No end in sight for School Police audit

Friday, Nov. 2, 2007 | 7:40 a.m.

While the Clark County School District's human resources office prepares to screen applicants for police chief, internal auditors are struggling to make sense of the paper trail left - or not left - by the last man to hold the job.

The internal audit, standard procedure following the departure of a department head, was triggered by the abrupt resignation of Hector Garcia, whose last day as School Police chief was Aug. 10. Garcia said he was returning to Florida to pursue his doctorate.

Initially, district officials said the audit report would be available by the third week in September. But Craig Kadlub, Superintendent Walt Rulffes' chief of staff, said Wednesday the audit has yet to be completed.

He declined to predict a finish date.

The process has been hampered by poor record-keeping and missing files. Hard copies of financial documents that should have been available to auditors could not be located at Police Services. Auditors had to access the hard drives of the department's computers in an attempt to re - create files, a time-consuming process.

In an interview with the Sun in September, Garcia said he took personal copies of files and memorandum s with him when he left, but that everything was copied onto a central server. Whether the necessary information was found on the hard drives has yet to be revealed.

One issue surrounds a July conference in Las Vegas conducted by the School Safety Advocacy Council, a private, for-profit company that provides training and security assessments. Garcia took a position as a consultant with the company after he resigned as School Police chief.

Garcia initially signed up about 80 of his employees to attend the conference, at $195 per person. But district officials are questioning whether all 80 employees actually were there and have withheld payment of $15,600 pending an investigation.

The executive director and founder of the council, Curtis Lavarello, told the Sun on Monday that auditors recently asked him to provide a list of everyone at the event. He sent them the original registration roster given to him by the district, he said. School Police officials later asked for a list of who actually attended, not who merely registered. Lavarello's staff, he said, is not responsible for providing that information.

"We don't have sign-in sheets," Lavarello said, adding that the School Police training sergeant at the conference should have taken a head count.

Now Lavarello wants to get paid and preserve his professional relationship with the nation's fifth-largest school district.

"We don't want to be on bad terms," Lavarello said. "We've worked with them for years."

Lavarello worked with Garcia in the Palm Beach County School Police Department in the 1990 s . While he was chief of Clark County School Police, Garcia served as an unpaid board member of Lavarello's company. His current post as a vice president is a part-time consulting position, Lavarello said.

Last spring, Garcia recommended Lavarello for a consulting job with the School District, evaluating the feasibility of metal detectors at Canyon Springs High School. The district paid Lavarello $11,750 for the study.

As the audit continues, so does the search for Garcia's replacement. The district's human resources office will be screening the 48 applicants this month, and interviews with the finalists will begin in mid-December.

Phil Gervasi, Clark County School Police Officers Association president, said morale is suffering from the overlap of the ongoing audit, the search for a new chief and contract negotiations that are headed for arbitration.

The department is short on uniforms for recruits, Gervasi said, mainly because a dispute with the supplier has yet to be resolved.

"The district is trying to wait until it picks a new chief to solve some of these problems," he said. "But that could be January or February."