The Forensic Accountant

In March, 2006, I spent the morning monitoring a classroom of students taking the ISTEP. When I returned to my office my secretary directed me to a book case and pointed to a now-empty space where about twenty 4-inch notebooks should have been. It seems our principal had come and taken these notebooks to her conference room - notebooks containing ticket reports, copies of claims paid, receipts, copies of game and officials' contracts through 2011 and monthly summaries of the athletic accounts.
She began her investigation by having her secretary make copies of almost every page of every notebook! What a huge waste of resources...not only a waste of paper but the waste of time for her secretary to stand at the copy machine! Then she and her secretary and maybe our treasurer combed through the documents looking for financial fraud. A couple of days later I was called in to face the results. She accused me of selling the same ticket twice - once at the end of an event, then a second time at the beginning of the next event. There it was, a massive fraud scheme...at the rate of $4 per event, let's say 100 home events for the season, a whopping $400...at this rate I would soon have my condo in Florida!
I went to the white board in the room and taught my little class of three - principal, her secretary and the treasurer. For example, at event one, the first ticket off the roll is 1 and at the end of the event the next ticket on the roll is 4 (4 is unsold). This is recorded on the ticket report and by subtracting, we find 3 tickets have been sold (tickets 1,2,3).
first ticket = 1
last ticket = 4
tickets sold = 4 - 1 = 3

For the next event, now the first ticket is 4 and let's say tickets 4 and 5 are sold. The next ticket on the roll is now 6. So we have...
first ticket = 4
last ticket = 6
tickets sold = 2

Ticket 4 has NOT been sold twice, but it has been listed twice, as the last ticket for one event and as the first ticket for the next event. It is done that way so one simple subtraction calculates the number of tickets sold. As I finished my explanation, I saw the lights bulbs go on...her secretary and the treasurer understood perfectly...however my principal had a "deer in the headlights look". She did not get it at all, but she did understand that she was the only one in the room who didn't get it and that her dreams of nailing me for financial fraud were now gone.
I enjoyed the moment (and still enjoy the memory) but then she moved on to something else.

The Master Scheduler

I almost forgot this...and it is too funny!

Every spring each high school makes up its master schedule for the following school year. Next year's students sign up for classes they want to take and the school puts together the class schedule for next school year. All students class requests are then fed into the computer and the computer assigns students to the classes...a good first run might be 80% of student requests met. Then the master schedule might be tweaked and eventually some students will be scheduled by hand. The entire process might not be finished until July.

In the spring of 07 the principal thought she was expert enough to handle this process so she and her sidekick put together the master schedule, ignoring the assistant principal whose job it really was to do this. By June, the principal's master schedule was only at 40%...YIKES...this is disaster for a high school...imagine students showing up in August with no classes to attend!!!

A scheduling guru...retired administrator...was hired in July to clean up her mess. Since he had worked with her before (during year one of her reign)...his condition for fixing the schedule was that the principal could not be in the building to bother him. District officials guaranteed this. Sure enough, he had not been working long when the principal showed up!!! He made a phone call to district officials, someone came out to the school and ESCORTED THE PRINCIPAL OUT OF HER OWN BUILDING!!!! I had to use Dave Barry-like capitals here. A principal escorted from her own building....after this you would think FWCS leadership would get it and realize what a loon they had on their hands. Nope, took three more months for her to do something even more embarrassing!

A Final Story

This story epitomizes our principal and her interactions with students.

A senior boy ordered a pizza for lunch from outside the building and was cutting class awaiting its delivery. He was caught by the principal and she escorted him to the office. This might have been the end of it, he was a good kid, rarely in trouble, maybe he would have received a detention or in-school suspension. Once in the office, the principal berated him for several minutes. She left, then returned a few minutes later and started in on him again. Finally she got what she wanted and he snapped, saying to her something like "get out of my face, bitch". Oops, magic words, three day suspension. What started out as a somewhat typical senior incident was escalated by the principal into a major deal. The sad part is I don't think she even liked kids.

GET OVER IT ALREADY !!!

Hey get over it already, no one died, you still have your health. blah, blah, blah. All true and I get it. I am mostly over it. But...(you knew there was a but) if I worked in the corporate world I might almost expect such behavior. But in education we are expected to model honesty, integrity and ethical behavior...heck, state law requires us to be "moral". And I had a boss who was none of those things. I guess I expected our leadership to, silly me, do the right thing. WR talks the talk and claims that FWCS has an employee code of ethics, but when it comes time to apply the Code of ethics WR does nothing. Instead an unethical, dishonest, lying and possibly unstable person was left in a leadership position...with the inevitable result that she eventually imploded. But at what cost?

Super Duper Meeting

At the close of the school year we had end of year administration meetings. On day one the head honcho, the big cheese, the super duper sought me out and ushered me into an empty classroom. As the door closed, I turned to face the superintendent and the yelling began..."This has got to stop...you should see my emails...many of them use the word bitch." I bit my tongue but wanted to say "have you met [the principal]?" Then she said quite angrily..." I am not losing my facility vote because of your situation." Ah, there it was. In a few days the school board was to vote to start the process for a building initiative, the Write Yellow, Write Now campaign. The superintendent did not want to meet with me because of my lawsuit, not because she had heard all the stories coming out of our school, not because she wanted information...the super met with me because she heard that a group of supporters were coming to the school board meeting and they might disrupt the meeting and jeopardize the facility vote.

BTW, how did that Write Yellow, Write Now thing turn out for you anyway????

And I get it...it was easier to fire an athletic director than admit your recently hired principal was an unethical, pathological liar. Still, would it hurt for the school district leadership to have done the right thing? So much for the FWCS code of ethics...only words on paper when leadership does not follow it.

Coke or Pepsi

Every school has a soft drink contract because schools are full of captive consumers. Ours ran out and it fell to our new principal to negotiate a new one. Uh oh. Another high school and recently signed with Coke and received three new scoreboards. I mentioned to our principal that we needed new basketball scoreboards...she mumbled something about not wanting to have her hands tied in negotiations. I had heard otherwise...oh wait, that's something else. A new contract was eventually finalized with Coke and we switched over after spring break. A couple of weeks after spring break a Coke truck arrived with a new machine and some new refrigerator units for our concession stands. Since my office was by the door, I told them they could put them in my office and then I would find out where they would go. I radioed the office. Shortly afterward the principal arrived and started yelling at the delivery guys to load everything back on the truck. She then yelled at me for calling Coke and ordering the equipment. I tried telling her that she had ordered the stuff but she would hear none of that. Back on the truck it went.

A couple of weeks later in a meeting with HR, the HR person would bring this up. I sat and watched as the HR person and my principal argued about this incident. The principal still insisted she was right to order everything back on the truck. The two of them went at it for about 10 minutes. It was kind of like watching a tennis match. It was funny but it was sad - sad to think it was what each person at the school went through one time or another. I wanted to say to the HR person, welcome to my world.

Note: When the principal was finally fired, oops resigned, district officials would search her office and find unsigned copies of the Coke contract. It turns out she never signed and returned it...null and void! When contacted, Coke asked that the money they had given the school in good faith be returned since their was no contract. Last I heard they were still negotiating...

The Rest of the Story

March 30 - I was informed by my principal's boss that I would be terminated effective June 30
April - I was told to request a teaching position for the following year
May - another HR meeting; I watched as the HR person and my principal argued around and around about a recent incident (see Coke or Pepsi)
end of May - I filed a lawsuit
June - I accepted a teaching position for the next year