tradewinds Island Grand Resort in St. Petersburg, Florida Dec. 3.

Many less-expensive stays at hotels in Syracuse, Boston, Fairfax, Virginia, and West Warwick, Rhode Island contributed another $1,315 to the hotel tab in 2012.

In 2013, school officials spent $1,733 at Atlanta hotels in February, and $693 at the Best Western in Syracuse and $1,546 at Sheraton Hotels in Cambridge, Massachusetts in March. Two months later, officials spent another $607 at St. Petersburg’s Tradewinds Island Grand Resort, $204 at the Residence Inns in Deptford, New Jersey, and $1,082 at the Campbell Hotel in Tulsa, Oklahoma, according to district credit card statements.

Other 2013 hotel charges included $179 at the Hilton in Saratoga Springs, New York June 6, $1,538 at another St. Petersburg resort – the Alden Beach Resort – on June 10, and a $290 stay at Nashville, Tennessee’s Embassy Suites Aug. 15, district records show.

It’s no wonder the district can no longer afford to offer girls bowling, and why officials were forced to shutter Career Exploration programs for fields like communications, performing arts, and engineering.

Hotels, plane flights, and car rentals are very expensive.

Astronomical legal expenses

Legal expenses are a significant drag on the district’s budget. In the 2012-13 school year alone, the district spent nearly three-quarters of a million dollars on attorneys.

To put the spending into perspective, the Buffalo, New York school district – which serves about four times as many students as Albany schools – spent just under a half-million on legal expenses.

Albany school officials doled out more on lawyers last school year – $756,458 – than on professional development, drug and alcohol awareness, mental health initiatives, domestic violence intervention, and police services combined, records show.

Several law firms raked in at least six figures or more in public tax dollars from Albany schools last year, including Goldman Attorneys PLCC for $270,418, Girvin & Ferlazzo for $171,331, and Segel, Goldman, Mazzotta & Siegel for $125,178. Five other law firms collected smaller amounts to make up the remainder of the district’s legal bill for 2012-13.

School officials denied the legal charges detailed in the spending records they provided to EAGnews, claiming the $756,458 total is “overstating the district’s legal fees by more than $500,000,” according to a terse email from district spokesman Ron Lesko.

Lesko did not return multiple messages for further explanation.

Local taxpayers would be wise to push for more concrete answers from school board members.

Students facing fewer educational resources and teachers who were laid off deserve a much more honest and thorough explanation.

Other questionable spending

Numerous smaller budget items, when taken together, also amount to a significant amount of money going out the door.

Records show school officials authorized $28,993 in mileage reimbursement payments for school employees, footed the tab for $14,384 worth of food from special catering services and restaurants, and spent $51,653 on cell phones and service for school staff.

School leaders spent another $49,711 on art and entertainment venues including movie theaters, bowling alleys, local ski resorts, the Albany Institute of History and Art, Bounce A lot Party and Music, Dutch Apple Cruises, the Mystic Aquarium Institute, the American Museum of Natural History and the Sacandaga Outdoor Center.

Presumably, many of the entertainment charges were for student activities, but it’s impossible to know for certain without cooperation from school officials.

Other 2012-13 charges were more perplexing.

Dr. Betty Webb Consulting Inc. collected $216,065 in tax dollars from Albany schools, and the “Albany Police Athletic League” consumed $85,908 of the school budget. District officials sent another $10,126 to VOTE-COPE, the Political Action Fund of the state’s largest teachers union, according to district spending records.

School officials obviously feel the public doesn’t deserve to know more about those expenses.

District spending records also detail $9,251 in payments to Souder, Betances & Associates Inc., a firm that bills itself as a “leader in the field of diversity training and consulting.” EAGnews featured Dr. Samuel Betances in a documentary about controversial teacher training titled “Re-Creating America.”

Betances delivered the keynote speech at a taxpayer-funded teacher diversity training conference in Wisconsin in 2010.

“I want you to say the pilgrims were illegal aliens,” he told teachers at the conference. “I want you to say the pilgrims did not give their passports to the Indians.

“And we consider them heroic.”

Other “diversity” discussions promoted by Betances and his colleagues center on the concept of “white privilege” – the idea that America is designed to benefit only whites and its social structures and institutions are hopelessly stacked against minorities.

As Betances put it in addressing Wisconsin educators, “You’ve got monies you gotta spend, we have a team that can come and help you spend it.”

The question is: Do Albany taxpayers believe it’s more important to spend tax dollars on this type of radical teacher training than after-school programs for students, or security officers to keep kids safe?

EAGnews requested more information about many of the above expenses, but district spokesman Ron Lesko ignored the detailed inquiry, with the exception of services provided by Dr. Betty Webb.

“The work of Dr. Webb and her associates is focused on improving teaching and student learning,” Lesko wrote. “It is a major district initiative and fully funded through a New York State Education Department grant that mandated the district hire external partners.”

That’s a very vague explanation that seems to raise more questions than it answers.

General labor costs

Other basic financial information suggests the district’s questionable spending extends beyond its check registry and credit card statements. General labor costs, specifically the salaries of district administrators and educators, are also significantly higher than expected for such a low-performing school system.

Buffalo Business First compiles an annual report based on state Education Department data that shows Albany’s teachers are the second-highest paid out of 429 upstate New York school districts with student enrollments of more than 260 students.

“In Albany, 5 percent of teachers made less than $51,514.25, 25 percent earned less than $62,000, half earned less than $73,491, three-quarters less than $88,848 and 95 percent less than $96,381, according to the (Buffalo Business First) list,” the Albany Times Union reports.

All in all, most of them earned more than their peers in other districts.

And then there are the administrators, who also take home top-dollar salaries.

Eighty-four district employees, mostly administrators, took home more than $100,000 in salary in 2012, according to SeeThroughNY.net, a transparency website maintained by the Empire Center.

Top-paid administrators listed on the site for that year include: William Hogan, assistant superintendent for business affairs – $152,636; Linda Jackson-Chalmers, assistant superintendent for human resources and community relations – $151,145; Tresa Diggs, assistant superintendent for student support services – $141,716; Linda Rudnick, assistant superintendent for elementary education – $140,118; and Ken Cioffi, director of special education – $139,755.

The incongruous salaries beg a simple question: What are taxpayers getting for all that money?

Unfortunately, most local residents are well-aware of the very depressing answer: a 49 percent high school graduation rate, not a single city school in good standing, a tax bill that continues to increase year after year, and school officials who dodge pressing questions about district spending.

Ashleigh Costello contributed to this report