Schools Pay Big Markup for Supplies
Despite buying for 1.1 million students, custodians at New York City public schools are forced to pay more for supplies than a regular consumer walking into a local hardware store.
Straightjacketed by a city contract that requires them to spend their supply budget with a single merchant, the custodians pay in some cases hundreds of dollars more for paper towels, hand soap, batteries, trash cans, jigsaws, and even snow shovels.
Through the company's two approved catalogs, a sheet of Plexiglass costs $224.54. But a custodian could buy the same sheet for just $125 at Dunrite Glass & Windows at 106th Street and Lexington Avenue. Even Ace Hardware and a Lower Manhattan Home Depot can beat the catalog, charging, respectively, $12.25 for a snow shovel listed at $16.97 and $169.99 for a jigsaw listed at $187.
Custodians said the company, Strategic Distributors Inc., a so-called integrated supplier based in Bristol, Pa., will locate items not listed in its catalogs, but the legwork can be costly. When a custodian who supplied invoice records to The New York Sun asked SDI last month how much it would cost to replace batteries for a floor scrubber, the company's quote, $1,663, was nearly $600 higher than the one a local supplier sent, $1,016.
Audit finds PHEAA excess
HARRISBURG -- The head of the state's student loan agency resigned yesterday, hours after an interim audit report revealed more evidence of lavish spending, including a $79,000 staff outing to Hersheypark.
Consultants painted a bleak organizational picture - in a report that largely went unnoticed.
The results of a management study that cost the Philadelphia School District nearly $700,000 have languished unread by top officials for almost a year, The Inquirer has learned.
In fact, it took district officials about a week to even locate a report by the consultants involved after The Inquirer requested the information.
The report was the end product of more than a year's study of the district's management and organizational structure. It had been commissioned by the School Reform Commission.
Two commission members - Sandra Dungee Glenn, the chairwoman, and Martin Bednarek - say they never saw a report from the analysis. Other members either could not be reached for comment or declined to be interviewed. Former district chief executive Paul Vallas also says he never saw the results of the study, which was designed to identify - and offer remedies for - poor management practices and inefficiencies.
School panel scraps study costing $470G
The School Reform Commission has terminated a sweeping organizational review that was never completed, after spending more than $470,000 on it, the Daily News has learned.
The review, conducted by Evergreen Solutions of Tallahassee, Fla., was commissioned at a cost of $686,650 to save the district money.
But the reform commission ended the work six months early, in December 2006, citing the district's budget deficit, Linda Recio, Evergreen's president, said yesterday.
As a result, no final report of the firm's findings was produced, and the earlier work - which school officials lost - cost the district more than $470,000.
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