Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
In response to requests for documentation, the state Department of Education has offered not one record or word. As questions mount, lawmakers should consider getting involved.
As the Florida Senate conducts its inquiry into the lack of oversight for school vouchers, it might begin with a question of basic regulatory fitness: Is the state Department of Education following the law?
The answer to that question is far from clear, and the confusion derives in part from the enveloping code of silence within the agency. Ask a question, but don't expect an answer. Ask for documentation, but don't expect it to be delivered. Ask for any piece of information from preschool classes to doctoral programs and be directed to one woman, DOE spokesperson Frances Marine, who gladly and repeatedly will refuse your call.
In the agency that Education Commissioner Jim Horne runs, this, as reported by the Palm Beach Post, is a typical exchange in the flow of public information: A DOE choice administrator is asked how many students receive corporate tax vouchers in Miami-Dade. His agency has no record, so he contacts Patrick Heffernan, president of Florida Child, the state's largest voucher organization, for an answer. Heffernan's e-mail response: "I would need to know who wants this and why - and unless this is urgently needed by a friend of the program, it will have to wait till later next week at the earliest."
In other words, it's none of your business.
DOE, under Horne, is displaying a similar type of arrogance. Florida law requires that most of its records be available to the public, and says that "every person who has custody of a public record shall permit the record to be inspected and examined by any person desiring to do so, at any reasonable time." But this and other newspapers, and some state senators as well, have found that the agency translates "any reasonable time" to mean some date in the future when the public is no longer interested. Some records requested by the St. Petersburg Times have taken weeks and months to be delivered and some, at least so far, have not been disclosed at all.
A week ago, for example, this newspaper asked DOE for a memorandum it wrote to a home-school organization in Boynton Beach called Castle Oak Academy. That organization was receiving some $54,000 in voucher money last year under the McKay Scholarship program, even though it did not operate a school, and the questions of accountability are myriad. Were those payments legal? Why did the state issue the checks? Why didn't DOE take enforcement action? Is it still sending voucher money to home-school organizations? A week has passed, and DOE has provided not a single record and not a single word in response.
Horne may find it amusing that news organizations are being denied access to records and that their calls are not returned. But lawmakers control the purse strings for his agency, and Senate President Jim King would be wise to look beyond just the questions of voucher oversight. Is DOE engaged in a pattern of withholding information? Is the information it provides to the media, the public and lawmakers trustworthy?
At least four departmental employees have lodged whistle-blower complaints since the start of the year. One of them, Bob Metty, said he witnessed a fellow worker cutting the time stamp off a voucher document that was faxed to DOE by Heffernan - the day after a newspaper had requested the document. Two months after Metty filed a formal complaint, the department's inspector general issued a three-paragraph finding that the time stamp was "transitory information" and therefore not covered by public records law. But why was the time notation removed? The answer is that it was an attempt to deceive.
Metty, a supporter of vouchers who was hired to put the program in order, says he encountered resistance when he began asking for records and trying to set up a database of voucher students to prevent double-dipping. He once was told to avoid one inquiry by saying he was "out of the office on critical business," and he says that the department's public assertions about compliance with voucher laws are demonstrably false.
Senators have found, during the combative debate on medical malpractice, that placing people under oath tended to produce a more clear-eyed perspective on things. As Horne so casually deflects the mounting questions of accountability within his own agency, maybe senators ought to consider asking him to raise his right hand.