$712,500 Video Fiasco Puts District on Spot

Even for seasoned Los Angeles school district auditors inured to bureaucratic messes, the case of the $712,500 video series stood out for its wastefulness.

A year and a half in the making and 50% over budget, the series on teenage health premiered before a 15-member committee of teachers and administrators. They judged it too awful to use.

“Programs were rambling and poorly organized--took too long to present any information,” the reviewers commented. “Main characters are unrealistic, acting is staged. Actors spoke too fast.”

With nothing to show for their money, district officials have been forced to confront some troubling questions: Who approved the project? Who chose the producer? Who was responsible for content and quality? And, most pointedly, were any laws broken?

Combing through hundreds of pages of memos, invoices and contract documents, the auditors could not find the answers. The official record seemed to suggest that the project had simply materialized like a genie.

In their report completed this spring, auditors concluded that the district had squandered the money through mismanagement. Now an outside lawyer is probing possible misappropriation.

The man who oversaw the audit says the video fiasco illustrates how poorly the Los Angeles Unified School District manages its $6.6-billion budget.

A reconstruction of the story, pieced together through public records and interviews, also shows how the district can bend to accommodate powerful interests and ignore the system of checks and balances designed to protect the public’s money.

It’s a saga that began in 1993 but remained out of public view until recently.

One reason there were no records tracing its origin is that the video series was conceived far from school district headquarters, the brainchild of former NFL star Reggie Williams and Herbert L. Carter, then head of the United Way in Los Angeles.

The two organizations were collaborating to build a youth center in Compton as the legacy of the 1993 Super Bowl, played in Pasadena.

Carter and Williams, the longtime Cincinnati Bengals linebacker, wanted to augment the bricks-and-mortar project with an education program.

“We thought health was very important,” Carter recalled in a recent interview.

Williams brought in a classmate from his Dartmouth days who had earned a medical degree but, instead of practicing, had formed a company to teach health through entertainment.

Carter was impressed, and Lesa Walden got a job that would soon expand by leaps and bounds.

“Originally it was to teach classes in the youth facility,” Carter said. “We then decided it would be a good idea to develop audiovisual-type materials.”

Money Came From National Guard Budget

Carter approached his friend Rep. Julian Dixon (D-Los Angeles) in hopes of obtaining a grant for the video project. Dixon told him it was too late to seek funds from that year’s federal budget, but the congressman knew where there was a large chunk of money.

He had just obtained $10 million for Los Angeles Unified in the 1994 defense appropriation as part of the effort to convert military spending to peacetime use. The money--which came from the National Guard budget--mostly was used to send troubled students to two National Guard camps and cover start-up costs for math and science magnet schools.

“I referred him to the Board of Education and said the money can be used to service disadvantaged youth,” Dixon said.

Carter didn’t go to the school board, though. Instead, he approached another friend, Patricia Marshall, manager of the district’s television station, KLCS.

Together, he said, he and Marshall expanded the idea into a video series, titled “The Ambassadors of Health,” which would be broadcast to students as part of the station’s instructional programming.

It is unclear from the official record who recommended using the National Guard funds for the project, or who approved the expenditure. Nonetheless, $500,000 was allocated and Marshall and Walden signed a contract in early 1994.

That contract named the district as co-producer and promised its help in marketing the series nationally, with the district and Walden sharing equally in the profits. (National Guard lawyers later told the district that Walden could not market the project for profit because of the government financing.)

District policy required any contract over $100,000 to go through a review and receive school board approval. Auditors concluded that Marshall did not obtain approval of the board or of the district branch responsible for reviewing contracts. Instead, she paid Walden through a company used by the station to pay its freelance production staff. Marshall, however, said she obtained board approval.

Initially, Marshall said, she viewed the project as a rare windfall of district funds that would allow the station to show off its production capability. Having a slender budget and no commercial sponsors, the station relies largely on grants from other branches within the district to fund productions.

“For me, it was like a gift,” said Marshall, who retired in 1994.

Money All Spent, No Videos Delivered

Looking back, she said, it would have been better to seek competitive proposals from producers in addition to Walden.

Walden could not be interviewed for this story. Her business, Vital Signs, is no longer listed, and both Carter and Williams said they had lost contact with her.

At the conclusion of the contract in 1995, the money was gone and no videos had been delivered. District officials reluctantly approved another $212,500, this time setting firm deadlines.

In late 1995, Walden completed half the videos. That was enough for the review committee to determine they were unfit for broadcast.

“The Ambassadors of Health” remained a well-guarded secret among a few district officials until this summer.

In mid-1997, district spokesman Brad Sales, who had recently been appointed to oversee the television station, called for an audit to determine why the second contract had been approved.

“Any reasonable person looking at it would ask if we weren’t billed for the same thing twice,” Sales said.

The audit report, filed this spring, did not come up with an answer.

Chief auditor Wajeeh Ersheid concluded that “there may be improprieties involved in awarding the contracts.” But he told general counsel Richard K. Mason that his staff lacked the expertise to get to the bottom of it.

“My gut feeling is that there is more to this story than stated in the report,” Ersheid wrote in a letter accompanying the audit.

In May, Mason assigned an outside lawyer to investigate Ersheid’s suspicions. By mid-November, he had yet to interview Dixon, Carter or Williams, the three key figures.

A dramatic turn of events this summer brought the case to light when Ersheid was fired over charges of racial insensitivity. He contends that he was dumped by administrators who were threatened by his vigorous efforts to expose fraud and waste. Seeking a public vindication, Ersheid began talking to reporters about the video saga, one of several damning audits he says the district was covering up.

Though it left many questions unanswered, the audit made one point loud and clear: The schoolchildren of Los Angeles were denied the potential benefits of a $712,000 project because no one was responsible for ensuring the quality of the work.

Technically, the buck stopped with Deputy Supt. Ronald Prescott, who is in charge of governmental operations and worked with Dixon’s office to obtain the National Guard money.

Prescott, who is Marshall’s brother, said he knew very little about the project or its genesis and wasn’t involved in the negotiations with Carter.

“He probably talked to my sister,” Prescott said. “I never talked to him.”

Notwithstanding his sister’s signature on the contract, Prescott advanced a sweeping denial of responsibility for all district employees, based on the theory that the project was never intended for the schools.

“It was very clear that the money came through the district to the United Way, to the NFL,” Prescott said. “In terms of administrative control over the project, we didn’t have any.”

Others saw it differently.

Todd Rosin, director of communications for the United Way, said the agency had helped fund the youth center but had no oversight role.

Carter left the United Way in 1994 and never saw the finished product. “I don’t think it worked very well,” Carter said.

Williams, now a vice president for Disney World, left the NFL about the same time and said he didn’t see the videos either.

Two former directors of the youth center told The Times they were not consulted on the project.

Looking for lessons in the fiasco, school board member David Tokofsky finds an all-too-often-repeated one.

“Like much in the district, we led with our heart, we reached and grabbed any money and we didn’t have a plan, oversight or controls,” Tokofsky said. “And so there isn’t a kid who benefited.”