Schaich Announces Plans to Enter School Board Race

BRADENTON – Despite facing something of a stacked deck, longtime Palmetto resident and Manatee School District watchdog Linda Schaich made a good run for the school board in the 2012 election. With incumbent Bob Gause having announced he will not seek another term in 2016 and supporters urging her to make another run, Schaich said that she will enter the race.

Perhaps more than any other individual, Schaich deserves credit for helping to expose a massive financial cover-up that nearly brought the Manatee School District to its knees in 2012. Had the cover-up not been deliberately kept secret until after that year's election, she quite likely would be sitting on the school board right now.

For the last seven years, Schaich has been a regular fixture at school board meetings and workshops. In fact, her attendance record is probably better than some board members over that time. With a background in accounting and audits, Schaich's budget and finance expertise have made her a valuable asset to taxpayers–as well as a hair shirt on a board that has been under near constant fire for financial mismanagement.

In 2010, it was Schaich who first started making noise about the school district's finances, particularly in its stewardship of sales tax revenues from the optional half-cent tax that was approved by voter referendum in 2002 and set to expire in 2017. Schaich, who served on the district's sales tax accountability committee, chided administrators for not following the policies and procedures put in place for managing the funds. Soon, she was noticing other discrepancies that seemed to suggest that the financial reports being given to the board by former superintendent Tim McGonegal and his team didn't add up.

In 2012, it looked like Schaich would be in a position to get some answers when she was poised to become the chair of the budget committee, which she also served on until it was abruptly disbanded by McGonegal. Schaich went on a full court press, routinely using the public comment portion of the meetings to question the administration's reports, while complaining that she was constantly getting the runaround on public records requests.

While she couldn't quite put her finger on the entire shell game, Schaich was able to effectively point out multiple discrepancies, once noting, "I can't tell you what the numbers are, because (the administration) won't give me the information. I can tell you, however, that the numbers they are presenting aren't accurate. They can't be. I'm not sure whether they even know what they are. Maybe they don't want to."

Schaich was often ridiculed by administrators and board members who sought to marginalize her claims by painting her as a Tea Party radical. However, her efforts were ultimately vindicated when McGonegal finally confessed to the board that he'd been deliberately misleading them, reporting a multi-million dollar deficit as a multi-million dollar surplus–but not until after the August election, in which McGonegal's close ally Gause had survived Schaich's electoral challenge to get another four-year term.

It's certainly plausible that had Gause, who as chair had routinely defended McGonegal's numbers and claimed to have kept his own "spread sheets" validating the superintendent’s assertions, had to endure the election in the midst of such a scandal, voters would have turned him away. Schaich admits that the way things turned out was beyond disappointing, but none of it dampened her enthusiasm as a citizen activist. In fact, she's been more vocal than ever during the four years since.

Schaich said she would have just as soon remained in her watchdog role, but when supporters who kept urging her to run would ask who they should support among the other candidates if she weren't on the ticket, she was unable to come up with a name.

"I just don't see any way that (the other candidates) could be prepared for this kind of job," said Schaich on why she decided to throw her hat back in the ring. "These people have not been coming to the board meetings over all of these years. They don't know the history like I do. They'd have to spend a lot of time just learning what is going on. I can hit the ground running on day one. No one else can truly say that."

Schaich said the final straw was the board's decision to kowtow to developers and agree to give them half off on school impact fees in exchange for their support in promoting a 15-year extension of the half-cent sales tax, despite the fact that the fees have not been collected at all since 2009, and the district currently needs 2-3 new schools at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in order to deal with rapid development in the northeast corridor.

"The developers will save $6 million this year alone," said Schaich. "Sure, they'll put a hundred thousand or so into a PAC (political action committee) to promote the sales tax if they don't have to pay the impact fees developed by the district's study. That's a great investment for them, it's just a very bad deal for taxpayers."

Schaich said that the giveaway to developers is bad enough, but even if the board had implemented the full recommended fees she would not have supported renewing the tax because of how poorly she says the current revenues have been managed.

"This board has shown that they are not going to stand up to developers and make them pay their share for growth," said Schaich, "yet they are willing to go to the taxpayers and ask them for a blank check to build new schools. Look at what happened the last time they got a sales tax approved. Read the audits. They haven't changed any of the things that auditors said were necessary for proper accountability, many of the same people are working in the same (administrative) departments; there is nothing to suggest that it will be any different this time around, yet they want us to give it back to them."

District 1 covers much of Palmetto, as well as the rest of the northeast corridor, including Parrish, Ellenton and Duette–the very same areas that have been most impacted by poor planning. In the years since the impact fees were developed, new houses have sprung up all over the aforementioned area, despite the fact that the only high school north of the river is Palmetto.

Bus rides and car commutes have only gotten longer as density increases, and despite the fact that the district has been acknowledging the imminent need for new schools to address the situation for quite some time, it has done nothing to address the lack of impact fee revenue. For years, both the school district and the county have used the lack of a current impact fee study as an excuse not to re-institute the fees, though neither made any effort to have the study updated until 2015.

When the study corroborated the need for fees on par with what they were at the time of the 2009 suspension, the school board did not recommend their re-implementation as prescribed, but rather a reintroduction at only 50 percent of the prescribed rate. The county commission, which ultimately has the say over all impact fees, will decide at Thursday's land use meeting whether to accept the district's recommendation of reduced fees.

So far, two other candidates have also filed to run for the District 1 seat: Xtavia Bailey, who has long been involved with the district through its Take Stock in Children and Amer-I-Can programs, and former charter school teacher and board member Edward Viltz, a retired business executive. School board races are non-partisan and conducted during the August primaries. If no candidate gets a simple majority of votes (50 percent plus one of all votes cast) during that election, the top two vote earners go head to head in a run-off on the general election ballot in November.