HARRISBURG, Penn. – The Harrisburg School District, so impoverished that the state is helping it dig out of its financial and academic woes, has hit a mother lode of tax dollars, evidently due to several years of financial ineptitude.

In early October the district discovered it had nearly $12 million it didn’t know it had until someone started looking closely at the books.

And a review by the Harrisburg Patriot-News now shows the school district, which laid off 300 teachers in August, made cumulative bookkeeping errors of $24.9 million over the past four school years. The district also cut the pay of remaining teachers by five percent and increased their share of health benefit contributions by five percent in August.

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The district’s state-appointed Chief Recovery Officer, Gene Veno, has blamed the accounting problems on “chronic mismanagement” preceding his term, which started in December. No specific individuals have been named by Veno as being the cause of the problem.

The district’s new chief financial officer, Peggy Morningstar, said Tuesday there are plenty of potential uses for the excess taxpayer money. She mentioned using it to fund the district’s $437 million debt or to pay additional salaries and insurance costs.

“The [$200 million] school budget is complex,” she told the Harrisburg newspaper. “There’s federal dollars, state dollars. Many things. It’s complex.”

The Harrisburg find is yet another example of public school mismanagement and non-accountability. On Wednesday, state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, a Democrat, released a report roasting the Scranton City and Carbondale School Districts for squandering $7.5 million in tax dollars on “risky investments, poor decisions and ineffective management.”

“The numbers are staggering,” DePasquale said. “We are talking about nearly $7.5 million. Imagine how many teachers could be hired. Imagine how many books and programs that buys. And imagine what that loss of millions means in residents’ property tax bills.”

Authored by Jim Panyard – Media Trackers