Fire Hinojosa and all of the top managers

The only way to fix DISD is to fire and remove Hinojosa, all of the Associate Superintendents and maybe all of the managers reporting to the Associate Superintendents.

And if the Board of Trustees can not figure out that they have a fidicuary responsibility to represent the best interests of DISD, instead of looking out for how they can personally benefit financially by contracting with DISD, then they need to be removed also.

If it takes the TEA to get this done, then so be but it would be better, if we could handle this on a local level.

What has become obvious to me over the years of reading about one DISD scandal after another is that these and previous DISD yahoos don't know anything about effective management 101.

Let's talk PCard:

There were 3 audits (2 external and 1 internal), which stated that there were serious problems and that Sherri Brokaw department did not have the resources to monitor the transactions on 1700 PCard.

The internal audit of July 2005 made 6 recommendations but DISD management chose to only half-ass deploy one of those recommendations, which was to update the PCard Procedures manual by adding the requirement that the PCard manager must approve these PCard transactions.

The PCard was created as a trial project in 1999 shortly after Sherri Brokaw was hired. The PCard was to supposed to address the issue of the long wait times for purchase approvals from the purchasing department. Except when they created the PCard, the PCard designers did not put into place any of the checks and balances, which were in the Purchasing Department.

For instance, PCard holders didn't have to get approval prior to making any purchase. In 2005, when the PCard holder's managers were supposed to approve these transactions, a computerized report was created which did not include the name of the PCard holder or identify the purchases. To further complicate this process, the PCard manager didn't get these reports until 45-90 days after the purchases.

There was no DISD procedure to monitor PCards for holders, who had changed departments, left DISD to make sure that these cards were turned in.

There was no report created to provide information as to which PCard managers were reviewing these reports and which ones were NOT.

The PCard problem could have been fixed by doing one of several things:

1. Manager must approve purchases before they were made. Any purchases made without approval would be deducted from the PCard holder's salary.

2. Modifying these reports generated by Oracle could have been done by a database administrator in a couple of hours at the most.

Sherri repeatedly reported the problems to her immediate manager but the PCard issues and potential problems were ignored, just as the three audit reports were ignored.

Sherri had two half-time employees that worked for her but even though she had the title of "Director", she didn't have the authority to hire additional personnel, interact with the Oracle DBA or change the process. All of the decisions were controlled by the Superintendent and his Associate Superintendents.

Why weren't any of these issues addressed by the DISD Chief Financial Officer.

Now, is it any wonder that a public accounting firm has not been able to complete an audit of the DISD books.

It also baffles me as to how various corporations are going to come in and help DISD clean up this mess, when everyone of them has one or more contracts with DISD. Talk about conflict of interest.

Top-level management doesn't want any of this financial mess cleaned up because then they couldn't manipulate it to suit their own agenda.

What DISD needs is for a company like Texas Instruments, which doesn't have any contracts with DISD but they are extremely skilled at what is required for the highest quality control process.

The next superintendent should be someone with top of the line management expertise. DISD's management may have an educational background but they certainly don't have a clue when it comes to effective management.

Hinojosa is the leader of the Keystone Cops.

How is it that 700 spanish speaking teachers were hired last year and based on what I have read in the Dallas Observer and the Dallas Morning News, spanish speaking teachers were exempted from the teacher layoff.

This just sounds like another manipulation of DISD by Hinojosa and his cronies. At a management level, this is a corrupt organization or why aren't they interested in having the DISD accounting books be transparent.