This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/gov-evers-needs-to-intervene-in-mps-says-former-superintendent/

Governor should appoint Special Master, step toward new governance 

Gov. Tony Evers, a former state Superintendent of Public Instruction, has a unique opportunity given his skill set to take charge of the Milwaukee Public Schools, a former MPS superintendent said.

Bill Andrekopoulos, MPS superintendent for eight years until his retirement in 2010, an educator in the district for 38, said that unless the school district was willing to yield completely to outside reform nothing — not the financial bungling or low student performance — would change.

The governor, Andrekopoulos said, ought to appoint a Special Master, who would create an advisory panel of, maybe, seven members to run MPS for three to five years. The panel would then decide on a new structure for the district, perhaps giving responsibility to the mayor of Milwaukee. The mayor could then appoint community stakeholder board members. 

“One of the things that has never been disrupted in at least 40 years is the governance of MPS and it’s time to be disrupted for the benefit of the kids and the community,” Andrekopoulos told the Badger Institute in a wide-ranging interview. “The governor, the legislative leaders, the mayor, the Common Council president and the MMAC have an opportunity to make significant changes to the governance structure of MPS. It’s time for a higher authority to intervene.”

Now that MPS Superintendent Keith Posley had resigned, set to give up his $300,000 annual salary at the end of June and take with him a $160,000 severance, Andrekopoulos wondered if anyone would finally listen to those angry speakers at the  Milwaukee Public Schools Board hearing Monday night.

Nearly everyone who called for Posley to be fired also said it was time to clean house. Like the angry crowd Monday night at MPS Central Services voicing their disgust, Andrekopoulos said the public has been given far too few answers to far too many questions.

His plan for reform is audacious. It’s never been tried in Wisconsin. There will almost certainly be political resistance from the most powerful, controlling player in local education, the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, he said.

District leadership, elected and administrative, and the DPI, have a lot to answer for the events leading up to Posley’s resignation under pressure, Andrekopoulos said.

Chief among them is why or how district administrators could be so slow to respond to problems with some of its most basic funding sources. While it wasn’t until mid-May that the public became aware that the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services was suspending MPS’ Head Start program, a check of board meeting minutes by the Badger Institute found references to “deficiencies” in the program going back more than a year.

The federal Administration for Children and Families in an April 26 letter to the board cited physically and verbally abused, maltreated and unsupervised children. Without some remediation, Head Start might withhold an estimated $10.5 million in funding for next year.

Unlike some federal programs that are little more than slush funds for school districts, Head Start provides very specific guidelines and benchmarks for spending and performance, Andrekopoulos said.

“As superintendent, I went through an (Head Start) audit,” he said. “It’s shocking to me when Head Start provides a template for remediation that it could be ignored.”

Approximately a week later, Posley made public a letter from John Johnson, deputy state superintendent for DPI, asking for six audits and reports for the years 2023 through 2025, several of them overdue by more than eight months.

The language of the letter is brutal.

The letter refers to a “pattern of submitting incomplete data” and warns the district that without swift compliance DPI would withhold a special education services payment for June that could be at least $15 million.

State general aid payments in the “tens of millions” of dollars to the district were at risk, a DPI spokesperson told a local paper. The failure of by far the largest school district in the state to provide required revenue estimates could potentially rob other districts of revenue, the spokesperson said.

Those few board members who responded claimed to be blindsided by the revelations in the letter. Requests for interviews with key board members and Posley by the Badger Institute were ignored.

MPS board member Darryl Jackson has said he has been “in the dark about quite a bit.”

While it is possible Jackson, a member of the MPS’ Committee on Accountability, Finance and Personnel and other committee members didn’t know the financial records debacle was coming to a head, he and a quorum were in attendance for a board meeting back on December 21 when district chief financial officer Martha Kreitzman responded to an audit critical of her office’s financial reporting.

Auditor Baker Tilly, a contractor with the district for a decade, had provided the district with a report based on its audit for the 2021-22 school year. Auditors “identified control deficiencies that are considered material weakness surrounding the preparation of financial statements” not in “conformity with generally accepted accounting principles or the schedule of expenditures of federal and state awards that is in conformance with the applicable federal or state requirements.”

“In addition, material misstatements in the general ledger were identified during the financial audit and subsequently corrected upon being questioned as part of the audit process.”

Kreitzman presented the board with the administration’s response, a 10-page outline for correcting the problems.

In response to a loss of lots of institutional knowledge in the department during the pandemic, Kreitzman said she’d hired contractors for permanent roles as comptroller, reporting manager, budget director, manager and coordinator.

She said she hired two contractors, Robert Half and Protiviti, to reorganize the Department of Finance. In addition to making financial reporting a separate entity, a financial reporting checklist had been created, she told the board.

“Have you ever been faced with a challenge and didn’t know what direction to go?” she told the board. “The challenge seemed impossible.”

However, she painted an optimistic picture for the board. “This year compared to last year we met most of all our deadlines now,” she said. “Things have gotten a little more difficult as we close out the financial reporting. We made all or most of our deadlines to the auditors.”

The issue of financial reorganization and deadlines is nowhere to be found in the minutes of the two meetings — January and February — available on the MPS website. There is no mention in the public discussion of a problem with DPI.

“Stupid, yes. Incompetent, yes, but it seems more to me than that,” Andrekopoulos said.

There is also almost nothing in the public record of any role played in all of this by MPS’ Office of Accountability and Efficiency. The office was created in 2010 by then Board President Michael Bonds to act as a watchdog of the administration reporting to the board.

Bonds was convicted in 2019 in connection with a bribery scheme involving a Philadelphia charter school operator.

Matt Chason, the director of the office, has not responded to several requests by the Badger Institute to discuss his role in the financial reporting mess. Chason is responsible, however, for recruiting and hiring Todd Gray to meet the DPI requirement to help MPS meet its overdue deadlines.

Gray is a former Waukesha School District Superintendent lauded recently for fixing up a financial mess in the Glendale-River Hills School District. “It’s a perfect hire,” Andrekopoulos said. “They are not going to be able to bullshit them.”

There are also questions about DPI and why it waited to publicly disclose the problems until after a $252 million referendum vote April 2 that was decided by two percentage points.

It wasn’t until May 29 that Sachin Chheda, DPI’s executive director, issued a sternly worded statement about MPS.

“Unfortunately, after months of inadequate progress on filing statutorily required fiscal reports, the DPI was forced to inform MPS on Friday that further aid payments are at risk, immediately including both a special education aid payment and a general aid payment in June.”

The next day, when asked by a CBS 58 reporter why this action didn’t precede the referendum, he backpedaled, saying that although letters had been sent to the district in September and December 2023, “I don’t think in March as you were leading up to the referendum that it was clear that that they were as behind as they were.

“It’s not fair to suggest DPI knew the scale of the problem is what it is two months ago.”

To which state Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dame, co-chair of the Assembly Finance Committee replied on Twitter: 

“Convenient how DPI didn’t release info about MPS’ failure to report financial data before a $252M referendum went to voters, despite the district missing deadlines months earlier. DPI was well aware of it, considering their frequent meetings with the district about the reports.”

Born told the Badger Institute that while it probably cannot be proven that DPI dragged its feet, Gov. Tony Evers and State Superintendent Jill Underly were vocal supporters of the referendum that was always expected to be close.

“DPI has been enabling MPS for a long time. This has been years in the making and finally it’s coming to a head,” Born said.

Evers and several DPI officials, including Chheda, declined to respond to emails asking for answers to many of these questions.

Andreopoulos said that the way DPI has handled the MPS problem is out of character from the usual vigilance and adherence to deadlines.

Andrekopoulos said, however, that rather than covering something up, he thinks DPI might have thought any disclosures would have been interference in a referendum that rightfully should have been decided locally.

When asked about Andrekopoulos’ proposal to have Evers head a reform effort going forward, his frequent political sparring partner, Born, said he agreed that the change had to come from somewhere outside of the school district.

“I think people should know that this is a big deal and that something like this just doesn’t happen in the course of daily governance,” Born said. “Wherever it comes from, the mayor, the county executive, wherever. It’s time for leadership.”

Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.

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