A Baltimore councilman contends that Education Alternatives Inc. and the school system have stymied scrutiny of the city's school privatization venture by failing to provide necessary financial documents to his new oversight committee.
More than two months ago, amid widening criticism of the controversial privatization experiment, the council moved to monitor EAI's spending and progress in a dozen schools.
But Councilman Carl Stokes, a 2nd District Democrat, complained this week that the school system and company have yet to provide an accounting of about $38 million in contracts for the 1993-1994 school year. As a result, the panel he formed after a 4 1/2 -hour hearing in December has never met.
"We want to look at the financials to determine if they are actually putting more money into the schools as they have promised," he said.
The 8,500-member Baltimore Teachers Union, a persistent critic of EAI, also has been frustrated in its attempts to obtain a school-by-school accounting of expenditures and the staffing for the nine "Tesseract" schools.
Superintendent Walter G. Amprey and EAI officials blamed the holdup on one remaining discrepancy in the financial statements.
Yesterday, Philip E. Geiger, EAI's division president, said he expects the company's accountants to reconcile the last figure in dispute with the city by the end of today and issue the long-awaited report within a week.
EAI turned in its financial reports on time, but the school system has taken longer than expected in its own review because of a staffing shortage, Dr. Amprey said.
Education Alternatives is in the third year of five-year city contracts worth about $180 million. The company began running the Tesseract schools in fall 1992 and has since taken on a more limited role in three other schools.
At the Dec. 7 hearing, when Mr. Stokes and other council members complained of being stonewalled in their efforts to get financial information, EAI chief John T. Golle said the company has steadily increased its spending for instruction and that the new figures would bear that out.
EAI provided the unaudited financial data for 1993-1994 to the city school board in August, but the board and school administration would not release the figures until completing an independent audit.