April 14, 2010 WaPo Interview with with Rhee: 'Conspiracy theorists' have it wrong
an update to yesterdays reports that DC schools found a surplus of funds after firing teachers in the name of fiscal emergencies.
Update WaPo Interview with with Rhee: 'Conspiracy theorists' have it wrong
April 14, 2010; 9:53 AM ET
a $34 million surplus in the DCPS budget was discovered by a senior aide in late February, three months after Rhee laid off 266 teachers driven by budgetary forecasts
BT: Do you think in retrospect it might have been better to share this?
MR: Why? What do you mean?
BT: There was so much anxiety about the private funding....
MR: Let me say this. I thought it was good news. The good news was that we were going to be able to allay the fears a lot of people had about the fact that [the contract] was going to be all funded by external dollars and that this wasn't sustainable in the long term. And so in my opinion it was good news.
BT: So why not share the good news?
MR: Because we were in the middle of negotiations....There's sort of a time and a place for all of this.
BT: This revives all the old charges and suspicions that you manipulated and gamed the budget process to get here. To get to this contract.
MR: I understand that there is a group of conspiracy theorists out there...All I can do is go back to facts. So people can conjecture all they want on hearsay and happenstance...What I think is important though is that the [d.c. chief financial officer] and the agency do not report to me. They are an independent agency. These are not DCPS numbers. These are OCFO numbers. So I think it is unfortunate. We had originally thought we needed to raise more [private] money for this contract...It was this huge concern about it not being sustainable in the long term. Now it's fortuitous, a situation that allows us to pay more city dollars. Now we're getting crap for that.
BT: People say it doesn't pass the smell test.
MR: The people who are sort of saying this, they want to jump to conclusions. They want to assume that somehow we have manufactured this. Again, we have all the documentation that shows that we at every single point were only making decisions based on the information we had in front of us.
BT: Do you have any remorse? Do you feel badly for these teachers [who were laid off just before a surplus emerged]
MR: I think it was unfortunate. And that's why we specially negotiated [a retroactive payment for the fired teachers] with [teachers union president] George [Parker]....I think it was important to George and we thought it made a lot of sense that [laid off] teachers receive a retroactive payment.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/...