As if City of Monroe Schools didn’t have enough problems, apparent thievery at the top is being complemented it would seem from the bottom as well, all the while with the district saddled with minimal, even deteriorating, academic progress.
In the past year, the District has been rocked by allegations that former Superintendent Brent Vidrine on two occasions defrauded it. As part of his contract, he was allowed to buy more service time for retirement, but allegedly he forged documents to show he paid more than he did to receive the benefit. He has been indicted for this, but has paid back some, $20,000, and retired from the District last year even as he seemed to have shorted the district over $48,000 more. Still unresolved is annual extra but unauthorized payments according to his contracts totaling over $141,000 during his decade-long employment.
Possibly this activity was so under the radar that the Monroe City School Board couldn’t discover it during normal due diligence. In last year’s audit, the Board promised closer attention to superintendent reimbursement as a response. But how it has handled reports of spending concerning student activity accounts doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that the current Board can get it right.
Last year’s, academic year 2023, audit revealed dozens of instances of improper use of these funds – which are designed to support a specific school activity to be used according to the purpose for which it was generated or for the purposes selected by the depositing entities and spent for the benefit of all or any of the school’s students, faculty, staff, facility, or program provided the ledger reflects the expenditure – across a majority of the district’s schools. This was after the District promised in the previous AY 2022 audit to change procedures to prevent this, which didn’t happen. In fact, ten schools reported negative balances in at least one fund, which would be possible only if improper or undocumented expenditures had occurred.
The District concurred with the findings and promised corrective actions to be put in place. So, what happened in AY 2024, with that audit released last month? Even more schools and funds had negative balances, and the District’s response was cut-and-pasted from the previous year’s audit. And, as in previous years, the District couldn’t complete audits on time. At least it seemed to have cleared up a problem with questionable federal grant-related items.
To make matters worse, since Vidrine took the job district overall performance improved little. Back then in 2013 it was a borderline C/D ranked district, but by 2024 it had crept a little way into C territory (the constituent components and their weighing changed somewhat over time, so the comparison isn’t quite exact). And since the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic it has fallen back slightly from 2019 scoring, even as Louisiana schools as a whole were winning plaudits for having perhaps the best student performance recovery on standardized testing overall from that period among the states.
Perhaps most worrisome, the current grade of 73 is as high as it is only because of the progress component to it, scored as a low B. The actual assessment indicator was well below the D level.
Finally, like districts across the state, the District technically is insolvent, to the tune of around $100 million, because of backloaded pension and post-employment benefits that aren’t yet due but will become so in the next couple of decades or so. It over the next decade will pay three or so times its required contribution to try to solve this, which only can come from any of higher taxes, spending cuts, or draining reserves, the combination of which still may not be enough to avoid fiscal problems.
That the District has a pattern of difficulty in getting it together in the past decade reflects poorly on the Board. Failure to make real progress on administrative issues this academic year might not endear its members to voters in next year’s elections.
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