A city charter school spent almost $250,000 over four years transporting five students with special needs and it did so without proper documentation, Auditor General Eugene DePasquale said Thursday.
Officials at City Charter High School spent $239,036 from 2011-2015, the report showed. State auditors reviewed district finances from July 2010 to June 2015.
During the 2011-12 school year, the school spent $23,504 sending one special education student to another facility in a taxicab. For the next three years, the school hired a bus company to transport students.
In 2012-13, the charter school paid a bus company $37,910 to transport four students with special needs to an alternate facility. By 2013-14, that number jumped to $92,456 to transport five students. In 2014-15, the bus company was paid $85,166.
“That number is high,” Mr. DePasquale said. “We’re seeing too much of this in our public schools and public charter schools, this lack of accountability in spending.”
State auditors reviewed the company’s invoices and found key information missing to verify the charges. Also, all the payments were conducted without approved contracts between the bus company and the charter school’s board.
The school did not track how daily rates for each student were calculated, mileage costs, which days students were being transported, whether the school was charged for transportation on days when one or more special education students were not in school, or even where the students were being sent to, the report showed.
“Unless you have the documentation, there’s no way to tell what the money was really spent on,” Mr. DePasquale said. “It’s a possible abuse of taxpayer funds.”
Ron Sofo, City High Charter School CEO and principal, said the school put out a Request for Proposals and has found a new transportation vendor for the 2015-16 school year that will save the school $45 per day. The vendor, Quigley Family Enterprises, will be brought before the charter school board this month.
The charter school is located in Downtown and has approximately 600 students. Of those students, four will require transportation for special needs this year to schools, Mr. Sofo said.
“We have taken all of the auditor general’s recommendations to heart and put them into place for the upcoming school year,” Mr. Sofo said. “Yes, we should have done better with the documentation, but I stand behind what we have done and how we spent the money. There were no monies misspent or lost in this case.”
First Published: September 10, 2015, 5:29 p.m.
Updated: September 11, 2015, 3:57 a.m.
