67% of School District inventory missing: City Controller report

Computers, printers and audio visual equipment were among the $196,000 worth of School District inventory that a recent City Controller report found missing, according to a release from City Controller Alan Butkovitz‘s office.

Nearly 67 percent of the 130 items the Controller sought out were missing from 11 schools, the report said. The report also targets a new computerized inventory system, which the Controller said was not doing its job of keep track of inventory.

In response to these issues, the School District said it would, among other things, train its employees to use the inventory system and keep employees informed about the District’s inventory policy.

Some other tech-relevant findings from the report include:

• In the new computerized inventory system, nearly $30,000 worth of computer hardware and software was marked as “obsolete,” meaning that the hardware and software were both more than five years old and “unable to be found” (rather than lost or stolen, which was a different category in the inventory system).
• 171 of the School District’s 242 schools (as of 2012-2013) have security cameras. Of those 171, 14 still use video tapes or a mix of video tapes and digital recording. The rest use digital recording.

Read the whole report here.