By Juan Montoya
By all accounts, Marylin Burns Elementary's Second Annual Bandit Bunny Run and Egg Hunt held April 7 was a huge success.
Many local businesses participated and the school figured to rake in somewhere around $4,000 for student services and teacher support.
But soon, stories that something shady had occurred on the way to deposit the cash in a local bank started to spread in the school and across the Brownsville Independent School District. Fueled by these leads, we filed an information request October 10 to get at the bottom of the story. In our request we asked for all reports by the BISD administration and its police department or any campus or district correspondence concerning the alleged theft of the funds. We also asked for any referrals on the matter made to the Brownsville Police Dept., the Cameron County District Attorney's Office, or any other law enforcement agency concerning the alleged theft. The request also included any disciplinary actions generated in the case. They wrote the AG that "The District believes that information in documents responsive to this request may be excepted from disclosure under the TPIA section §551.108 Exception: Certain Law Enforcement, Corrections and prosecutorial Information. Accordingly, pursuant to Texas Government Code §552.301 (3), within 15 business days of its receipt of the request, the District will submit to your office written comments providing reasons why the stated exceptions apply that would allow the information to be withheld, and copies of the documents about which the District is seeking an opinion."
Well, as you can see from the letter sent to us by the BISD lawyers, this amounts to a back-door confirmation that something amiss did happen.
For those who contributed to the fundraiser, it is only appropriate and proper that they know what became of the efforts to help the school, and not to protect any potential wrongdoers.
Will the BISD, Burns Principal Alma S. Garza, and her assistant Leticia Bohn have the courtesy to let the parents, students, staff, and sponsors know the real story?
9 comments:
juan i always wonder where some of those funds all end up at? like the money at all the sport games, sam stadium entrance fees, all those fund raisers where our kids are assigned boxes of chocolates, booklet to sell oh my, where does it all end? no where except in the back pockets of thieves. man o man puros ratas wow
I no longer buy items being sold as part of school fund raisers. If the school can afford artificial turf, a state of the art scoreboard and large self-congratulatory ads in the newspaper then they can live without my purchase of bad chocolate or caarmel corn or whatever it is this time.
Not all persons involved in fundraisers steal the money. Monies raised go to the students for incentives. Don't punish the students for decisions made at the main office to purchase artificial turfs and the scoreboard. The campus administrators do not control that.
Corruption seems to be part of the culture of BISD....from top to bottom.
Ask Charlie Atkinson we have paid three times for the stadium and Sam's stadium has had enough money.
Not all funds are controlled by the central office, high schools and middle schools have bookkeepers that control all the motivational funds. The bookkeeper makes sure that all the funds are deposit when they have a fundraiser, the money raised is only used for students.
Every school has its slush fund just like the city
The citizens need to boycott BISD until they flush out all types of "culture of corruption", including the elected board.
They should not be allowed to create money making skims. Those three months off with pay scam should be more then enough. They should contribute from the three months off with pay for any projects without ingurgitating the
citizens.
The new board should stop ALL money making skims and revert back to a 12 month "WORK" schedule for all of BISD.
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