Best of 2019: Public Kept in Dark on Scandals as They Voted for Tax Increases

In one of the more troubling stories to come out of the perpetually scandal-plagued Manatee School District this year, we learned that the district deliberately kept the public uninformed of important factors that may have affected support for additional tax funding that was passed by referendum.

MANATEE COUNTY – School board members and administrators are pointing fingers as to who is to blame for the public being kept unaware of an emerging scandal as citizens voted on whether to extend the district hundreds of millions of dollars in additional tax revenues.

The Manatee County School District was aware less than a month before voters went to the poll to decide on extending the optional half-cent sales tax in November of 2016 that the state would be investigating an alleged graduation rate inflation scheme directed by Cynthia Saunders, then a deputy superintendent to Diana Greene.

The public was kept in the dark and voted to approve the measure, which Greene had called a "fiscal cliff" for the school district's troubled finances. In November of 2017, Greene received a report from the Office of the Inspector General that concluded Saunders had inflated graduation rates by directing school administrators to deliberately miscode dropouts as transfers to homeschooling. The OIG recommended putting a copy of the investigation in Saunders' personnel file, which she did not.

Greene has claimed that she briefed each board member on the investigation, though board members' responses ranged from not hearing anything at all to it being mentioned, but as something that was no big deal and certainly not as serious as what is now known. Nevertheless, an unknowing public went to the polls just a few months later and narrowly approved a controversial one mill increase in school property taxes, a referendum Greene used the supposedly rising grad rates to promote.

What's more, when Greene left for Duval County the day before a scandal-plagued software upgrade was to launch last July 1, the board voted on Saunders becoming the interim superintendent without understanding the scope of Saunders' looming investigation, which the DOE had referred to the Office of Professional Practices. Saunders made no mention of the investigation at the time, despite having been question by the Department of Education the day before the vote.

Saunders followed Greene to Manatee Schools from Marion County when Greene was hired as the district's deputy superintendent of curriculum in 2014. The two are close friends and have worked together for nearly three decades.

Despite the gravity of the allegations, some members of the Manatee School Board are still lobbying to hire Saunders permanently, rather than testing the market for an outside superintendent. On February 12, the board isset to voteon awarding Saunders a three-year contract worth around $750,000 in total compensation to become its permanent superintendent.