……The snow today just keeps coming and the much anticipated January 26 meeting of the Board of Education has been cancelled with a meeting date yet-to-be-determined. The January 26th meeting was when we were promised the big reveal on what really happened with the Hancock County School District’s finances. Uriah Cummings, WV Dept. of Education CFO, and Jeff Davis of Education Consultants, were to deliver their report with details included. I am hoping that printed report will be shared with media so we don’t have to file a FOIA request..
………..Listed on the agenda for Cummings’ and Davis’s report are: “Hancock County Board of Education financial template”, Hancock County Board of Education – 2025 MDA; Hancock County Board of Education Board of Education notes to the 2025 SPW fund 61; FY 25 Hancock; 2025 encumbrances”.
………..Can’t tell you that I know what all that means. I’m not versed in public school acronyms like I am in “legislative speak”. I am skeptical that the topics listed above will tell us all we need to know,
…….When the State Superintendent of Schools, Michele Blatt, testified before Finance Committee in Charleston, she said that Hancock County had not put its numbers into the WVEIS system for many years (I’ve heard 30) and had they done that, the State would have been alerted to the problem. Out of 55 counties in the State, only one, Hancock failed to use the program. Here’s where my antenna first goes up. Why does the person downstate responsible for the WVEIS reporting system not raise the red flag to fellow State officials? Can the system be operating fully if one county does not input the numbers? Hancock CFO Joe Campinelli used a spread sheet instead. Were the superintendents at that time aware of Hancock County’s deviation from the rest of the State in the required reporting? Campinelli was the superintendents’ direct report. Were they not aware of the deviation or did they overlook it? The State Superintendent and several Senators spoke of “malfeasance.” Malfeasance is criminal and every superintendent who knew of Campinelli’s failure to comply would seem to me to be to be guilty of it.
…….Pat McGeehan’s financial rescue bill, is now stalled in the Senate, Senator Laura Wakim-Chapman (R-1st) sponsor of a companion bill to McGeehan’s in the Senate, said the initial agreement had been to act immediately on the Bill when it passed over to the Senate. Wakim-Chapman said she had never been told that agreement wasn’t going to be honored.
………The bill is double-referenced, first to Education then to Finance, a sure way to slow down or kill a bill. The Education reference is not necessary and every moment the bill spends in the Senate, the more it stands a chance of being amended, Perhaps, this is the time for school employees and citizens to begin to contact Senators on the Education and Finance Committees. Their names, phone numbers and e-mails are listed on the legislative website.
,,,,,,,,Several senators spoke of the need for the prosecution of school officials involved. Another amendment being tossed around is that the seated Board of Education would be removed from office when the County seeks the loan to continue to operate. Sen. Ryan Weld (R-1st) represents Hancock County, but I wonder about his commitment to getting the bill passed. He is quoted as saying since the State took over the County there’s no pressing need to get the money. (I seriously wonder if Weld DOES represent us. In what I believe to be the worst crisis Hancock County has seen, Weld has been neither been seen or heard. I think perhaps he has caught “Kanawha fever”, a strange malady in which a legislator gets to Charleston and gets so caught up in his importance that he forgets where he came from and who got him elected.)
……..Whether you agree with Del. McGeehan’s stance on past legislation or not, he was the first to come to the aid of the people he represented with his legislation which provided a lifeline for the quickly sinking district.
…..The phenomena of Hancock County School District receiving a clean audit for 3 years is one of the strangest aspects of this situation. The President of the State Board of Education, Paul Hardesty, wants to see the auditing firms in Charleston and I believe an investigation needs to be launched into how a clean audit came out of all the shenanigans that appeared to have been going on. Three years of searching through the Board minutes find no record of the audit being either presented or approved by the Board. The Board is in charge of the county’s finances and yet I had a Board member tell me he had never seen an audit report.
………I have many more questions, but want to hear what the State has to say before I ask follow-up questions. Hometown News filed a Freedom of Information request for a list of which employees were bonded and for how much and information about the auditing firms’ bond. (One firm prepared the financial report without testing and another did the audit with testing.)
………When WV Board President Paul Hardesty delivered the news that the State was taking over Hancock County’s School System he was visibly angry and he chastised the County for its failure to comply with the WVEIS reporting. I understand his anger, but I also thought to myself, “Was the State Board of Education doing it’s job when it didn’t address that failure to comply at the time?”
……..Waiting for answers.
