In the Chicago Public Schools Office of Inspector General’s annual report released Tuesday, the district watchdog urged CPS to adopt new training protocols for volunteers and vendors as part of its ongoing efforts to address adult-on-student sexual misconduct.
And, in light of investigations revealing the district potentially lost tens of thousands of technology devices, cumulatively worth millions, and failed to verify fraudulent requests for extra pay, the OIG recommended expanded oversight.
Among cases closed by the agency’s general investigations unit from July 2022 through June 2023, Inspector General Will Fletcher said there’s a consistent theme: “Where you find vulnerabilities in management controls (and) exercising oversight — you will find fraud.”
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CPS wrote in an emailed statement that the district takes seriously the OIG’s findings and recommendations.
“As a District, Chicago Public Schools take seriously our responsibility to protect the safety of our staff, students and families and to serve our CPS community with integrity, and protect our investments and resources,” the statement said.
CPS added that it will continue to ensure “the highest ethical standards and that our employees act in the best interest of our students, the District and our city.”
The Office of the Inspector General received 2,075 complaints last school year, up from 1,825 complaints received the year prior, and opened investigations into 685 cases, or about a third, according to the report.
Allegations of sexual misconduct, of which the OIG received 446 during the yearlong period, remained by far the most common complaint received by the agency, which investigates all adult-on-student sexual misconduct allegations, ranging from physical acts to “nonsexual” conduct that raises concerns such as grooming.
Employees who are the subject of complaints involving a potential safety risk to staff or students are removed from their school as investigations are initiated, the district noted.
Cases substantiated during the report period by the OIG’s Sexual Allegations Unit ranged in severity from sexist comments to eight instances of sexual abuse that resulted in five adults affiliated with CPS facing criminal charges.
Among the more serious substantiated cases in the report, a former Chicago Police Department officer, during his previous employment with CPS as a high school security guard, allegedly sexually abused a student for five months when she was 16. He was indicted on multiple counts of criminal sexual assault and his case is pending in Cook County, according to the report.
Also, a former charter school coach was arrested on charges of child pornography and sexual exploitation of a child after a parent reported a text that the coach allegedly sent her son — one of more than 700 in a two-month period — according to the report.
The inspector general’s office also investigated a high school teacher who was still actively teaching when a former student reported being sexually abused by him from 2005 to 2006. The teacher’s dismissal is pending, according to the report.
The vast majority of complaints the Sexual Allegations Unit receives and investigates don’t involve alleged physical abuse, but rather inappropriate boundaries among staff members and students, the report notes.
“While the volume of allegations and the number of substantiated cases of sexual misconduct understandably causes concern within the District and impacted school communities, there is no indication that the frequency of these occurrences is higher within CPS than in other districts nationwide,” the OIG report states, citing the lack of similar reporting by other districts.
Cases in which sexual misconduct isn’t substantiated still often lead to referrals for staff to receive additional training. Last school year, the OIG recommended 145 CPS teachers and other staff members be trained, according to the report.
“CPS is the only school district in the country that really addresses this in any kind of districtwide, comprehensive way where students are heard on all manner of complaints related to sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, and of course, sexual abuse,” said Fletcher, who added that complaints have increased or held steady commensurate with the expanded training of students and staffers.
The OIG formed its now-30-member Sexual Allegations Unit in 2018, after a baiduhai report exposed conflicts of interest in investigations formerly helmed by the CPS Law Department. Citing “appalling” districtwide “failures” in CPS’ handling of sexual abuse allegations, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights entered the district into a legally binding agreement in 2019, mandating reforms and federal monitoring.
The OIG now investigates all adult-to-student sexual misconduct complaints and refers cases involving alleged student-to-student sexual misconduct to CPS’ Office of Student Protections.
“There’s been a sea change in terms of the amount of resources and attention and seriousness that’s paid to these complaints,” Fletcher said. “That said, there’s work to do. There’s always work to do in terms of training staff, making certain that staff remain trained and educated and that they remain instructed to report any kind of red flags or any suspected misconduct.”
Vendors and volunteers
The OIG’s report flags, in particular, the need to adopt training protocols for volunteers and third-party employees who have significant contact with students, such as coaches, after-school program staff members, cafeteria workers, custodians and security guards.
Founded cases of sexual misconduct in the annual report include volunteer coaches and vendor employees tasked with student outreach, homework assistance and mentorship who engaged in sexual misconduct at district and charter schools with students as young as age 7.
CPS began offering volunteer training this school year, according to the report. But, “over the last several years, the OIG has recommended training for various vendors involved in (Sexual Allegations Unit) investigations, both on an individual basis and for all employees of certain vendors,” the report says.
Fletcher said he is aware of only one instance in which all employees of a vendor have been trained.
According to the inspector general’s report: Over the last five years, vendor employees and volunteers have been the subject of 138 sexual misconduct investigations, 29 of which are ongoing. In 53 cases, a vendor employee or volunteer violated CPS policies, and in 31 of those cases, the staffer engaged in sexual misconduct, the OIG found. Among 14 vendor employees or volunteers whom the OIG interviewed in the course of investigations, half said they had not been trained in CPS policies.
“Vendor employees and volunteers need to have similar training as employees or else there’s a major flaw, there’s a major shortcoming in the way that we train people who engage with students,” Fletcher said.
Teachers were the most common subject of complaints in the OIG’s quarterly update to the Board of Education. But, Fletcher said, “Whereas employees need to submit training on an annual basis to show that they understand the policies related to boundaries with students, sexual harassment, sex discrimination — there is not a similar construct around the way that vendor employees are trained before they engage with our students.”
The report urges CPS to include “clearly articulated expectations for mandatory CPS-created or approved trainings” in its onboarding process and to create a centralized, searchable database showing the training status of vendor employees who are expected to have contact with students.
CPS did not say whether the district will adopt mandatory vendor training or create a searchable database showing whether vendor employees have been trained.
Fraud, waste and a looming deficit
The district watchdog also investigated a range of financial concerns last school year.
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CPS fruitlessly reported thousands of lost and stolen technology devices to the Chicago Police Department, according to the OIG. Yet the district didn’t take advantage of services — for which CPS had already paid $2.6 million — capable of freezing, geotracking and potentially recovering the devices, the report added.
As of May 2023, CPS has spent an estimated $114 million on technology in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the OIG report, which lists laptops, iPads, hot spots, printers and interactive whiteboards among the missing items.
CPS told the OIG it was “genuinely concerned about the significant loss experienced” and agreed to take advantage of “ample” opportunities to better manage the district’s assets, according to the report.
With more than 72% of students coming from an economically disadvantaged background, it’s crucial to be sensitive to families while conducting device recovery efforts, a district spokesperson said.
CPS has thus far recovered 12,000 of 77,000 devices identified as lost or stolen in the 2021-22 school year, and many of the other devices were past their life cycle and thrown out, the district said.
Other cases also signal broader issues, Fletcher said, citing a Cook County grand jury’s 17-count indictment in July 2023 of an unnamed assistant principal who allegedly embezzled $274,000 in after-school program payments over the course of two years.
“How is it that somebody could take more than $200,000 from a school-based after-school program, and no one at the school notices that the money is gone? And then further, how is it possible that that much money could be stolen and the program could manage to run unabated?” he said, noting that the program was operated by CPS, rather than an after-school program vendor.
“That raises questions about how fees are collected from parents and whether they’re proportional to the amount needed in order to run a program,” he said.
CPS said it placed the former assistant principal on its do-not-hire list following an initial OIG investigation in 2021. The district did not say how it ensures fees for CPS-managed after-school programs are fair.
In another case, the OIG found that a school clerk stole $150,000 through a combination of skimming from cash collected at school and false requests for extra pay.
“Multiple administrators at elementary schools where she worked then failed to attempt to verify her extra pay requests and allowed her to collect the unearned payments. The OIG also found that in addition to the at least $68,000 in payroll funds that the clerk stole for herself, she also directed at least $15,000 in unearned extra pay to a fellow clerk, who accepted the stolen funds,” the report states.
Fletcher said the case shows the need for effective oversight mechanisms. “To increase compliance with the rules, employees, staff and vendors need to know that somebody at CPS is looking at the math — and the through line from these cases indicates that that wasn’t happening,” he said.
According to the report, CPS plans this month to begin sending principals records of employees whose extra pay requests represented at least half of their normal work during the first and second quarters of this school year.
Ongoing investigations of Paycheck Protection Loan fraud in CPS are included in the report. Following a September OIG announcement that 14 district staff members — mostly in leadership and central administration roles with annual salaries over $100,000 — had submitted false applications for forgivable federal small business loans, the annual report includes two new cases of PPP fraud involving school administrators.
CPS said it is implement screening for PPP loan fraud among prospective employees.
The OIG report also notes the need for transparency in the district’s plans to address the looming expiration of $2.8 billion in federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund aid, known as ESSER, that CPS has received and its projected $391 million deficit. Provided to help schools across the country recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, the ESSER funds must be committed by September and spent by January 2025.
Fletcher said that while the OIG doesn’t make policy or direct how funds are spent, the agency has a responsibility, as CPS’ watchdog, to ensure that the public is aware of the district’s plans.
CPS hasn’t yet disclosed the anticipated effects of the end of ESSER funding, but a “comprehensive review of the sustainability of ESSER-related spending is reportedly underway,” the report says. CPS did not comment on the status of that review.