Central Office

State auditors and the Camden County Prosecutor's Office yesterday joined a school district investigation of Camden High School's finances that is reviewing athletic funds and other accounts to determine whether the money has been mishandled, authorities said. The investigation, which began as an examination of an office safe found empty last week, has widened to cover all of the school's student activity accounts from the current school year, Board of Education president Phil Freeman said in an interview yesterday.

Lost in the shuffle of a six-hour Philadelphia School Reform Commission meeting Thursday night: resolution A-13, a $1.4 million, one-month contract with Boston Consulting Group Inc. That's right - $1.4 million. And the Philadelphia School District still has a June deadline to trim $38.8 million more from a budget that's already lost thousands of employees and withstood deep cuts to individual schools. But SRC Chairman Pedro Ramos said he did not expect the money to come from district coffers.

Tucked in my recent story about "Occupy 440" - a group of school nurses protesting against the Philadelphia School District's latest round of budget cuts - was a line you may have missed: District spokesman Fernando Gallard said the Promise Academies had had "significant cuts," including the elimination of the entire central office staff that supervised those schools, which was also axed as of Dec. 31. Promise Academies, of course, are...

A day after the state Department of Education sent the Camden School District a letter citing the district's failure to report more than 76 incidents of violence and vandalism in the last two school years, Camden's police chief met Thursday with the district's head of security. It was the first step in the right direction, said Gaylen Conley, executive director of the district's office of safety and security. "We are increasing interactions with Camden City police" to ensure that they and the district are in constant communication, Conley said.

Philadelphia Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said Wednesday that city students' state test scores are up for the eighth consecutive year. "For the first time ever, more than half of our students now score in the proficient or advanced level," Ackerman said in brief remarks before the School Reform Commission. Students in third through eighth grade and eleventh grade took the exams in reading and math this spring. Ackerman also said that the district's "Empowerment" schools - 105 chronically failing schools given extra supports and closer scrutiny by the central office - mostly showed "significant and dramatic" gains in reading and math.

The realities are ugly, leaders said Tuesday - the Philadelphia School District is nearly insolvent, lags behind most other urban districts in academics, and loses students to charters because parents believe it does not keep their children safe. "What we do know through lots of history and evidence and practice is that the current structure doesn't work," School Reform Commission Chairman Pedro Ramos said. "It's not fiscally sustainable and it doesn't produce high quality schools for all kids.

On any given school day, more than 600 of Chester High School's 1,700 students are absent. Two hundred more students are probably in the school building, but not in class. Those staggering statistics do not even include the estimated 500 students who have dropped out of the high school since the start of this school year, according to Janice Hoffman-Willis of the Chester Upland School District. "The absentee problem is a sore that has been allowed to fester for years, and we have to act now to do something before we lose the hand," she said.

Schools Superintendent David Hornbeck testified yesterday before Commonwealth Court Judge Doris Smith that the district is revamping its structure by axing its regional offices. He said he agreed with a court-appointed education team's recommendation to get rid of the regional offices to decentralize the system. The regional offices act as go-betweens for schools and the central office. Hornbeck was a witness during the second day of hearings on Smith's education team's report on improving city schools.

In a surprise move, Neshaminy Assistant Superintendent Bernard Hoffman announced his retirement at a school board meeting. Hoffman, 56, said he wanted to leave at the end of the school year in 1997. He has worked in the school district for 38 years, starting as a 20-year-old teacher in 1958 at Penndel Elementary School. Hoffman has been a constant in the ever-growing Neshaminy School District. Board member Robert S. Tull Jr. said he remembered as a boy admiring Hoffman.

Malik Muhammad remembers the day a gunman shot and killed a man on Lancaster Avenue near 42nd Street last month. And how that same night, the owner of a deli was shot in the chest in an exchange of gunfire during a $20 robbery. And a week before, the 1:30 a.m. police call to Muhammad's own house telling him that his civic association, in the same block, had been firebombed. Muhammad, the executive director of Showcase Community Services and the president of Lancaster Avenue Business Association, is thankful officers spotted the fire before it destroyed the office.