Metro Schools Initiates Search For Wasteful Spending

Metro Schools has initiated a deep search for wasteful spending. A team of top finance officials is scrutinizing every contract worth more than $100,000.

Superintendent Shawn Joseph has been on the job three months with a budget he inherited. So there’s a risk that he’ll be seen as the “new guy” bringing in the budget axe.

“I think people will understand. It might be shocking, originally, once we start,” he says. “But I think they’ll see that we’re just trying to make sure that, one, we’re putting money in the right places, and two, we’re getting results for our money.”

There’s never a perfect time to look for cuts, he says. But Joseph figures there’s some money that could be used better within the district’s budget of more than $800 million a year. Joseph says he’s looking for reading programs that haven’t paid off or curriculum that no one is using anymore.

“A lot of times when you have a budget as large as ours, you have vendors that have just been here for years that are just here and we constantly renew just because,” he says.

Joseph says he doesn’t anticipate finding mountains of waste. He just wants to verify that big expenditures can be tied directly to student success.

Last week, Joseph instituted a temporary
travel freeze. The district, which has 10,000 staffers, estimates it spends more than $1.5 million a year on trips to conferences and professional development.

The self-examination comes as Joseph’s contract and those of his top lieutenants
have come come under scrutiny. They’ve received pay raises compared to their predecessors and perks like take-home cars.

Joseph says he’d like every staffer to see the same kind of pay bump so that Nashville’s teacher pay can be “nationally competitive.”

“The challenge is when you have 10,000 employees, it makes it harder to get them where I think they should be,” Joseph says. “We only have eight executive officers, so getting them in line was easier. But the goal will be to aggressively move towards making sure everybody has the type of pay and the type of compensation that will make Metro Nashville Public Schools the most competitive market in the country.”