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Inside the Chaos at MPS
The Minnesota Reformer’s Melissa Whitler has been doing some excellent work lately regarding the ongoing financial meltdown at Minneapolis Public Schools. Her latest takes you behind the scenes of “a year of chaos and dysfunction” in the district’s finance department, where a senior officer continued working for months even as red flags about his conduct mounted.
“Warning signs about the Minneapolis Public Schools’ senior finance officer, Ibrahima Diop, had been accumulating for months: IRS penalties, a mysterious deficit in the district’s healthcare trust account, a blistering outside audit that referred to the department’s ‘pervasive fear and uncertainty,’ two reprimands and a performance improvement plan,” Whitler begins.
Diop, who shockingly did not respond to requests for comment, was MPS’s top financial official for a decade, and he remained in that post through January 2 of this year even as concerns grew. And this shit sucks: District Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams has not publicly addressed why he was allowed to remain in that role and has declined the Reformer’s repeated interview requests. “The district says it will not be doing interviews on these topics because of the ‘substantial amount of not public and private data involved,’” Whitler writes…