By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

DES MOINES – Turning around a failing school is hard work, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun, as some teachers in Iowa’s Waterloo Community Schools have discovered.

According to IowaWatchdog.com, the district misappropriated more than $30,000 of federal money to send a handful of teachers to training conferences in Las Vegas and St. Louis.

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At the Vegas retreat in 2010, a Waterloo teacher “used taxpayer money at a Hooters restaurant, and others bought $30 steaks and submitted receipts that weren’t itemized so the district had no way of knowing what was bought,” reports IowaWatchdog.org.

“In all, the district spent $32,910 (on the two trips), which included airfare, hotel rooms and registration for the conferences to train staff on ways to improve schools with high poverty and large minority-student populations.”

The trips themselves, and the amount of money spent, are not the biggest problem with this scenario.

The problem is that the $32,000 came from a $4.4 million federal fund dedicated to improving two low-achieving schools within the Waterloo district.  The Des Moines school district also received aid from the fund.

In return for the federal handouts, both the Waterloo and Des Moines districts agreed to implement a variety of reforms, including extended learning time, using student achievement in evaluating teachers and principals, and providing teacher incentives to help boost student learning.

“The two districts, instead, used the funding for programs and training not in their original applications and not state approved. In some cases, money was used to send teachers to Las Vegas and St. Louis for training, pay custodians and cover busing expenses, records show,” the watchdog group reports.

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Using taxpayer dollars to eat at Hooters isn’t necessarily malfeasance, but it illustrates how throwing money at problems seldom solves anything.

Holding a press conference to announce a huge federal grant to help failing schools makes for a nice story on the nightly news, but the end result seldom changes: the money gets frittered away, promises go unfulfilled, and the problems persist.