D.C. School Board Member May Abandon Campaign

Graham 'Very Upset' Over Disputed Memo

D.C. school board Vice President Carolyn N. Graham, who is running for president, says the disputed memo "casts a shadow." (By Jonathan Ernst For The Washington Post)

D.C. Board of Education Vice President Carolyn N. Graham, a candidate for school board president, said yesterday that she may quit her campaign because a disputed memorandum links her to a scandal involving charter school funds.

Graham and the board president said a board employee forged Graham's signature on the memo, which requested the aid of the city's financial office in providing $44,251 in payments to vendors. However, Graham said she signed essentially the same request but addressed it to a higher-ranking official.

For several months, a federal grand jury has been investigating the board's charter school office, which is responsible for overseeing 18 of the city's 55 charter schools, said a source close to the inquiry who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. Federal investigators are trying to determine whether the office's executive director, Brenda L. Belton, whom the board fired this week, steered about $350,000 in city contracts to a company with the same address as a house owned by her daughter.

The grand jury probe and Graham's link to the memo were first reported by the Examiner newspaper.

The May 17 memorandum raises questions about Graham's involvement in requesting money for vendors, even after a D.C. Council member questioned the qualifications of one of them.

But Graham said yesterday that a board staffer said Belton had told her to cut Graham's signature from an original memo and paste it to a memo addressed to an employee of the D.C. chief financial officer. Graham said she had neither signed nor seen the memo, which is on her letterhead.

School board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz also said she talked to the employee who acknowledged pasting Graham's signature to the memo. Cafritz identified her as Mary Bunn, a coordinator in the charter school office.

"The staff person admitted to me she had done the cutting and pasting. . . . Supposedly, this was at the direction of Dr. Belton," Graham said. "I'm very upset, angry and disappointed to have worked with people who acted in this way."

Bunn declined yesterday to talk to a reporter.

"I've got to decide whether I will continue this race," Graham said. "I would not want the people of this city to think I'm not an honest person. This casts a shadow on my entire campaign." Graham said the D.C. inspector general's office, which is working with federal authorities, has told her she is not a target of the investigation.

The memo addressed to the financial office employee assigned to the school system lists seven contractors with expenses totaling $44,251. The expenses include $17,450 for testing monitors at charter schools, $15,427 for the consulting firm Equal Access in Education and two items totaling $12,113 for the Foston Institute.

D.C. Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), who chairs the education committee, raised concerns early this year with the school board, chief financial officer and federal officials about Equal Access. School board invoices show that Equal Access is at 26 Underwood Pl. NW, a duplex that, according to city property records, was previously owned by Belton and is now owned by her daughter Lindsay Holmes.