Baltimore Schools Disrepair

The Balitmore Sun's Sara Neufeld has done yeoman's work in uncovering the rank mismanagement in the Baltimore City Schools. Neufeld, who was responsbible for breaking the story on the City's school budget fiasco back in April, now has a story on the poor condition of the physical facility maintenance.

Spot checks by state inspectors found that Baltimore school employees falsely reported making promised building repairs and permitted shoddy work on multiple renovation projects, according to confidential documents obtained by The Sun.

The inspectors found new windows that were cut to the wrong size, leaving gaps at the top, and new doors installed in rusty old frames although new frames had been paid for.

Their findings have sent top school system officials scrambling to correct hundreds of problems ranging from a leaky roof to an empty fire extinguisher to a toilet not secured to the floor.

The city school system's chief operating officer, J. Keith Scroggins, has vowed to hold accountable the people on his staff who didn't make the repairs they said they had, and those who didn't check behind contractors. He said he has already taken disciplinary action against at least one person in management, though he could not offer specifics.

"Unfortunately, it was just a total breakdown," said Scroggins, who has assigned one of his top deputies to address the state's findings and is withholding money from two contractors. "Everything that could go wrong did go wrong."

David Lever, executive director of the state's public school construction program, said he is pleased with Scroggins' response and confident that he wasn't knowingly conveying false information.

At the same time, Lever said, a lack of accountability is "very entrenched" in the culture of the city school system, which is slated to receive nearly $53 million in state money for renovation projects in the coming fiscal year.

Mismanagement seems to be the catch-phrase in the Baltimore City schools.

Like all maintenance programs, occaisionally, the management has to trust that all work was done because it is impossible to track every task from start to finish. However, spot checking has to be done on a regular, and random basis. Minor repairs might not make the list of necessary review, but major ones involving say--the roof of a building or safety equipment should not only be done in a prompt and timely manner, but also should be checked without fail. But it looks like Baltimore City management dropped the ball big time:

Last fall, two employees from Lever's office performed routine maintenance inspections at 40 city schools, part of a program to ensure that schools throughout Maryland are well kept. About 230 of the state's 1,400 public schools are inspected each year.

The inspectors found 585 building deficiencies in the 40 Baltimore schools, some minor and others potential safety hazards. In the winter, the school system reported back to the state that many of the issues had been, or were in the process of being, corrected.

In February and March, the inspectors returned to five of the schools to see whether the corrections had, in fact, occurred. They discovered that nearly two-thirds of the repairs that the system said it had made -- 52 out of 82 -- were incomplete or not done at all.

That is not only poor performance, but poor management and poor foresight.

If the state hands you a list of required maintenance items, you can bet that the state is going to come back and check to see if they are done. Failure to address that specific list is just plain stupid.

"This is an appalling discovery," Lever wrote in an April 16 memo to state Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick, marked "confidential" but obtained by The Sun.

In the memo, Lever went on to say that he did not believe senior administrators knew they were submitting false information to the state, but rather that they were not auditing the data they received from their employees.

He said in a recent interview that Scroggins and the school system's new facilities director have been working hard to fix the problems since he informed them of the inspectors' findings in late April.

The Sun's story goes on to say:

The memo, along with other state inspection documents the newspaper reviewed, reveals a pattern of mismanagement involving city school buildings.

In several cases, contractors did not complete work they were paid to do at schools, or they performed the work badly, the documents show.

To me it is a basic function of management that they not only check upon work done by employees, but really check up on work done by contractors.

So the larger question is, when will the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore step up and take over the city's schools? The funny thing is that had these stories come out last year, Martin O'Malley might have been run out of town on a rail rather than riding into the Governor's Mansion.