$ 1.4 Billion CPS Spending Gone Wild. 122% increase
In a page out of “Bizarro World”, where everything is opposite of what it seems, Substance News research into Chicago Public Schools vendor spending has uncovered 1.4 billion dollars of increased spending. During the recent corporate media dust up over an FBI investigation of Chicago Schools CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett’s no-bid $20 million contract to SUPES, a company she has direct ties to, it became apparent that there needed to be a history check on CPS spending and public statements of the need for austerity.
In light of the assertions that the Board of Education of Chicago is claiming a billion dollar (plus) “deficit” and the newly elected reactionary Republican Governor Bruce Rauner is declaring that Chicago schools should declare “bankruptcy”, it was curious to see how Chicago schools was actually spending money on outside vendors. Vendors means everything extra outside of paying staff to teach kids. And a closer look at the vendor situation shows that during the past four years, spending on vendors has exploded, while spending on teachers and other staff has actually gone down!
With the long history of corruption and prison sentences for Chicago politicians over the years there have been many laws passed to make public spending “transparent” to the taxpayers, not that it seems to be slowing down any sticky fingers or golden gooses. Or is this latest $20 million FBI corrption investigation just a slight of hand to deflect attention from the neo-liberal agenda to divert public assets to private hands?
CROSS POSTED @ http://www.substancenews.net/…
So what has been happening to Chicago’s massive (between $5 billion and $6 billion) school budget. For a decade, the Board of Education has been spending less and less on the people who do the teaching and other work in the schools — and more and more on outside vendors that, like the SUPES “Academy”, get little or no scrutiny once the contracts are given away.
And, the problem has gotten worse since Rahm Emanuel was sworn in as mayor in May 2011 and appointed the seven members of the Board of Education that approved the hiring of Barbara Byrd Bennett and dozens of her cronies to top executive positions. During those same four years, the Board has also been increasing even more the spending on outside “vendors.” To note just the dramatic example that’s been in the headlines in April 2015 — at the June 26, 2013 meeting of the Board of Education, there were 52 “Purchasing” items on the agenda (all of which were approved by the Board in a quickie vote without discussion or debate). The SUPES scam was number 51. In other words, it was buried in the Board’s 300 page public agenda that day.
One such ordnance (2-156-475) in Chicago mandates that public school vendor spending is published for everyone to see. Interestingly it is difficult to navigate to this area directly for a website but there is a way to get to the information through a backdoor search method. Going through each year’s list of vendor spending and manually copy and paste into excel spreadsheets for tabulation and comparison that information was condensed into one table.