Audit states DeKalb Schools has too many central office personnel
- 1/25/12
- Categorized in: DeKalb News, Education
A recent audit of central office positions at the DeKalb County School System found it has approximately 300 jobs too many.
School spokesman Walter Woods said it would take the recommendations from Virginia-based Management Advisory Group (MAG) to “do the work needed to organize and run an efficient school system.”
The school system has approximately 15,000 employees—1,499 in the central office. According to the report, the system has 15.5 central office positions per 1,000 students and should have closer to 12 per 1,000.
Superintendent Cheryl Atkinson ordered the audit and said she will use the findings and recommendations to develop a new organizational structure for each department within the school system.
Woods said the system hasn’t done a full audit similar to the one performed by MAG in several years. An Ernst and Young study in 2005 is the most recent.
“Basically, we have a lot of work to do and it’s going to take some time to sift through everything,” Woods said. “We need alignment on job titles and job descriptions that are accurate descriptions for jobs performed.”
Woods said in some cases at the central office level, the audit found there was confusion as to who should be doing specific jobs and how much they should be getting paid.
“There are people who have a title but are doing a completely different job,” Woods said.
The results of the audit released on Jan. 18 are part of a two-phase project to audit each position within the school system. According to Woods, phase two of the audit is scheduled to be complete in March.
Woods said each year there were jobs phased out due to attrition for various reasons. He wouldn’t say when, or if, a significant amount of positions would be cut from the central office.
“The realignment process is under way and we won’t know the number of positions until that process is complete,” Woods said.
http://www.championnewspaper.com/news/articles/160levitas-wants-to-create-ethics-commission-for-school-system-160.html
The bill, called the DeKalb School Board Transparency Act, is a direct response to school board member Gene Walker’s former chairmanship of the county’s Development Authority. In August, Walker resigned from the authority, which oversees deals with local developers and promotes economic growth and job creation countywide.
Furious residents criticized Walker for accepting more than $21,000 in school board campaign contributions from Sembler, a St. Petersburg, Fla., developer, last year. Walker, who chaired the authority, found himself in the middle of a dispute over whether Sembler deserved a tax abatement worth more than $40 million over 20 years to build Town Brookhaven, a 600,000-square-foot, mixed-use development near Oglethorpe University.
“The citizens of DeKalb are entitled to be represented by a school board free of conflicts of interest,” Levitas, D-Atlanta, said in a statement.
Like the county, DCSS is nothing more than a job machine. County taxpayers get taken from all sides.
Now what about the CEO and BOC Staffs and the rest of this Bloated and Dumb-Downed DeKalb County !
Read the : Georgia State Study on DeKalb County !