Mid-Central Seeking New Business Manager, Still Settling GEAR UP Accounts

Perhaps in the “no news is good news department,” the scandal-rocked Mid-Central Educational Cooperative board met for three hours in executive session on December 17, apparently to discuss personnel and legal matters in secret. When they came out of executive session, the board voted to start the search for a business manager. This move comes three months after their previous business manager, Scott Westerhuis, allegedly shot his family, set a fire that destroyed his house and made his safe evaporate, then killed himself with a shotgun that did not evaporate.

The December 17 minutes say that Mid-Central will work with the School Administrators of South Dakota and the Associated School Boards of South Dakota to search for a new business manager. They might have wanted to hire consultant Rick Melmer to conduct the search, given his past history of well-paid and thus surely valuable service to Mid-Central, but Melmer’s Dakota Education Consulting only does searches for superintendents.

Dakota Education Consulting does offer mentoring for first-year business managers for just $2,000 a year. Once MCEC hires a new permanent business manager, that person may need some support to explain the $3.4 million in balance discrepancies reported in MCEC’s financial reports under Westerhuis’s management from June 2011 to March 2014 (I originally reported $3.3 million; two additional financial reports originally absent from the MCEC website have brought that total above $3.4 million).

By the way, the November financial report in the December 17 minutes shows that MCEC has arrested its precipitous cash balance decline. After dropping from over a million in January to $160K in September, MCEC finished November with $197,213.98 on hand. That includes $81,287.99 received in November under the GEAR UP grant, the contract for which the state took away from Mid-Central in September.

The November financials also show that Mid-Central paid Eide Bailly $37,531.23 for its largely unrevealing audit of its GEAR UP expenditures and Swier Law $5,147 for legal services. The board also approved $12,750 in sick leave payouts to six former employees of the GEAR UP program.