State Education Grants Could Face Further Scrutiny

THEY PROBABLY WON’T USE SUCH A QUEER-LOOKING MICROSCOPE, THOUGH

FITSNews – December 18, 2007 – Whenever your tax dollars are routed through a fundamentally-flawed process that produces questionable results that end up benefiting select politicians, investigations typically follow not too far behind them.

That’s why we weren’t at all surprised to hear from several state legislators over the past few days about the so-called “Public Choice Innovation Schools” grant program, which has come under fire recently based on information gleaned from several State Department of Education e-mails obtained exclusively by FITSNews.

Being the concerned citizens that we are, we’ve forwarded these e-mails to at least a half-dozen different legislators over the past two days, several of whom have expressed an interest in investigating the Department’s grants programs as part of a broader ethics reform package aimed at cleaning up the cesspool that is South Carolina politics.

Bills have already been filed for the upcoming legislative session which would address the scandalous competitive grants program we exposed back in March (ditto for the bar exam scam we busted open last month), so why shouldn’t lawmakers sniff around this latest scandal?

Particularly when a State Department of Education employee responded to our original story by saying, “There’s plenty of other boondoggles out there. Trust me, I work with a lot of them. This agency runs a lot of grant programs.”

Also left hanging is the question of whether or not any of the nine school districts whose grant applications were rejected in this case will file an appeal – or a lawsuit. Because we’ve heard rumblings of both.

Additionally, what does the State Board of Education think of Department employees arbitrarily altering the original grant RFP (request for proposals) without its consent?

The whole thing stinks to high heaven, people, but then again so does most of the backscratching that goes on under the State House dome.

We’ll be sure to keep you up to speed on the latest developments in this case, but in the meantime you can count on FITSNews to keep pinning these worms to the table with our trademark delicacy, discretion and scientific objectivity.

And our microscope isn’t queer-looking, it’s just misunderstood …

Comments