Enough is Enough, Jeffco!
In response to a CORA request asking for FTE numbers, by school, for every school in the District, Jeffco responded by writing:
At this time, our Subject Matter Experts only have the unofficial student count by school for the Charter Schools and can provide that to you at no cost. If you would like the FTE data for every school in the District they estimate the time necessary to research and retrieve that information to be 3 hours.
This is just a BLATANT attempt to make it difficult for me to get the numbers!
And, it’s outright FALSE!
Let’s look at this from another perspective. If Jeffco truly doesn’t have these numbers:
- How could they calculate the Charters’ share of 5B funding?
- How does CDE have the detailed, by school numbers?
The answer to the first question is easy – Jeffco couldn’t make the calculation! This makes Jeffco’s response to my CORA request extremely difficult to believe.
For the second question, I know that CDE has the same detailed numbers because I sent a CORA request to CDE with the identical question. And, guess what? CDE responded. CDE gave me, without a fee, the breakout of FTE numbers by school in Jeffco. Yet, for some strange reason, Jeffco doesn’t have those numbers readily. How does CDE have the FTE numbers, readily available, and not Jeffco?
The answers to both of these questions make it impossible to believe Jeffco’s response to my CORA request.
That leaves the question of WHY Jeffco would respond in the manner they did.
Everyone can have their own opinion on the reasons, but I’m going to believe that Jeffco is trying hard to hide something (and I know what it is, thanks to CDE, but more on that later) and their response was outright deception and obstruction of attempts to determine the truth.