I'm glad you have an administration that appreciates you. We just kicked out a superintendent [finally] that spent special education money on lobster dinners on vacation retreats, at one of our middle school's ex-principals houses. sorry for getting off topic, i just like to inform people of the better things that our budget is going towards. as a town we ended up having to pay $250 thousand back to rhode island department of education for fines and whatnot. yet somehow, we're one of the top 500 schools in the country.
Isn't it ironic that when you follow the money trail, who really gets hit hard for penalties against the school district? It's not the school district.
Here we've only within the past couple years paid off our debt. Our
previous accountant told the district that there was more money than there actually was, only to be revealed that the opposite was true during an audit.
Yup, a couple million dollars missing rolls a few heads. Luckily, the accounting firm was held liable for a large chunk of that, but certainly not all of it.
The most important thing that I've learned about dealing with school administrators is communication. You want a solid
line of communication with them if you want them on your side, and the key is never to complain you don't have the money for something unless you go to them with something important and they shoot you down. We spent too many years here in Oconomowoc playing that game. As it turned out, most of our problems were taken care of after everybody began to understand what their jobs entail. Taking our principal for example, he had been there a few years, but no
line of communication was ever made to him by anybody really and so when ____ hit the fan he couldn't help because he never even knew there was a problem to deal with. All said and done, he now keeps a closer eye on the
theatre department and has opened the doors to saying that if we're in a jam for one reason or another he'll help us out, but prior to that he had no idea there were ever problems that needed to be dealt with.
I can assure you though that the last thing anybody should do is fill in the blanks. It's understandable to complain about not having a budget, but once you start pointing fingers at people then you get into a really iffy territory.
IMO, if you don't make an effort to communicate to the proper authority that there's a problem to be dealt with, you're at more fault than the authority is for nothing getting done. I'm not accusing anybody here of that, certainly not, but it's a lesson I've learned and I think everybody benefits if they carry that lesson through life.
