Word: budgeteer
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...prompted Granholm, a Democrat, to seize control of Detroit's public schools in the fall of 2008 and then look for someone to fix them. After a wide search, she settled on Bobb, who had a reputation for restoring fiscal sanity to city governments - including managing public-school-system budgets. When Bobb arrived last spring, here's what he found: Contracts had been stuffed in office drawers. The district couldn't afford new books. Gas was siphoned between buses. The district had to borrow money to pay its employees. There wasn't even a chief financial officer managing the system...
...mainly because of the emergence of charter schools and the middle class's exodus to the suburbs. It could fall further, to 65,000 in the next four years. Those trends, if they persist, will further erode revenues of a school system saddled with a $219 million budget deficit. So Bobb is trying to squeeze out the waste in the meantime, and he has built an investigative apparatus that has uncovered widespread corruption, including nearly 3,800 unauthorized dependents on employee health-insurance rolls. In the case of the ninth-grade dropout, the judge essentially followed Bobb's suggestion...
...Denial was a problem too. Shortly before Bobb took over, Detroit's school board okayed a budget that it claimed had an $8 million surplus. Bobb's assessment showed a budget deficit of $303.5 million. He's since reduced the deficit partly by trimming the system's job rolls from about 14,000 to about 13,000. He's closed 29 of the district's 194 schools and hired outside firms to restructure 17 others. And in what may be his most inspired move, Bobb has asked some 2,600 volunteers to donate 360,000 hours to helping kids read...
...cover tuition at Grambling State University, he buffed floors. He moved quickly through a series of city-management jobs in Kalamazoo, Mich., and Oakland, Calif. In 2003, Washington's then mayor, Anthony A. Williams, hired Bobb as city manager and deputy mayor; he managed an $8 billion annual budget and some 20,000 employees. Three years later, he was elected president of D.C.'s board of education. After that experience, why would anyone want to take on the task of saving Detroit's public schools? "I wanted to go to an urban school district, the roughest and the toughest...
...It’s not a great time of huge new money to do things,” Davis said, listing the $3.9 million shortfall in the school budget as an example. “It doesn’t mean you can’t reallocate, but money isn’t growing on trees right...