BUSTED: West Bonner Schools’ FORMER Chairwoman’s Signature Has Been On District Checks For The Past 18 Months — What Else Has Been Missed?
Can You Say The Words “Forensic Audit?”
(Priest River, Idaho) — West Bonner County Schools have been embroiled in controversy over the past month, as conservative leadership, and a new Superintendent, have begun to take steps to fix what is arguably Idaho’s most broken school district.
The district, which has the lowest grades and highest dropout rate in the state, has gone through 3 superintendents in just as many years, and recently 30 teachers have resigned, allegedly in “protest” of the district’s decision to hire an “outsider” superintendent.
For the past 3 years West Bonner Schools has endured a teacher-student sex-scandal, a former superintendent that left his wife for the business manager after having an affair in the District Office, Levy funds that were supposed to be spent on a new boiler were allegedly mis-appropriated, and the financial situation has been in question for years now. For these reasons, and many more, tension at the District is at an all time high.
In particular, a very vocal verbally abusive minority, present at almost every board meeting, have been doing everything in their power to prevent the district’s majority-conservative board and their new superintendent Branden Durst, from being able to get anything productive done. Where have we seen this before?
At these meetings, District employees and former trustees have been doing everything in their power to confuse residents as to what has actually been going on behind the scenes at the school, and now the truth is finally starting to get out.
At a recent Town Hall, held last weekend in response to the recall campaign launched against the Conservative Trustees, Susan Brown, the current Vice-chair for West Bonner County Schools revealed that there were some problems with the checks that the District was writing - namely that they weren’t signed by the Chairman of the board, Keith Rutledge.
Documents made available to the Idaho Tribune by a district insider have revealed that for the past 18 months, over 150 checks have been signed not by the current chair of the board Keith Rutledge, but by Sandra Brower, the former chairwoman of the district’s board who is spearheading a recall effort against the conservative trustees.
Although the Tribune is not aware of any fradulent payments in this series of checks, the fact that Brower’s signature has been on these checks for so long raises some serious questions. A lot of them.
Brower was questioned by independent journalist Casey Whalen at a recent board meeting, prompting a very bizzare over-reaction. Watch:
Brower said "I think if people start thinking about people in a positive intent there wouldn't be this dialogue of accusing people of things they didn’t do.”
Of course, this “good faith” attitude is only extended to district insiders and their friends, not to people like Branden Durst, the schools new superintendent.
There’s an old saying that says “Never attribute to malice what can be easily attributed to incompetence.”
West Bonner School’s Supposed “Budget”
Last week, the School Board met to go over the FY 2023-2024 budget, after having previously voted the budget down by a 3-2 split.
The School’s new Superintendent was handed a budget prepared by the District’s business manager Steffie Pavey, which the gang of angry teachers and former board members expected him to approve blindly.
Here is that “budget:”
Anyone who has ever seen a budget before can tell you that whatever that is, is certainly not a “budget.” This got the attention of several concerned Conservatives in the district, such as Kathy Nash who wrote a letter to Redoubt News saying:
“The long list they published of seemingly random account names with balances that also seemed completely random couldn’t pass for a budget in any legitimate business. There were no designations of what estimations of payables were and what estimations of receivables were. Heck, they didn’t even have any dates in the document. Really, it’s that bad. Go look for yourself; it’s on the district website.
“There were no projected cash flows. In fact, there were no projections at all. It’s almost like it was designed to deceive people. Either that or whoever put it together is totally incompetent. That’s the budget they produced while Susie Luckey was the interim superintendent.
“It’s frightening that Margaret Hall and Carlyn Barton and the pro-levy gang were actually asking for an almost 60% increase in the levy based on that pile of nothing. Thank goodness we voted the levy down. And thank goodness the school board hired an actual professional in Branden Durst to sort that mess out. He was the one bright spot in the whole meeting and was the only one on the administrative staff that knew what he was talking about. Now maybe the district’s children will get an administration that cares more about them than keeping their own relatives in high paying jobs.”
I hate to break it to the angry mob, but Kathy Nash has a point. It is more than abundantly clear that this district needs a forensic audit, and STAT, because something very wrong has been going on up there for a long time.
Letter To The Newspaper From Board Chair Keith Rutledge
Several weeks ago, Keith Rutledge, the chairman of the board wrote a letter to The Miner, a local paper that isn’t controlled by the Hagadone Corporation’s regional news monopoly.
The letter, titled Recall an Attempt to Prevent Audit is not accessible online without a subscription, so we are making Keith’s letter available to everyone here, because it’s worth reading.
In a desperate effort to prevent the forensic audit currently being planned by the Board and our new Superintendent, some of the oligarchy that had controlled this district for years seeks to prevent the administrative reform that our district so desperately needs by attempting a recall of the two Board members that voted against placing the May levy on the ballot.
It should be noted that some of the leaders of this small but very vocal group presided over the many years of maladministration that have led to some of the worst educational outcomes in the state for our students and their families. It should also be noted that the families of some of the leaders of this recall effort would have experienced significant economic gains from the 57% levy increase that they championed, almost 70% of which was allocated to administrative and staff pay.
Their resistance to improving the financial transparency and administration of our district is nothing new. This same clique has been consistently working to deny the Board itself proper financial transparency and to undermine all of our attempts to improve the administration of the district since Trustee Brown and I have been elected.
Going forward, I urge every district resident to watch the Board meetings closely as trustees Hall and Barton will attempt every trick in the book to discredit the Board and delay the forensic audit until after the recall. And if this clique is successful with the recall, the forensic audit will either disappear after being declared unnecessary or narrowed in scope so dramatically as to be ineffective at revealing anything about the convoluted state of district finances.
I am committed to doing everything I can to improve the district administration to do a better job at educating the almost 1,100 children in our schools. I will not abandon those children and their families to the same group that would reinstate the type of administration that heralds a 60% reading competency level as a success (as Susie Luckey did in the superintendent candidate forum a few weeks ago). I think better of our students than that, and I will continue to demand more for them than that.
Please join the actual conservative majority of the Board in protecting our children from those who would take us back to the same old failed tax and spend policies that lined their pockets at the expense of our district’s residents and our students’ education.
— Keith Rutledge
