Accentuate the positive because image is everything.

If someone is breaking into your house, you call the police. If your house is on fire, you call the fire department. If your school district is mismanaging public funds, sell your looted, smoked-stained rubble and leave town.

This process has revealed one rather obvious issue. There are absolutely no checks and balances in school board governance. The school board doesn't follow their own policies. They answer to no one because no one understands the depth of their responsibility. The superintendent doesn't have to justify poor choices because the board doesn't want to attract any attention to their own inadequacies. Asking tough questions may demand tougher follow-up questions.

The superintendent, after bouncing around school administration for years, knows that mismanagement is not taken seriously by the public or the State Auditor. No one expects a school district to run like a business because they aren't considered a business. They have people with music degrees running a $180,000,000.00 enterprise. Of course, mistakes will be made - this is the public sector after all.

No one knows how to detect a crime when it happens. If they did, they would be working for the police. If corruption occurs, it must be covered up. Image is everything.

I am reminded of my job in South Africa as a Housemaster. I was in charge of 90 students that lived in Roan House during the school week. They went home on weekends. On a night I was not on duty, a man broke into the hostel and used a razor blade to slash several blankets with children sleeping underneath. When students awoke, I was notified and became deeply distressed. The security alarm had not been set by the duty officer and this intruder walked right into the Main House through an open window.

I soon found out that this unknown person was known as "PK" and that events like these happened at least once a year and sometimes children were hurt. I immediately asked what steps had been taken to prevent such attacks and was basically told that the school's reputation was greater than the safety of any single child. I notified the local media and the perpetrator was caught in a matter of weeks. The perpetrator had been breaking into hostels for years and each target school was more concerned with their reputation and how enrollment might be impacted if people found out.

When the Headmaster of the school found out about the leak, I was not offered a contract for the following year.

People like to pretend that bad things never happen. Rather than preventing bad things from happening, this school district chooses to "accentuate the positives". Sadly, it gets tougher to do when you run out of positives and start making them up as you go along.