Photos of Current Foster School Site
And another rant about budget misses
First off, I posted about this in yesterday’s story, but I want to highlight this again because this is so crazy. Below is a table that I derived from the District’s reporting. For an entity with relatively fixed and predictable revenue and expense1, it’s mind blowing how badly the budget misses were.
In order to keep the reports as apples-to-apples as possible, these do not include the capital and bond/municipal funding accounts, which is a whole other can of worms.
Source material:
9/27/2021 Board Budget Packet
9/14/2022 Board Budget Presentation and Table
9/11/2023 Board Budget Presentation
9/16/2024 Board Budget Presentation
What’s the reason for all these budget misses? It’s honestly hard to say, I realize that the District has pointed to special education and transportation costs - but like those were high in 2022 too and were already mostly budgeted for in 2023-24. Grossi suggested that there were budget games played with grant revenue and bills and that these were just “bad budgets.” The 2021-22 budget was spot on - was this because Dr. Horton was moving revenue and expenses around to make it look better than it really was? I don’t feel like we’ve gotten a full post-mortem for this yet.
It’s also mind-boggling that these budget misses never came up for conversation until the end of the year. Halfway through the year, when you’re $5 million in the hole already for the year, shouldn’t you warn the board?
Foster School Site Pictures
After soccer practice today, we drove by the Foster Site and took some pictures, since there has been considerable discussion on pausing the project. Here’s a couple photos of the current state of the site:
Relatively speaking, these are budget misses of 5% in 2023 and 6% in 2024 - those are not insane percentages but like, if you had a business with fixed and predictable income, this is a pretty bad miss!
The incompetence of the Board ranks to gross negligence and should be considered criminal… that’s how you make them accountable
At this point we need to start holding rallies at every BOE meeting. We need to demand answers on behalf of BR families. The community also should be demanding an independent full audit of everything related to this district —financials, contracts, everything. All results & recommendations should be shared with the community via town halls throughout the community where we get to ask questions and have them answered. Full transparency and accountability.
I also believe that every administrator that was part of the Horton administration, that is still working at the district, should be fired if they’re still working at d65. They enabled this. The same goes for every BOE member —starting with the President —except maybe the last two newest elected. And as for the current administration, every position should be on the table for elimination.
Allowing this to happen (& continue to happen) — I imagine that we don’t even know the half of what “this” is —is the definition of malfeasance & negligence. Everyone and everything should be fully investigated. I hope people are starting to see how ABSOLUTELY INSANE this is.