Massachusetts audit chastises district leadership for ‘unconscionable, highly disturbing’ $18M deficit

A Massachusetts district has drawn withering criticism from the state Office of the Inspector General (OIG) after its overspending during the 2023 fiscal year created an “unprecedented” $18 million deficit.

“A failure of leadership by key BPS (Brockton Public School) leaders allowed this fiscal crisis to occur,” the office wrote in a Dec. 3 letter to city officials, noting “a collection of failures to properly plan the BPS budget, monitor spending, and respond to clear warning signs.”

“In not recognizing and remedying FY23 budget issues notwithstanding the available information and opportunities to intervene, the BPS CFO, the superintendent, school committee members, and the mayor violated their fiduciary duty to BPS and the city,” the letter concluded. 

Inspector General Jeffrey S. Shapiro reserved even sharper words for the district’s administration in an interview with GBH News. 

“The circumstances that resulted in the city’s — and its school district’s — overspending by $18 million, it’s unconscionable, it’s highly disturbing, and the answers for how it happened are far from satisfactory,” he told journalists. 

Payments contributing to the budget bloat included payroll and energy usage, along with police details and out-of-district tuition and transportation, the report noted. 

“I acknowledge that those are real expenses,” Shapiro said. “On the other side of it, they’re the same expenses that every other school district is dealing with, and we don’t have other school districts that have overspent.” 

Suggested changes by the Inspector General included “taking part in a state training, ensuring people are comfortable reading and analyzing finances, and creating a culture that encourages members to raise concerns to city and school leadership,” GBH News wrote. 

The district enrolled about 15,000 students during the 2024-25 academic year. 

‘Everything … is going to come back on the taxpayers’ 

Lori Mason, a Brockton resident, told reporters she didn’t believe anyone would be held accountable for the misspending. 

“What would be accountable to me would be, I believe, resigning from their positions immediately and paying back all the money that occurred during the deficit,” she said. “Everything that’s going on is going to come back on the taxpayers and we’re hardly making enough money to survive.” 

As previously reported by The Lion, an increasing number of public-school districts nationwide are disclosing budget deficits, sometimes as late as September after the academic year had started. 

In one example, the affluent Montclair district in New Jersey updated its estimated shortfall to $18 million – a substantial increase from its July projections of approximately $11 million. 

“It is really incompetence, bad accounting and administration’s inability to say no,” said the district’s superintendent, Ruth B. Turner. 

Other organizations reporting multimillion-dollar deficits include Minneapolis Public Schools, St. Joseph School District in Missouri, Seattle Public Schools and several California and Oregon districts.