Chicago Public Schools is one of the worst-run school districts in the country.
A new report shows the district spent millions on travel:
Fueled in part by federal pandemic relief money, CPS travel expenditures that included such items as airfare and lodging more than doubled between Fiscal Year 2019 (the last full pre-Covid school year) and Fiscal Year 2024 (the most recent post-pandemic school year analyzed by the CPS OIG), as indicated in Chart 1.FY 2023 and FY 2024 alone produced, conservatively, more than $14.5 million in travel expenditures, mostly for out-of-town employee professional development seminars or overnight student outings, an analysis by the OIG’s Performance Analysis Unit estimated.
What the what!?
And yet the students keep falling way below standards.
Unacceptable.
Why did the Inspector General make this report? Staff trip overseas:
The genesis of this OIG initiative was a complaint that one elementary school had paid more than $20,000 to one vendor for staff travel to Egypt, had not received the required approval for the trip, and had undertaken other lavish staff outings. Faced with this news, CPS canceled the Egypt trip one day before its scheduled departure and eventually canceled three of this vendor’s other overseas outings, two of which also had not been approved.An OIG investigation ultimately found that eight schools had used more than $142,000 in CPS funds to pay this vendor for 15 staff trips to Finland, Estonia, Egypt and South Africa for professional development and school visits. These tours also featured numerous scheduled as well as optional tourist activities of debatable value, including a visit to a South African game park, a hot air balloon ride, camel rides and a visit to a bazaar. Thirteen of the 15 trips were never pre-approved, as required.
Maybe I should move back and get certified to teach in Illinois because man oh man…I would raise hell if I ever heard about these trips.
One principal went to Las Vegas numerous times “to attend a professional development conference without CPS approval.”
The principal and his wife spent over $400 a night on hotel rooms, not at the conference site.
They arrived two days before the conference started.
Get this. The same conference took place in Chicago. Hardly any employees attended THAT conference.
Another teacher spent $4,700 on a luxury seven-day trip to Hawaii for a four-day seminar.
It was easy for the employees to take advantage of the system:
Faced with this pattern of problematic spending, the OIG sought to identify the underlying cause of the travel excesses by launching a performance review into districtwide CPS travel procedures and found them sorely lacking. CPS travel guidelines, travel training, the travel approval process, and travel bookkeeping were all so deficient that they created vulnerabilities for abuse and fraud, the performance review found.The OIG learned that, when it came to travel expenses, CPS had its eye on the wrong ball. It had a team of employees scouring small reimbursement receipts for such items as meals and Ubers, but paid far less attention to the cost of CPS payments directly to travel vendors for far larger ticket items like airfare and hotel rooms that totaled nearly 29 times more, according to one sample analyzed by the OIG. Questions about travel requests focused more on whether the proper paperwork was filed and not whether a trip was worth the cost.In addition, no one was checking if travel agencies were charging CPS fair rates. Said one top CPS official: “I don’t think there’s any way the system is set up today that we can do that.”
According to Fox News, 30.5% of Chicago students in grades 3-8 hit the reading proficiency mark.
Only 18.5% students had math proficiency.
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