The Washington State Auditor’s Office has released a jaw-dropping report detailing fraud and questionable spending of $1.8m dollars belonging to the Seattle School District by a former employee. The scandal has implicated well respected organizations and individuals in Seattle’s African American community who the state auditor says received money for work that either didn’t benefit the district or was never completed.
Rumors have swirled for a few years that Silas Potter, as the director of the School District’s Regional Small Business Development Program, used district money to pay off some of the district’s harshest critics in the African American community who were upset about school closures and their impact on children of color. The audit found no proof of that, but it’s curious that once those individuals started getting money from the district by way of contracts, they mostly if not completely stopped criticizing school closures.
Some of the most prominent African American men and organizations in Seattle have been cast in a light less than flattering by the auditor’s report. Eddie Rye, Tony Orange, The Urban League, Charles Rolland- these are well known individuals who have been around for a long time.
Some people feel they represent a self-serving good ol boys club and others feel they’re leaders and trailblazers.
From 2006 to 2010 the Urban League received nearly $600k of district money, funneled through a specific department called the Contractor Development and Competitiveness Center. The CDCC assists small, minority and women owned businesses to increase their competitiveness in the world of contract bidding.
The Urban League was paid with school district funds to provide a database of business owners that would match those owners to contract opportunities with the school district. That in itself certainly isn’t a crime and is actually a good thing, but the district reported the database was not functional and they never used it.
The database represents only a tiny fraction of the money the Urban League was paid. The rest of it was a flat bill that ranged from 5 to 15 thousand dollars a month for administrative costs billed over the course of a few years. The state auditor found that this money was used basically to keep the doors open at the Urban League and did not benefit the school district in any way. The Urban League is not alone.
Eddie Rye is credited for leading the successful effort to have the King County emblem changed from a crown to the profile of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also received payments from Silas Potter’s department.
Charles Rolland was once our state’s democratic chair. Tony Orange is the former Executive Director of the Washington State Commission on African American Affairs. Both are named in the auditor’s report. Both refused to be interviewed during the investigation.
I’ve heard from a few people in the African American community who feel these folks are being unfairly targeted because of race. I couldn’t disagree more. We’re talking about minority and women owned businesses so naturally we’re going to be talking about people of color more than anyone else. They aren’t being targeted because they’re Black.
But there was a race card at play.
Silas Potter and his supervisor Fred Stephens, both Black men, didn’t go unnoticed during their time with Seattle Schools. Many employees complained about the culture of the Regional Small Business Development Program. Those employees were concerned about how money was used, and which ethics and laws were broken. They regarded Potter and Stephens as con-men.
Their complaints didn’t get very far. When school district employees complained, or tried to express concern, Potter and Stephens responded with bold threats. They told anyone who questioned them that their actions were based in racism. It was like ‘if you tell on us, we’ll tell everyone you’re a racist. Keep your mouth shut.’ So they did.
It is the race card personified. You know, the whole, “it’s because I’m Black.” An excuse injected into an otherwise cut and dry instance of wrong-doing. It is outrageous. It is disgusting.
Couple the trick play with a culture at Seattle Schools that discouraged employees from lodging complaints above direct managers and we have a recipe for disaster. Silas Potter went unchecked. He took advantage of that at every turn.
Sometime late last year he fled the state. Just a few days ago he was discovered hiding out in Florida.
He has no intention of coming back.
Sable Verity is a reporter and commentator based in Seattle who covers social and political issues for KBCS Radio and a number of online and print news outlets. Photo/L-R Silas Potter, Fred Stephens
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Eddie Rye getting credit for changing the King County crown logo to MLK’s image, really?
King County Councilmember Larry Gossett was the force behind the county’s logo change for many many years, with credit also going to former King County Exec. Ron Sims.
So will those individuals and organizations who received funds but did not provide services or good be refunding the money to the school district?
I’m hopeful that justice will be served on those who are guilty of plundering funds from the school district.
Let’s not forget, once upon a time there was a superintendent, not African American who resigned in 2003 with a $35 milllion budget hole. He had no education experience and was a former wallstreet investment banker. The school district never investigated fully on where the money got siphoned off to.
Update: The Urban League is having a press conference tomorrow at 10:00am to address this.
Sable,
Thank you for a well written, balanced article that presents the facts. Well done!
GG,
I think they should investigate that superintendent also and try to get back any criminally misallocated funds.
Sorry, that presser is Wed at 10, not Tues.
Hope the School Board Elected Officials only give Maria Goodloe a payout to leave ONLY IF she agrees to pay back the money that was misused. If the misuse of funds was in her contract to come out of her personal pay she would have paid attention and done something to shut down this operation.
“Some people feel they represent a self-serving good ol boys club and others feel they’re leaders and trailblazers”
Alas, with humans, it’s all too easy to be both. You start off with the best of intentions, but power corrupts. That’s why checks and balances are so very important.
Thanks you for a good, informative article.
I may be in the minority but I don’t feel the Super should lose her job over it. The auditor did not call out a systemic problem. At worst this is a embarassing example of hiring unqualified people to participate in a system that is already failed our kids. What corrodes public trust is the politics that take place after situations such as this come to the surface. I don’t know much of the Super, but pretty sure she’s not a very popular manager closing schools and laying off teachers.
surfer1: You need to educate yourself about Seattle Public Schools. Yes, she closed schools to save something like 3 million only to have to reopen many a year later at a cost of $50 million — ooops! And laying off teachers while the Central Administration grew by leaps and bounds is ridiculous—put the money in the classrooms where it belongs.
This incident is just the latest in a laundry list of issues and the Super is just that—the MAIN supervisor and must be held accountable. Check out this site: http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/
Keep going, Sable, keep peeling back the layers. There are too many administrators and community leaders more concerned with maintaining and enhancing their own positions and protecting their cronies, too few who willing to do the work to improve the education of our kids.
Sable, thank you.
The PI reports that Sharon Tomiko Santos sponsored the state legislation that allowed for non-accountable funding of this type, and that she does not want to change the law to require greater accountability. Another local leader who has some involvement in this scandal is Elaine Ko, a former director of InterIm.
What saddens me about this is many of the people who have been mentioned have made positive contributions to the community. Still, it seems less an example of a “good ol’ boys” network than an example of systemic incompetence and corruption, from those who changed the law to those who should have been accountable for administering it, from those who made the deals to those who received the contracts. The report from the State Auditor’s office says that an atmosphere of “fear and intimidation” has been promoted in the school district because of the administration.
Perhaps this is a reflection of a greater malaise that has come to affect our civic institutions in Seattle.
Is Sharon Tomiko Santos the same state rep that got a DUI recently?
Sounds like time for a change.
Thanks, Sable, for explaining the scandal. This article, although chock full of opinions (but I love your opinions) gave a much better explanation than another article in a “BIG” paper gave.
It bothers me that everyone is now ready to fire the superintendant. As I am reading these articles, there are so many holes and unanswered questions. How many degrees of separation are there between Regional Small Business Development Program? How long had this program been operating before the superintendent was hired? How & when was she informed of problems? Did she or did she not take any action to deal with the problem? Did she have any allies in dealing with this? Was she allied with the criminals? Was she threatened?
There are many prominent individuals and agencies named in these articles. What are our expectations of an outsider and a newcomer to hold some of these individuals and institutions accountable? Because it’s clear to me that it wasn’t just a matter of firing Silas Potter. What would the fallout have been for Maria Goodloe Johnson to simply fire Potter. I’m not suggesting that Ms. Goodloe Johnson doesn’t have some responsibility here. However, this is systemic corruption that clearly runs deep & high, and firing the superintendent is not going to eliminate this corruption.
It makes me sad that many of the people fingered here are African Americans. This type of white collar corruption abounds aplenty in places predominantly white, but when it happens, the fact that it’s a bunch of white people is never highlighted. The fact is, money corrupts, and money corrupts absolutely–doesn’t matter what your race.
I worked in the Seattle Public Schools way back in the 90′s and there was serious corruption and graft at the school I worked at. It was all in the admin side, one employee had 3 titles (paychecks) and he was there about 2 hours a day. He was the husband of a high-level admin at the main office. Even I was the recipient of some of this graft once and I didn’t even know. I was admitted to a competitive program for getting further education training (I think a Masters). They told me “hey, why weren’t you at the meeting for the new program” but I hadn’t applied because I was moving out of state soon after! They did me a favor and I didn’t even want it.
Absolutely appalling. Good luck as the school district and the city tries to convince voters to support educational levies that raise taxes. How receptive will the voters be to the message? Not bloody likely.
@ 14
Please. Ever hear of Enron? WAMU?
It seems the lunatics are running the asylum. The Seattle School district is just another bloated bureaucracy that pisses away taxpayer dollars. And further proof that mediocrity rises to the top.
I will never again vote for any levy or initiative that gives my money to these fools, at least until there is a system wide audit that aims to cut the bloated admin done to size.
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