Chicago Public Schools Spent Millions on Travel as Students Fall Under Expectations
“FY 2023 and FY 2024 alone produced, conservatively, more than $14.5 million in travel expenditures…”
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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Comments
Fix your problems at home before you pat yourselves on the back with paid vacation “conferences”.
Stop trying to fix what is irreversibly and irredeemably broken.
For those children whose IQ is lower than room temperature and have no interest in attending a school that they’re not capable of thriving in stop requiring their attendance. Let the smart kids learn in peace and quiet.
Needless to say, teachers unions gotta go, as does much of the bureaucratic bloat.
Parents (assuming they’re not dead or incarcerated) should be able to choose how their children are educated, as well or as poorly as we might judge that to be.
As it stands now, public schools cater to the least common denominator – the disruptive.
While a conference in Egypt might be fun I doubt they much to gain in terms of learning innovative educational practices. Educators should never be traveling overseas for conferences on the state’s dime. Do that with your own personal funds or not at all.
Reading the headline, I thought we were talking about student transportation expenses.
Is the failure to meet expectations really tied to funding? Or, is it the student feedstock’s lack of discipline, lack of intelligence, and lack of support from parents?
Grizz, surely that question is rhetorical.
Clearly a Federal Taxpayer funded bailout is gonna be not only necessary but absolutely justified, for the children’. /S
How about we began withdrawing Federal funding to low performing School Districts? Create an incentive structure so that where the students read, write, perform mathematics at grade level based on standardized testing, HS graduation Exams and the number/percentage of graduates needing remedial classes in College are positive v negative, improving v declining the School District gets more support for their successes and less to zero funding for failures?
Better yet, fine the schools for the future cost of associated welfare benefits.
Suggested campaign slogan for non-Democrat candidate in next Chicago mayoral election: “100 years of Democrats is enough.”
“30.5% of Chicago students in grades 3-8 hit the reading proficiency mark.
Only 18.5% students had math proficiency”
Honestly much higher than I expected