City school district sues CAP, ends pact with agency
By Robyn Meadows
Published Sep 01, 2006 14:34
And, you can’t charge for more hours than are listed on the time sheets.
These are among the poor billing practices the School District of Lancaster alleges in a lawsuit it filed this week against the Community Action Program of Lancaster County.
The $87,000 in bills are for extra training that CAP provided teachers in an early-education program. They are for services from January through May of this year.
“We have no confidence in what has been billed to us, so we’ll let the courts decide,” district business manager Curt Baker said.
The district wants CAP to account for all the money it has received from the district, according to the lawsuit.
The district also asks the court to declare that it does not have to pay CAP for any current bill until the agency can provide accurate invoices.
This week, Superintendent Rita Bishop also sent CAP’s executive director, Derrick Span, two letters stating that the school district will terminate its contracts with the agency. One of the contracts expired Thursday. The other expires Sept. 30.
Span said today that he is saddened by the district’s decision.
He said that while the court makes a decision in the case, he hoped that the district and CAP could continue their relationship.
“Kids should not be sacrificed in this dispute,” he said, adding, “Let’s allow the attorneys to find the truth while we go on with the business of serving children.”
Span noted that the disputed billing happened before he arrived at CAP.
He added, “The great disappointment for me is that I don’t have the opportunity to work with the school district and to work with children in the community like I hoped.”
Baker said that the programs CAP operated for the district will continue, with the services provided either by the school district or another party.
“Nothing we are doing here will have one iota of impact on the kids,” he said, “and to suggest otherwise is wrong.”
The district’s lawsuit states that this isn’t the first time CAP has overcharged the school district.
As evidence, the lawsuit cites a state auditor general’s office report released this week. The report criticized CAP for inaccurate bills that it gave the school district for a separate after-school program.
CAP administered training for Head Start teachers and paid them extra income for having completed it. The district then paid CAP for that service through a federal Early Reading First grant.
The district cannot pay CAP’s bills the way they have been submitted or it would violate the guidelines of the federal grant, district officials said.
Bishop said, “We can’t use taxpayer and federal dollars to pay bills that we know aren’t correctly invoiced.”
Health and Human Services funds the Head Start program, not the school district, Bishop said. The district paid CAP for the extra training for the teachers, not for the program.
The district also has asked CAP to return $25,000 the district gave the agency earlier this year. The district wants the money returned, it says, because CAP failed to provide the superintendent with a quarterly financial and operational report, as stipulated in the agreement.
CAP receives a $521,630 grant to run its Fatherhood Initiative program. As part of the guidelines for that grant, CAP had to find other agencies to give it 10 percent of the total sum.
The nonprofit agency asked, as it has in the past, the district to provide $25,000 of it now and $25,000 again in the future.
Span and Bishop were scheduled to meet Tuesday. But Bishop said she canceled the meeting because Span wanted to talk about a resolution to the earlier billing dispute with the after-school program.
CAP filed a lawsuit against the district earlier this year demanding payment of invoices for the program. The case is still pending in Lancaster County Court.
Bishop said she can’t talk about something that’s in litigation.
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