Where did the tax money go?

The Brown Deer School District spent a little over $28,000 on travel this year including stays at the Kalahari Resort and the Hilton, but they only provided documentation to account for $7,521.

The school district didn’t provide documentation for how over $20,000 was spent in travel expenditures for the 2005/2006 school year.

In a related case, a taxpayer group found that Greendale School District officials and school board members have attended 92 out-of-state trips in the last two years to places including San Diego and Orlando including one trip for five that tallied up to $10,000.

Brown Deer also failed to comply with an open records request for the credit card statements from the district for the last two years. The district was able to provide $2,200 in statements for the district’s two emergency credit cards. These cards were issued to Bruce Connolly, superintendent, and Kristin Kollath, business manager. There are statements missing from various months which are unaccounted for. Kollath is looking into this gap in the credit card statements.

“Is this in regards to the Greendale case?” said Kollath, when she was asked about the district’s travel expenditures.

The Greendale controversy is an entirely separate case, because Greendale provided documentation of their spending.

“They don’t have to submit documentation for short trips,” said Kollath.

• According to the Brown Deer School District’s 3.20 reimbursement policy, “receipts are required for all reimbursements.”
• Brown Deer provided documentation for a little over $7,500 that was spent this past year out of an aggregate total of $28007.
• Kollath and Connolly are the only administrators who obtain and use “emergency” credit cards. They used them to book flights, make purchases from amazon.com, hp.com, best buy, and other stores.
• Only credit card statements and no receipts were provided for the cards of the two administrators.
• Recently, Brown Deer had a referendum to do renovations to the district that was voted down by taxpayers, because it would result in a raise in taxes.
• Teachers and administrators attend a variety of different conventions from the Wisconsin Music Education Association Convention in Madison to the National DECA competition in Dallas, Texas.

Taxpayers are responding to this information about the district.

“28,000 is a lot of money, I don’t even make that in a year,” said Brown Deer taxpayer Kim Lee. “We, as taxpayers, have the right to know where money is being spent.”

In regards to the administrators who possess emergency credit cards, Lee said that, “if it’s for emergencies, then that’s how it should be used.”

Lee has two younger kids that will soon be apart of the school district and she said that she has heard a lot of good things about Brown Deer.

“It seems silly to send teachers to a lot of conventions,” said Lee.

Many of the districts employees go on these conventions every year.

“I get to see people that I don’t normally get to see,” said Kathleen Dimmer, Brown Deer Middle School band teacher.

According to Dimmer, these conferences are a great way to network with other band teachers and she has taken techniques and approaches from the WMEA convention in Madison and implemented them into her curriculum.

Dimmer’s total reimbursement for a two day convention in Madison was $296.04.

Kollath said the budget is set to a function, or a set account allotted for a particular purpose, and often employees will put more money in travel for the next year and less money in supplies depending on the educational initiatives within the school district.

Jim Sadowski, marketing teacher and adviser of the DECA program, feels that teachers should be able to go on these conferences. DECA is a national association of marketing education students that provides members with educational and leadership development activities to merge with the classroom instructional program.

Sadowski said that you can’t judge a book by its cover and a lot of times when administrators and teachers are planning on going on these conferences, “it may look worthwhile in the brochure, but when they get there it’s a whole different story.”

“I have gone to my share of conferences that haven’t been worthwhile,” said Sadowski.

Every year, the Brown Deer School District reimburses Sadowski of a little over $900 to take his DECA students to Nationals.

“We have forms in place to make sure that there is no abuse of the system,” said Kollath.

Connolly said that the school is really efficient within the district’s travel reimbursement policy. He said that Brown Deer did a joint study with Michigan State called “The Balance Score Card” on how to do reimbursement.

Connolly and Kollath both stated that reimbursement within the district is on a case-by-case basis. Connolly said that Brown Deer spends a lot more time internally on staff development in place of sending teachers to conventions.

“Administrators are responsible to make sure that travel is applicable to their job,” said Kollath.

Brown Deer alumni, Krystal Johnkins, commented on the travel expenditures of the district.

“If they are traveling to learn about psychology, it might be more helpful,” said Johnkins. “Band, I’m not sure,” she said.

Johnkins said that she is not confident that the teachers improved or enabled their students to benefit from the conventions.

“If our teachers are well-educated, they will be able to better serve the students,” said Connolly.