The Mississippi Department of Education and the board that oversees the agency may feel like they are under Republican siege.
The state superintendent of education, Dr. Carey Wright, got cross-wise with conservatives last year when she said MDE would require local school districts to ensure transgender students can use the bathroom of the sex of which they identify — an Obama-administration initiative from which Wright soon backed away after an incensed reaction by GOP lawmakers and Gov. Phil Bryant.
The GOP duo of Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and House Speaker Philip Gunn have pledged to come up with a new formula (still to materialize) for funding the state’s public schools on the claim that the current formula isn’t getting the classroom results it should.
And Bryant has questioned the high salaries that Wright has been paying some of her assistants.
Nevertheless, it is a waste of $114,000 for the state Board of Education to hire an outside accounting firm to make sure the state auditor doesn’t make any mistakes in investigating MDE’s books.
Stacey Pickering has not initiated a witch hunt. The Republican state auditor has been asked by the U.S. Department of Education to look for potential fraud in two of MDE’s programs where the federal grant money was not handled correctly.
The outside accounting firm that will be working alongside Pickering’s staff, Clifton Larsen Allen, is admittedly well-familiar with MDE’s sloppy recordkeeping. It just completed an audit that confirmed that money was improperly diverted from one federally funded account to another plus other bookkeeping problems: financial records not being balanced monthly or being tardily compiled, tens of millions of dollars being deposited into a wrong account, and documents not being digitized, which caused some records to be lost following a 2015 fire at MDE headquarters.
In justifying keeping CLA on to oversee the forensic audit, the Board of Education’s chair, Rosemary Aultman, told Mississippi Today that it “wanted to make sure that the information that was audited was correct and that we had someone there watching out for the (education) department’s interest.”
It is not MDE’s interest that is at stake. It is the taxpayers’. The State Auditor’s Office should be more than capable of ensuring those interests are safeguarded without adding the expense of a duplicate set of eyes. For the board to decide otherwise sounds like paranoia.
