Ledger editorial

Holding schools to account

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Revelations about wasteful, if not larcenous, spending and other administrative horrors in New Jersey's 31 Abbott school districts have been coming in scandalous waves.

The Keansburg school district inked a $740,000 severance package into a retiring superintendent's contract -- on top of $120,000 in pension and health benefits. Audits show unconscionable or undocumented spending in a slew of districts, including Union City, which budgeted money to pay bus drivers for charging their cell phones. Elizabeth officials are accused of treating public school money like political cash.

These abuses are coming to light because the state is finally taking steps to make school districts explain themselves and to be accountable for how they spend the public's money.

In the case of the Abbott schools, the money comes to $3.1 billion, ordered by the state Supreme Court in the long-running Abbott school funding case. In most of those decisions, it was clear the jus tices never expected the state simply to write the checks and ignore what the schools did with the money.

The state Education Department says all districts, not just the Abbotts, will get a hard look. That's as it should be be cause school spending is the main force driving burdensome property taxes in so many communities.

It is a travesty to misspend education funds; it's doubly so when the funds were allocated to provide a good education to kids who have not been getting one.

The practice of handing superintendents big buyouts, turning unused sick days and vacation days into severance gold or giving administrators juicy incentive bonuses -- just for doing what they were hired to do -- has to end. In some cases, it may be too late to undo contracts signed before new legislation took effect giv ing the Education Department increased scrutiny over spend ing.

It was, however, the department, albeit under different leadership, that negotiated superintendent contracts in two state-run districts, Newark and Jersey City, with some of the very perks that need to be exorcised.

The Corzine administration, which is challenging the Keans burg package and a contract for a new superintendent in Plainfield, is right to make sure it exhausts all legal avenues to ensure that such contracts comply with the spirit of the new law.

The wrongs that are being uncovered cannot, however, be used as an excuse simply to cut school funding instead of enact ing true remedies. Wasteful spending is not necessarily evi dence of padded school budgets. It may be evidence that someone redirected, or snatched for himself, what should have been spent on the children.

Nothing good will be accomplished by making the children pay for the sins of those who betrayed them.