Chick, School Officials Trade Barbs Over Audit

Los Angeles Controller Laura Chick and school district officials staged dueling news conferences Thursday in the latest round of their ongoing tit-for-tat over school district audits.

Peering out from behind nearly 1,000 financial reviews and reports conducted on the district over the last five years, Chick jabbed first, deriding the Los Angeles Unified School District for “a disturbing lack of transparency and accountability” and repeating her call for district leaders to allow her to perform a sweeping audit.

“Audits and reports are intended to bring transparency,” she said. “LAUSD has used them to hide from the public, to obstruct and delay.”

She repeated her offer to bring in a team of auditors to perform a wide-ranging, top-down investigation of the district’s finances and teaching practices.

Supt. Roy Romer and school board members quickly rejected the idea, repeating their claim that the nation’s second-largest district was already heavily audited and well run.

At a hastily arranged news conference, Romer rebuked Chick and said she had neither the authority nor the qualifications to evaluate the district. He compared her to a farmer he once knew whom neighbors resented for telling them how to tend to their crops.

“My point being: We really ought to look very carefully at what we’re elected to do,” Romer said. “She said that she is not an educational expert ... but we do have educational experts in this district.

“Let me get this question off the table: We’re not going to spend our dollars for Laura Chick to do an additional audit. We have enough audits done.”

Chick has said an audit would cost the district between $800,000 and $1 million.

To emphasize his point, Romer announced that Education Resource Strategies, a national consulting firm, would begin this month on an audit of the district, focusing on possible reductions of the central bureaucracy.

Romer and A.J. Duffy, president of the teachers union, agreed to the audit as part of recent contract negotiations.

Romer and board members declined to comment on Chick’s assertion that her call for a review of the district was unrelated to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s ongoing campaign to wrest control of the district from the school board.