When we last left former District 150 Superintendent Kay Royster, she had just been fired from a school district in Missouri. Well, since then, the state has audited the school district. From the July 29 St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
The Jennings School District ran annual deficits of $3 million for four years, mismanaged an expensive plan to provide hand-held computers for students and has many sloppy accounting practices, a state audit released Tuesday found.
The report, by Missouri Auditor Susan Montee, also says the district appears to have paid an excessive severance to former Superintendent Kay Royster, who championed the purchase of 2,572 Palm T/X computers. Montee reports the district didn’t competitively bid for the computers, overspent the $950,000 project budget by $304,000, never hooked up a workable system and had 324 of the computers in storage as of January.
“The units are basically sitting in the classroom unused or seldom used,” Montee said.
Royster announced the mini-computer program in February 2007 as a way to keep the district “on the cutting edge.” But when the board fired her one year later, members cited declining student test scores and the failure to put the devices to effective use.
The audit says the computer overspending is one reason for the annual deficits. Others include an extra $988,000 for nine administrators added mainly by Royster and the $249,709 severance package she obtained in February 2008.
Kalamazoo. Peoria. Jennings. Who will be next?
What is so amazing is that she keeps doing the same things–absolutely no deviation–and no one at her current place of employment is on guard even though all is a matter of public record in local newspapers.
This is what happens when voters elect a school board too stupid to use Google before hiring a superintendent. I have no sympathy.
Wow. I know I am not a rocket scientist but really.
I truly wonder about the hand-held computers. She sells them to every district–she must have something to gain by pushing this particular product.
This is no suprise! It is nevertheless amazing that she is able to continue to run her con game and, as Sharon states, with all the publicity, is still able to find a sucker to bit.
It is all about money in this country… what did she do wrong? She played the game and she won! Is it any different than the museum or District 150 or the Marriott or Big Al’s or Enron, Citibank, Freedie Mac, Charles Keating, or even Henry Ford? Hell, some burger joint in Cambridge is now selling Officer Crowley cheeseburgers!!!!!
Don’t you wish you were her friend and she was funneling some of those contracts your way?
She is getting wealthy off the severance packages. As long as some school district is willing to hire her, she will continue to collect severance packages. Look at how city managers move from city to city, same thing. Eventually it will catch up to them. Chances are, they will be wealthy enough to land on their feet.
Billy – Aaron Schock DID Google Royster (or at least search the Internet for info on her). He came to the School Board meeting with a thick packet on her and her “history.” He was basically poo-poo’d by the board because of his young age. In fact, I don’t believe they even read through the packet he provided everyone. Yet another example of our fine School Board.
Let’s hope they do more research on the plan for possibly closing a high school or “re-purposing” Woodruff. Their typical approach of making a decision without thoroughly thinking through the ramifications needs to change. I hope they listened to the comments at last night’s board meeting. Most were well thought out and articulately explained. I also hope we do more research on our upcoming new superintendent!
Hiring Royster was a net positive for Aaron Schocks budding political career.
No doubt Missouri will have to increase taxes and spending for “education” to make up for Royster’s deficits. No kcdad, it’s not like everybody else. The Enron people went to jail, and so did Keating. Private businesses get called to account, eventually. But some Govt. people seem to be immune.
i believe she has struck again…this time at a charter school associated with the troubled St. Louis school district.
http://www.imagineschools.com/dynamic-school.aspx?id=1332
Ahhhh we “know” what the news tells us and then we forget to follow up…
The Keating 5
Keating looked for help from the Keating Five, five Senators (Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), John Glenn (D-OH), John McCain (R-AZ), and Donald W. Riegle (D-MI) ). Keating had, or would soon make, legal political contributions of about $1.3 million to the senators, and he called on them to help him resist the regulators. Keating had become personal friends with McCain following their initial contacts in 1981, and McCain was the only one of the five with close social and personal ties to Keating.
“In April 1996, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that state trial judge Ito had mistakenly allowed the jury to convict Keating by giving them faulty instructions as the law as regarding fraud.[93] Thus, the conviction was overturned. In December 1996, the same Court of Appeals ruled that some of the jurors in the federal case might have been influenced by their knowledge and discussion of the results of the state case, and threw out the federal conviction.Keating was now a free man after having spent 4½ years in prison;he later said that staying tough during his incarceration was the thing he was proudest of that he had done.
In April 1999, on the eve of the retrial of the federal case, Keating entered a plea agreement. He admitted to having committed four counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud by extracting nearly $1 million from American Continental Corp. while already anticipating the collapse that happened weeks later. In return, the federal prosecutors dropped all other charges against him and his son, Charles Keating III. He was sentenced to the over four years time he had already served.
In October 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the government’s appeal of the overturning of the state conviction.] This left Keating without any convictions on his record of the core charge that he had duped and defrauded investors by having them switch from insured accounts for junk bonds. State prosecutors declined to move for a retrial, saying it would bring no more than a six-month jail sentence and that many witnesses had died in the interim or were in bad health. In reaction, Keating said that if the government had left him alone, investors “would all be rich.””
(most of this comes from NY Times)
Didn’t one of those guys just run for President recently?
I went to Jennings High School and I must say that I am particularly upset with our School Board. If they would have google’d her like we did they would have saw what was coming to our district. It seemed like all the students and most teachers knew she was conning us but the School Board didn’t know or maybe didn’t care. I knew those Palm Pilots were a bad idea and no one in the high school every saw them. Apparently the school “accidentally” bought the wrong chargers! Sure. Then when she was fired she sued our district for unlawful firing and what a surprise she won! Jennings was already sinking below expectations and thanks to Kay Royster we probably won’t have accreditation by 2010!