The details sound awfully familiar: public employees doing private kitchen renovation projects and vacation-home projects on the taxpayers’ dime. Receipts for publicly funded travel expenses that don’t add up. Employees helping themselves to money and goods meant for public use. And all of this happening, apparently, under the noses of upper administrators.
No, those allegations aren’t leftovers from the various public-corruption cases—at the Mass. Career Development Institute, the Springfield Housing Authority, the Friends of the Homeless shelter, the Greater Springfield Entrepreneurial Fund—that rocked Springfield in recent years. They’re from the recently released audit of the city’s Putnam Vocational Technical High School.
Those earlier scandals ended in a string of federal convictions, and a number of highly placed “public servants” headed to prison. Will the Putnam audit yield similar fallout?
The report, by City Hall auditors, covers five years, from late 2005 to 2010. (A PDF of the of the audit is available here.) More than a year in the making, it details missing receipts and questionable reimbursements made to school employees, poorly tracked school accounts with unreconciled funds in the tens of thousands, and “a substantial number” of missing computers and other equipment purchased with school and grant money.
The problems weren’t just a case of sloppy bookkeeping: school money was used to buy gift cards at Old Navy and Barnes and Noble, and to pay for $1,900 in “funeral expenses” (for whom, the audit does not specify). There were payments to teachers, recorded, vaguely, as “token of thanks” or “perfect attendance,” and to students, recorded as “scholarships.”
About $25,000 worth of computers were stolen from the school due to a “lack of building security,” the audit says. More than $14,000 in cash receipts from vocational programs could not be found; $1,600 had been “diverted for personal use by two employees.” Another employee ran a school store “on behalf of a student organization” but never reported receipts—totaling $135,000 over four years—to school officials, keeping the money in a personal bank account and paying him- or herself $4,000 a year “as personal compensation.”
One especially damning detail: a Putnam employee “may have purposely deleted records from a school computer to circumvent [the auditors’] review.”
At the center of the mess is a checkbook, ostensibly for the “Putnam High School Student Association,” controlled by Kevin McCaskill, then Putnam’s principal, with no oversight by city or School Department officials, as required by state law. “Total checkbook transactions averaged approximately $200,000 a year,” according to the audit.
McCaskill, Putnam’s principal from 2004 to 2010, now works for the Hartford school system. He was a particular favorite of Mayor Domenic Sarno, who appointed McCaskill to his transition team after his 2007 election and liked to compare him to Joe Clark, the tough-minded New Jersey principal mythologized in the movie Lean on Me.
After the audit’s release, McCaskill told the Springfield Republican the findings were “egregious” and “a disgrace.”
“I have no recollection of doing anything illegal while at the school,” McCaskill told reporter Stephanie Barry.
The audit findings reportedly have been turned over to the Attorney General’s office for review. Seven Putnam employees have already been disciplined for their roles in the scandal, including four who were fired, according to city officials. The audit does not name those employees. Sarno called the “disgraceful financial practices” at Putnam “serious and disconcerting,” adding: “This issue is not nor should it be about politics.”
City Council President and mayoral candidate Jose Tosado blamed Sarno and Superintendent Alan Ingram for the fiasco, saying “only a profound absence of leadership could lead to illegal activity that is so widespread and long-term.”
Councilor Tim Rooke, chair of the Council’s audit committee, questioned the delayed release of the audit. (The Law Department says the delay was to ensure it didn’t interfere with any criminal investigation.) Now that he finally has the audit, Rooke is unimpressed.
“The report was, in my opinion, watered down and politically correct,” Rooke said, noting a lack of details and, specifically, the absence of the names of public employees who were disciplined for misuse of public funds. “It was a huge whitewash of the investigation.”
