School board members were told that the Palm Beach County School District's cafeteria division would spend about $55,000 on printing costs in 1997. But it paid a printer nearly four times that amount in the last six months of 1996, paying 10 times more for a business card than the district did and nearly 23 times the norm for tab dividers to separate sections of cookbooks and manuals.

Palm Beach Post reporters detailed how the school district's spending controls were virtually absent within the cafeteria division, which provides meals for approximately 135,000 school children, and that school board members were unaware of a district policy that permitted over-spending on contracts.

Some of the findings:

Pink and teal business cards for employees of cafeteria department cost nearly $21,000 or 24 cents for each card. The typical school district business card costs 2.4 cents. The cafeteria unit spent $85,000 on tab dividers - often spending $23.75 a set when the rest of the district paid $1 for each set.

How it Started

Schools reporter Mary Warejcka investigated how the district spent money on vendors, businesses and individuals that supplied services and products. After examining paper records and getting a tip, she found that the cafeteria division was spending more than the school board had approved on its contract with a local printer, KC's Desktop Publishing.

The school system followed an unwritten rule that allowed it to exceed the limit of a school board-approved contract. In this case, the district spent nearly $400,000, almost three times the $135,000 specified in the contract.

Warejcka requested copies of the printer's invoices from the district and was given a four-inch stack of paper records dating back to 1994, when the contract was awarded. The 500-plus invoices contained multiple orders and some were barely legible. We decided to create a database.

We spent more than six hours entering details from the invoices into a Paradox database, making note of the item purchased, the quantity and price, among other details. We also tried to match purchase orders from district records to the invoices.

When we finished, we looked at the items the district paid for, including the business cards and tab dividers. Using queries, we were able to tell how much the cafeteria unit spent on most items and a per-item price.

We also discovered that the invoices contained incomplete information. Nearly a quarter of them did not have an order date. And 40 percent of the money was spent without any reference to how the items corresponded with the contract. The story was published the following day.

Reactions

One school board member had this reaction to the expensive tab sets: "That's totally outrageous. Are they lined in gold?" The district's internal auditor requested, and the superintendent ordered, an audit of the food service department. The director of the cafeteria was suspended with pay two weeks after the story ran. In addition, the district changed its policy to require that the school board be notified whenever a contract exceeds the amount it approved. Since then, additional tips - and the school district's own investigation of spending - have yielded more stories on the cafeteria unit director, who set up a private consulting firm with the same name as the cafeteria division and accepted $4,000 in speaking fees at conferences across the nation.

Advice

School districts in Florida are county-wide and often are the county's largest employers and some of the biggest spenders. Tackling school spending piece-by-piece, or department-by-department, seemed to be the way to go in our case.

Although certain school records were available on computer, the district did not enter all of the information from the printer's invoices into a database. Thus we had to make our own to see how much the cafeteria division spent on business cards and other items.

Derek Willis can be reached at (561) 820-4463 or send e-mail to dwillis@gate.net.