Detroit Public Schools:
Money paid to cronies

Mar 21, 2005

The Detroit Public Schools spent more than two million dollars over two years – to carry out a public relations campaign to keep school enrollment up and involve parents. $600,000 went to one company, run by a former critic of the school board, to pass out flyers. And the brother of a school official was paid over $87,000 to design flyers and banners.

Keep enrollment up? Involve parents? How about providing services students and their parents need!

Some parents have taken their children out of the district because the schools provide no latchkey program that would allow them to drop off their children before they go to work and pick them up after work.

If the district had used that two million to establish a latchkey program, for example, they almost surely would have gotten more parental involvement and higher enrollment.

But if they'd done that, nobody's friends or relatives would have gotten big bucks! And a critic might have started yelling again!