For FY 2017 and FY 2018 through March, Board of Education member Jill Ortman-Fouse charged $10,895.25 in expenses to the MCPS Operating Budget.
The Parents' Coalition has obtained Board of Education expense account records for calendar year 2017 through March 15, 2018.
From the documents we obtained we believe the documents show that Ms. Ortman-Fouse traveled out of town on the following dates.
Conferences:
March 2017 - 5 Days in Denver Colorado [Hyatt Hotel]
August 18 2017 - Possible Ocean City stay, but BOE members are not listed on the hotel bill
September 21, 2017 - Possible Ocean City stay, but BOE members are not listed on the hotel bill.
September 27-30, 2017 - Cube Conference in New Orleans, LA [Waldorf Roosevelt Hotel]
October 3-6, 2017 - 4 days at MABE Conference in Ocean City, MD
April 5, 2018 - Airfare purchased for unknown trip
Below are the records that we obtained. Please note that Board of Education members no longer possess personal credit cards. That practice ended in 2014 when the Parents' Coalition exposed how Board of Education members and their staff were using their personal MCPS credit cards.
However, Board of Education staff still have a MCPS credit card for Board member purchases.
The first document below shows Jill Ortman-Fouse's requests for expenses/reimbursements and the second document shows the bills for Board members paid from the Board office credit card. The one Board of Education office credit card is in the name of staff member Rebecca Gibson.
Per Diem, Airport Transportation:
Airline tickets, hotels, conference fees:
I am very disturbed by the false insinuation that Jill Ortman-Fouse, an at-large board of education member, has done something wrong with regard to her board expenses. A process has been in place for several years that makes board expenses transparent to the public. Here is the link by which the public can view all BOE expenses: http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/boe/ Jill Ortman-Fouse is an outstanding public servant and anyone who knows her will attest to her integrity. The fact that this is posted 9 days before an election in which she is running for county council is troubling to me. I urge people to look past this Parents Coalition posting and review the many public records easily available on the MCPS website to better understand who Jill Ortman-Fouse is. Therese Gibson
ReplyDeleteTherese, where is there ONE accusation of ANYTHING in the above post? There is nothing except facts.
DeleteIf you "think" Board expenses are transparent to the public, where are the documents we obtained available on the MCPS website? If they were on the website we would not have had to request them via a Maryland Public Information Act request.
For your information, we obtained the expense account spending from all of the BOE members running for re-election or other offices.
The Parents' Coalition has been requesting these exact same documents for over 4 years.
Deletehttps://www.scribd.com/document/329923318/2016-mpia-for-phil-kauffman-and-rebecca-smondrowski-expenses#from_embed
http://parentscoalitionmc.blogspot.com/2014/07/breaking-news-parents-coalition-obtains.html
Ms. Gibson, Nothing posted here is by any means an 'insinuation' of anything. It is simply a post of existing Board of Education documents that show how our tax dollars are used. The link in your post is just a link to the Board of Education, not to these documents. If you can post the link to these documents, it would be good to see them rather than have to use the Maryland Public Information Act to get them. I am sure Ms. Ortman-Fouse has no trouble with transparency, as she has said often. The subject line here is stating that Ms. Ortman-Fouse has claimed an amount of money in her expense reports. That is all. No insinuation of anything.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjsh2j7W6Bo
ReplyDelete