Grandma's long fight for $47 reveals a major problem at DPS
 
BY ROCHELLE RILEY
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Talk about a hard-earned $47.

It took seven weeks and a battle against five layers of bureaucracy, but Adrienne Randle finally received a check Tuesday from the Detroit Public Schools to replace one that bounced when she tried to cash it for her granddaughter back in July. Marketta Randle, 16, earned the $47 for working one day as a lunch aide at the Golightly Career and Technical Center.

The new check covered the $10 bounced-check fee.

If this is how DPS handles its little financial issues, don't you wonder about the big bucks?

A case for remaking the district

The rubber has met the road -- and it bounced. Now, Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb really must face facts. He has to choose.

Bobb cannot ferret out the criminality and theft that has been routine in DPS while also trying to run the district. The sheer scope of corruption and mismanagement and ineptitude is too great.

Bobb needs to shut down the district and reopen something new, something that parents will stay in the city or move to the city so their children can attend.

Want proof? I give you just the latest example, a bit of absurdity that will make your blood boil.

It involves $47.

That may not seem like much, but when you're a pregnant 16-year-old living in hard economic times, it can mean the world. Here's Adrienne Randle's side of the story:

Check, no balance

In May, her granddaughter, Marketta Randle, a student at Kettering High, took a one-day job at Golightly Career and Technical Center as a lunch aide at a banquet. She earned $47.

When Adrienne Randle, a 52-year-old typist in the Wayne County purchasing department and Marketta's legal guardian, tried to cash the DPS check last month, it bounced. And her bank charged her $10 for the effort.

So ... Randle called Golightly principal Betty Edwards, who apologized profusely and sent a request for payment to Lawanda Taylor, principal accountant in the DPS Office of Accountants.

Two weeks passed.

Randle again called Edwards, whom she cited as the only DPS employee who was gracious and helpful to her. Edwards apologized again and told Randle that Taylor refused to take her calls and refused to see her when she tried to talk to her in person at DPS headquarters.

(Edwards, contacted Tuesday, said she remembered Randle and remembered forwarding her request to the DPS accounting department, but she declined to comment further.)

So, Randle called Taylor, who apologized profusely and said she already had processed a new check, but was awaiting approval to issue it from Delores Brown, the district's deputy financial officer.

(Taylor, contacted Tuesday, said I had to speak with her supervisor, Almon Turner Jr., director of cash management. Turner said Taylor misspoke and that no check had been processed. Brown, who supervises both, did not return phone calls.)

But back to Randle, who was becoming as much investigative reporter as typist. She called Turner herself. He apologized profusely and sent vendor papers to Golightly for Randle to fill out. A suspicious Randle declined, saying, "My granddaughter is not a vendor. This is a lie, and I'm not going to get into trouble."

She also declined to give Turner her granddaughter's Social Security number, which is standard for paychecks, but wasn't needed for the first check -- the one that bounced. Besides, Randle feared that that the number would be misused.

(Turner, reached Tuesday morning after my repeated calls to accounting, said: "I'm aware of the situation, and we're going to write the check today." He then specifically said that Dorothy Menefee, the program supervisor in accounting, was going to write the check without Marketta's Social Security number. Randle later called to tell me that the district's forensic auditor, Joe Jackson, delivered a $57 check to her office at 4 p.m. Tuesday. Randle got back her $10 bank fee.)

'This is the only one' -- or is it?

When I asked Turner how often DPS employees issue bad checks, he said, "As far as I know, this is the only one that's ever happened. Maybe it was a closed school or a closed account."

(Turner's new. He worked for the City of Detroit until last month and may not have known that Golightly's former principal, Laura Royster, was fired in June after an audit accused her of, among other things, using school resources to pay for flowers for her husband's funeral. Her accounts might have been closed, including one for the banquet where Marketta worked.)

When I asked Turner whether DPS allows employees to issue checks without recipients' Social Security numbers, Turner said, "No, are you kidding?"

No, Mr. Turner, I'm not.

So how can the district do such a thing?

"We're going to -- well I shouldn't say," he replied, and directed me to DPS spokesman Steven Wasko, who said that the district, under federal law, routinely issues checks without Social Security numbers for disbursement less than $600. DPS uses a default number, he said.

It took six weeks for Marketta Randle, a pregnant teen who took a job to help buy baby things, to get what DPS owed her. She may have been caught up in one employee's alleged shenanigans at one school. Or she may represent not a tip, but one of thousands of icebergs waiting to sink the school district.

If the district can't handle one bounced $47 check any better than this, how can it possibly clean up multimillion-dollar problems?

Even if Robert Bobb were Superman, he couldn't do the impossible. He needs to shut down the district and start from scratch. It will be easier to catch the criminals -- and create better schools -- than to bail water from a sinking ship.