D.C. School Board Member May Abandon Campaign
Graham 'Very Upset' Over Disputed Memo

By V. Dion Haynes and Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 21, 2006

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.

Graham said she turned over the memo this week to the D.C. inspector general's office.

Patterson blames Graham and Cafritz for ignoring numerous warning signs about Belton and defending her reputation. Patterson said she contacted the chief financial officer and asked officials not to authorize money to Belton's office unless it verified the invoices. In April, Patterson said, "I was asked by the board president and board vice president to please rescind what I had said about Belton. They didn't like the criticism of Dr. Belton's office."

Graham said she did sign a memo at Belton's request in May. That memo, she said, was addressed to the school system's then-chief financial officer, John Musso. "I knew if he got it, he would have taken the requests through the process" to verify the legitimacy of the requested expenditures, she said.

But the memo that Graham says was forged was sent to someone who reported to Musso in the chief financial officer's office. The chief financial officer's office paid the $44,251 requested in the memo.

Cafritz and other board members said they voted in a closed session Monday to fire Belton, who had been on paid administrative leave since June. Members said she was dismissed because of poor job performance, not because of the investigation. They said she did not always show up for work and often filed late reports that had to be redone.

The action came five months after the FBI raided the school board's charter school office as well as Belton's home and the Equal Access property on Underwood Place.

Belton's attorney, Vincent H. Cohen Jr., did not return calls.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that Equal Access had submitted invoices for $350,000 in expenses.

According to one memo of understanding between the charter office and Equal Access in August 2005, the company would provide assistance to charter schools that did not make adequate yearly progress in reading and math under the No Child Left Behind law. The assistance included help with lesson plans, homework assignments and curricula.

About a month later, Equal Access submitted an invoice to Belton's office for $43,000 for work that it described as consulting with 15 schools and training language arts teachers. One school was Booker T. Washington Public Charter School in Columbia Heights.

Principal Richard Jackson said he had never heard of Equal Access, although the invoice said the school had received help in reading and math. "None of that ever happened," said Jackson, the principal for three years. "I didn't see anybody who came in do any of those things."

Staff writer Carol D. Leonnig and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.