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Linda
Harris was never confronted with the findings of the Woodlawn
audit. "No one from the budget office ever said a word to
me," she says.
Before
Linda Harris got promoted, Carol Matarazzo was in charge
of academic accountability
for all 12 grades.
Superintendent
Ben Canada has been praised in Salem for raising the district's
fiscal credibility, but critics within the district--including
many of Linda Harris' fans--are pressuring him to demonstrate
more committment to poor and minority students.
Canada says that from now on, any time a school changes
principals, an audit will be done automatically. Elementary
schools will be audited every three years, middle schools
every two and high schools annually.
Ben
Canada has attempted to make assistant superintendents more
accountable for academic achievement. He has also raised
the profiles and responsibility levels of other cabinet
members, particularly the heads of finance and facilities.
This
week, Woodlawn Elementary School students were introduced
to Marian Young, the school's third principal in the past
three years.
Even though Vinh Nguyen authorized the Woodlawn audit, she
says a supervisor advised her not to seek a copy of the
final document.
The
percentage of free and reduced-charge lunch students at
Woodlawn is 80 percent, down from about 89 percent a year
ago. District officials explain that the school is attracting
students from other neighborhoods.
In addition
to general-fund dollars, Woodlawn Elementary School gets
about $240,000 in Title I funds and another $360,000 in
desegregation and Early Childhood Education Center funding.
A 1991
Woodlawn audit found minor deficiencies that blossomed over
the years. The report cited Harris' inattention to procedures
such as approving the preparation of checks and adjustments
to the student-body account.
Marie Allen did not enjoy her first year working for the
Portland Public Schools. "I've worked more than 20 years
in education, and I've never been put through what I've
gone through here," she says. "They've tried to ruin me."
Neither
the 1991 nor the 1998 audit is part of Harris' personnel
record because audits are considered a part of the school's
record rather than the principal's.
Woodlawn's
test scores were mixed this past year under Marie Allen.
The third graders did worse in reading and math, while fifth
graders improved in reading and math and did worse in writing.
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The opening of school doors this week marked the second year
of Ben Canada's tenure as superintendent of Portland Public
Schools, but his first with his own team in place--a team,
he pledged, that would help him improve academic achievement
and fiscal accountability.
Last January, Canada announced the "retirement" of two
of his three assistant superintendents. He replaced them
with one person, Linda Harris, a former principal of Woodlawn
Elementary School.
The promotion was Harris' second in six months and confirmed
her status as the district's rising star. She jumped from
running one elementary school to overseeing 63 of them,
in addition to several other programs. Her salary leapt
as well, rising about 50 percent to $98,000.
Dozens of interviews confirm Harris' reputation as an excellent
educator. But a review of audits and other school documents
also reveals that she possesses a troubling record of financial
mismanagement. The evidence calls into question her qualifications
for the second-highest position in a school district that
spends $550 million annually.
WW's investigation found no evidence that Harris
lined her own pockets. But school documents do make clear
that even when handling small amounts of money, Harris is
at best careless and at worst ignorant of financial rules.
Perhaps most disturbingly, top district officials, including
Canada and the chairman of the school board, say they were
unaware of Harris' fiscal shortcomings, including the details
of a negative audit of her school conducted just four months
before her promotion to assistant superintendent.
In her office overlooking the Willamette River, Linda Harris
sits surrounded by plaques commemorating her decade as principal
at Woodlawn. A shy woman of 49 whose unlined face shows
none of the wear and tear of 27 years as an educator in
Portland, Harris now shoulders an awesome responsibility.
Canada is the school district's public face, a man whose
political instincts and people skills earned him accolades
during his first year. But it is Harris and the other assistant
superintendent, Carol Matarazzo, who run the district day
to day. Specifically, Matarazzo runs high schools and middle
schools. Harris oversees all of the district's elementary
schools. The principals of those schools report to three
directors, who in turn report to her. In addition, Harris
oversees several district-wide programs including Title
I (the federally funded program for economically
disadvantaged kids), Head Start, the Talented and Gifted
program, Reading Recovery and others. All told, she holds
the purse strings for budgets that exceed $95 million dollars.
Harris rose to her present position because of her remarkable
turnaround of Woodlawn, a school situated in one of Portland's
poorest neighborhoods. Located at 7200 NE 11th St., near
the city's northern boundary, Woodlawn was a name best known
in the early part of this decade for the corpses that regularly
turned up in Woodlawn Park, adjacent to the school.
Under Harris' guidance, however, the name Woodlawn became
synonymous with overachievement. During her tenure, Woodlawn
students scored consistently above expectations on standardized
tests, particularly in mathematics.
In 1997, the Oregon Department of Education cited Woodlawn
as one of 10 Title I Schools of Merit, and the Portland
Public Schools Foundation gave the school an Excellence
in Education award in 1998. When House Speaker Lynn Snodgrass
and other skeptics toured Portland schools during the past
legislative session, Woodlawn was their first stop.
Harris modestly attributes her achievements to Woodlawn's
faculty, which was anchored by math teacher Jan Gillespie,
the co-author of a nationally distributed textbook series.
People who served under Harris say she was a tremendous
leader. "Linda had a vision of what the school could become,"
says Gillespie, who worked for Harris for 10 years, "and
she hired people who shared that vision."
Harris' success at apparently solving one of education's
most intractable problems--how to turn around underperforming
schools--has earned her widespread respect. "When you get
people together to talk about the future of this district,
she's the bright light," says Portland School Board Chairman
Ron Saxton.
At the end of the 1997-98 school year, Harris was promoted
to the newly established post of director of intervention.
Her job was to spread the Woodlawn magic to other Portland
schools. Her departure from Woodlawn brought tears to the
eyes of many staff members, recalls former school librarian
Diane Gutman. It was difficult for Harris as well. "Packing
up and leaving was just traumatic for her," Gutman says.
Six months after being promoted, Harris moved up again.
This time it was to an office two doors down from the superintendent's,
where since January she and Matarazzo have shared responsibility
for educating Portland's 56,000 public-school students.
Although Harris has shown herself to be an inspiring educator,
it is not clear that she possesses the administrative skills
to handle the nearly $100 million now under her control.
At Woodlawn, Harris had authority over only a tiny fraction
of the school's $2 million budget (central administration
controls most expenditures for schools), but she had difficulty
managing even those modest funds.
An examination of audits and other documents made available
to WW through public-record requests shows that:
* In 1997-98, Harris overspent her discretionary budget.
She had $38,000 available for routine supplies but overspent
by $3,000, or about 8 percent. Harris actually underspent
on library books, periodicals and textbooks and overspent
on teacher overtime. Overspending by principals is relatively
rare, says District Controller Heidi Franklin; only a "handful"
of Portland's 98 schools exceeded their discretionary budgets
last year.
* During 1997-98, Harris repeatedly spent student-body
funds--money raised by students or donated to them--in ways
that are strictly prohibited by district rules. Lisa Houghton,
an independent auditor hired by the district, objected to
six checks, totaling $1,300--or about 9 percent of the expenditures
she reviewed. Houghton stated her findings at Woodlawn plainly:
"Significant violations relate to student body funds to
benefit staff members rather than students."
According to the audit and other documents, Harris spent
money earmarked for kids on such things as staff dinners,
tickets for a benefit held at Atwater's Restaurant, flowers,
frames for the faculty lounge and an Internet hookup for
herself. The rules for student-body funds--which contain
no tax dollars--are clear and were restated in the audit:
"All student body funds are to be expended only on student
activities that benefit students. Under no circumstances
should money received from student fund-raising be spent
to benefit district employees."
* In 1997-98, according to the audit, Harris violated rules
for cash disbursements, paying for goods without an invoice
or other documentation that would substantiate expenditure.
She also purchased goods of value greater than $1,000 without
approval from the district's purchasing department.
* During 1997-98, according to a district memo, Harris
also overspent the funds Woodlawn received from the federal
Title I program. How much she overspent remains in dispute;
however, exceeding Title I budgets by even a penny is prohibited,
according to Franklin.
* Harris also appeared not to understand basic procedures
involving grant money. In a memo dated January 15, 1998,
she asked a district accountant to make a transfer from
a federal High Performance Learning Communities grant to
cover a deficit in her discretionary budget. Mixing federal
and local dollars is forbidden, says Franklin, who explains
that what Harris really intended to do was transfer expenses
rather than money. Indeed, nothing untoward actually
took place, but the point is that Harris' request as written
was clearly improper.
Given all the challenges facing Portland Public Schools
today, it may seem like nitpicking to single out an otherwise
stellar administrator for misspending a few thousand dollars--that's
certainly Harris' point of view. Still, she admits she made
some mistakes. "I should have been more cautious about adhering
to the guidelines," she says, while insisting that what
she did was for the good of the school.
Her argument is similar to that made by Dr. William Brady,
then the state's medical examiner, in 1985. Brady was found
to have inappropriately used a few thousand dollars of public
funds to pay for parties and office furniture for his staff.
He was fired from his job, although he later sued the state
for failing to grant him due process. Harris, by contrast,
was promoted to a position of far greater fiscal responsibility
after her transgressions.
Harris maintains that she never saw the 1998 audit of her
school until WW requested a copy of it a month ago.
At the same time, she acknowledges that seven days prior
to WW's July 27 request, she went to Woodlawn and
left the school with a box of financial records. Harris
says she handed the box to a teacher for safekeeping because
she believed the records were not secure. She insists, however,
that she never looked at them. Still, her actions raise
questions. Franklin, the district controller, says it would
be highly unusual for anyone to take financial records from
a school building.
Harris isn't the only one who hadn't seen the audit until
recently. A number of people in the district, including
Canada, say they never knew the details of Harris' record
until WW filed a public-records request. That is
extraordinary, given that at least one person was aggressively
trying to call attention to it.
Marie Allen, who succeeded Harris as principal at Woodlawn,
made the request for an audit of Harris in the first place.
Soon after her arrival at the school in July 1998, documents
show, Allen raised questions about the state of Woodlawn's
finances. Unpaid bills from Harris' tenure piled up on her
desk over the summer, and there was no money in the Title
I or discretionary budgets to pay them.
After requesting the audit on Aug. 28--the week before
school started last year--Allen took the unusual step of
sharing her concerns about Woodlawn's finances with Ben
Canada at a meeting in November. She says she told the superintendent
that she feared her rapport with her staff, many of whom
remained close to Harris, had been undermined by her request.
By February, Allen's relationship with her staff had deteriorated
to the point that she asked an attorney to write Canada
a letter officially outlining the campaign of retribution
she believed was being waged against her.
Canada confirms that Allen told him about the audit in
November but says that he asked to see it neither then nor
before he promoted Harris in January. The superintendent
explains that if the audit had been sufficiently damaging,
he would have expected his staff to inform him. "As far
as I knew," Canada says, "there was nothing I needed to
be aware of."
Even after receiving the letter in February from Allen's
attorney, Canada still didn't ask to see the audit. "When
a lawyer sends me a letter, I send it to my lawyer," he
explains. The lawyer he sent it to, district counsel Bruce
Samson, admits he didn't bother to look at the audit either.
"I guess I just wasn't curious," Samson says.
Top officials' lack of interest in the audit is especially
puzzling because another principal's alleged misuse of student-body
funds had generated headlines only months earlier. In June
1998, Larry Fleckenstein, the principal of Rigler Elementary
School, took early retirement after a scandal over his alleged
misspending. Among other violations of district policy,
Fleckenstein allegedly used student-body funds to rent a
car while in Oklahoma for a speaking engagement. In the
wake of that scandal, acting superintendent Diana Snowden
vowed to end the district's loose financial controls.
Saxton, the school board chairman, believes that the culture
of laxity still exists among administrators. "For too long,
the district hasn't focused on individual accountability,"
he says. "Diana Snowden tried to change it, but I think
the old guard said, 'Don't worry, she'll be gone in 10 months.'"
Saxton says that if Harris wasn't lining her own pockets
with her misspending, then she should keep her job, but
he says there is no excuse for financial sloppiness. "Linda
Harris is an outstanding educator," he says. "But all of
our educators need to follow the rules."
In addition, Saxton says it makes no sense to do audits
if nobody looks at them. "When we do audits, we need to
follow through," he says. "Otherwise, they're just a waste
of money."
As for Canada, he's sticking by Harris. Knowing what he
knows today, he says, he would still promote her. But Canada
does promise an end to business as usual. From now on, he
says, all audits will be reviewed by senior administrators,
and all improprieties will be brought to the attention of
assistant superintendents. "Clearly," he says, "we need
to change some procedures."
The Woodlawn audit failed to slow Harris' rise, but things
haven't gone as well for her successor. Allen is no longer
principal at Woodlawn. She believes that asking for an audit
of her powerful predecessor played a major role in her downfall.
It's an opinion her former boss shares. "Marie Allen sealed
her fate when she asked for that audit," says Vinh Nguyen,
who, as director of the Jefferson-area elementary schools,
supervised the Woodlawn principal.
Several Woodlawn teachers tell a different story, arguing
that Allen caused her own difficulties. She clashed with
powerful faculty members, reassigned two teachers from administrative
functions back to classroom duties and told Gillespie, who
was working part-time, that she would not have a job at
the school the following year.
The moves infuriated staff members. At year end, the teachers'
union, the Portland Association of Teachers, organized a
survey to assess Allen, the results of which were shared
with district officials. At the end of the school year,
Allen went on medical leave. Although her contract was renewed
for two years in April, her career remains in limbo.
Harris disputes the notion that she had anything with her
successor's demise, although she acknowledges she was in
regular contact with her old staff during the year. "Success
for Woodlawn is all I have ever wanted," she says.
Perhaps the biggest challenge Canada faces in reforming
his administration is getting people both inside and outside
the district to believe accountability applies to everyone.
District documents show that he's cracking down on underperforming
principals, but a real test will be whether the school audits
scheduled for this fall have any consequence.
As for Harris, she's poised to assume even more power.
Canada's other assistant, Matarazzo, has told colleagues
she'll take early retirement in January.
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Willamette Week | originally
published September 8,
1999
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