Embattled D.C. schools’ Chief Financial Officer Pamela Graham has resigned, The Examiner has learned.
She will be replaced by Noah Wepman, an aide to city Administrator Dan Tangherlini, sources told The Examiner.
Graham was the top financial official for the schools for just under two years. She struggled to bring the $1 billion school system’s accounts under control.
Last summer, schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee asked city Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi to replace Graham, sources said. Gandhi resisted, but sources say he finally relented late last week when his top deputies told him Graham wasn’t up to the job.
For more than a decade, Gandhi has fought efforts to loosen his grip on the schools’ failing finances. But he has been weakened by allegations that low-level employees in his tax office stole tens of millions of public dollars on his watch.
Neither Gandhi nor his spokeswoman, Karyn-Siobhan Robinson, responded to requests for comment.
The schools are facing a $100 million-plus budget deficit in fiscal 2008, according to an outside audit paid for by the city. Mayor Adrian Fenty has already reneged on a promise tocap his budget and asked the D.C. Council for an additional $81 million.
Graham was blamed for the most recent chaos in the schools’ budget. Last month, D.C. Council members, including Chairman Vincent C. Gray, pilloried Graham in a public hearing on the schools.
Graham met with Gandhi’s lieutenant Angell Jacobs on Friday and came back to tell her staff that she was leaving, the sources said.
Like most city agencies, the schools don’t control their own budget. Critics say the arrangement allows agencies to blame one another when things go badly.
“It’s an impossible position,” said Mary Levy, a schools and budget expert at the Washington Lawyers Committee. “You have to please both the superintendent and the city’s chief financial officer.”
Since 1996, at least 11 different people have served as schools’ CFO.
