Having a long Labor Day Weekend, and the focus of the Shreveport Times on Caddo School issues, caused us to spend a little time “inside the numbers” of the 2011-2012 Caddo Parish School Board budget. This budget is out of balance by at least $15Million, and it fails to give details an investigator would expect to find in the blocks of money appropriated. The budget doesn’t pass the “Smell Test.”  We’re talking $1,923,501 budgeted for consultants to conduct workshops in subjects staff spent over $800,000 traveling to learn how to present.

This section of the budget is particularly ripe for abusive allocation of resources. For those who don’t understand, we’re NOT talking about the School  “Building” Staff here, we’re talking about “Consultants,” who can duplicate staff work in many cases. If we pay staff members to travel to learn and bring back training to share within the system, why would we spend $800,000 to train at least 197 teachers & staff at conferences or workshops around the country at the nine largest programs and then hire duplicate consultants in the same programs? The attached table recaps the programs and census, as reported in the summary by the CPSB.

Knowing $800,000 was recently spent to educate staff members, more questions need to be asked about “Consultants.” The real question we might ask is “Why aren’t  some Midway office people being asked to take a one-way trip?”