The checks stopped coming a few months ago for vendors doing business with the Randolph Public Schools.
Sophia Haynes-Cardwell, executive director of Stajez Cultural Arts Center, said she ran her dance program serving Randolph students for three months without a single payment from the school district.
She didn’t want to stop serving students and leave the schools with a scheduling mess by canceling classes, so her team kept working with no word from the city.
“I missed a paycheck. My other staff missed multiple paychecks,” she said. “I couldn’t take it out of my personal money to pay the staff, so we just had to wait. So that’s what we did, we just waited.”
Stajez is one of dozens of vendors who were not paid for weeks — or for some, even months — because of an ongoing dispute over funding between schools and town officials. About 200 invoices for services totaling more than $1 million remained frozen in mid-June, school officials told the town council.
The problems appear to have been resolved earlier this month — after a series of heated meetings — but there clearly remain deep feelings of mistrust in this town of about 35,000 people about 17 miles south of Boston. A recently released investigation funded by the schools found “a highly contentious relationship” between the schools and the town and a “significant lack of trust” leading to “daily obstacles and delays.”
In the midst of this infighting, the school finance director was placed on administrative leave and later resigned over her handling of cash from student fees. But she says that was not the real problem.
“I needed to part ways because of the hostile work environment,’’ Annya Haughton Washburn told GBH News. “There will be no change until there is a willingness to collaborate.”
A blame game
The conflict pitted town officials against the school district: a department that makes up nearly half of the town’s annual budget, far and away the largest line item. In 2024, the schools consumed $49 million of the town’s total $111 million budget, according to town council records.
Town officials and school officials blame each other for the suspension of payments to vendors.
Randolph officials — including Town Manager Brian Howard and Finance Director Janine Smith — say they were forced to stop paying bills because the school district’s spending account was showing a deficit of as much as $4 million.
School officials — including Superintendent Thea Stovell Herndon and School Committee Chair Lisa Millwood — say the town created a financial crisis by not signing the necessary paperwork. There was no deficit, they said. Instead, the money was in other school accounts, such as grant funds, that simply needed to be transferred to a spending account to cover the bills.
That step, they said, required the assistance of the town finance department.
Millwood described an onerous, bureaucratic process to the town council in June. She said for each transfer, the town finance department was requiring a blizzard of paperwork, organized in a very particular way. “And then it gets rejected, gets sent back and then we fix it again, then it goes back to the town, then it gets rejected and comes back. So what honestly should take us hours to complete is taking us weeks,” she said.
As a result, Millwood said, the town just stopped paying the bills at the end of May.
A few weeks later, Howard, the town manager, told the council that town officials believed the schools had slipped into a deficit, and school officials were never able to show how much money was available.
“There is nothing better I would like to do than hand a check to Stajez,” he told the council, as he was explaining why vendors were not being paid. “They do a wonderful job, they’re awesome in this community, and I would love to do it.”
High turnover, unsecured cash and bureaucracy
Howard told GBH News that the root of the problem relates to the high turnover in the schools’ finance department, with at least four different people serving as finance director over a five year period. “You don’t have consistency in that department and the opportunity to build the proper relationships between the town and the schools,” he said. “I think that is by far the number one factor.”
Records of problems go back years. In June 2023, officials from a consulting firm called TMSolution that had briefly been serving as the schools’ finance manager announced they were leaving the position because “we’ve concluded that we currently are not a good fit for each other.” The resignation letter did not offer details, other than to say “the systems we inherited have presented unforeseen challenges.” Nobody from the company, based in Auburn, responded to requests for comment.
When Annya Washburn stepped into the role in 2024, she says the experience was no better for her. She found a system that used online payments for school lunch charges, but not for anything else. So when the schools adopted a $50 technology fee for laptops issued to students, parents had to pay with cash, bank checks or money orders.
As a result, Washburn said last summer the schools ended up with more than $70,000 in cash and no secure place to put it. She said her supervisors told her not to hand the money over to the town, in part because of concerns the schools would never get the money back. So she opened a bank account and put it there.
But despite being the school finance director, she did not have legal authority to open a bank account.
In a public Town Council meeting in March, Councillor James Burgess Jr. said she had opened the account “in her own name.” While Washburn designated a colleague and herself as signatories on the account, it was opened in the name of the Town of Randolph.
Theschool district and thetown council each launched investigations — neither of which found any evidence that Washburn had pocketed any money. Washburn was placed on administrative leave and ultimately resigned.
Washburn said the issue of unsecured cash was one of many systemic roadblocks she faced as the schools’ finance director.
Among them, she said, the town finance office required all vendors to provide paper invoices. While city officials said this was intended as a safety measure to prevent fraud or overspending, Washburn said it became a burdensome practice. That issue apparently now is moot. In June, the town council passed a resolution to direct the town finance director to “remove the requirement for paper invoices” except in cases where state or federal law requires paper.
In ‘five minutes,’ a solution
Wherever the fault lies, it is clear that the town and schools were unable to simply talk through issues.
“The lack of communication is why we are here today,” said Town Councillor Katrina Huff-Larmond at a July 14 council meeting that broke down into shouting.
School officials who had not been invited to testify were trying to ask why town officials were not helping them get the bills paid.
Burgess told his colleagues he did not trust finance data coming from the schools. “I think we’ve just been lied to on a regular basis.”
At one point, Council President Chris Alexopoulos had to pound his gavel to stop the bickering among councillors.
The divided council agreed to return for another emergency meeting four days later — Friday, July 18.
At that meeting, Councillor Natacha Clerger announced that after the Monday night gavel-banging, a few councillors convened a side conversation with town and city officials. “In five minutes, we did get everything solved,” she said.
And all of a sudden, the funding issues were resolved.
Finance Director Smith announced that the school budget is no longer showing a deficit. She said vendors’ outstanding bills will get paid July 31 — without paper invoices. And, she said, the town is moving forward to adopting an online payment system for school fees as quickly as possible.
Millwood thanked Smith and the councillors. “Several individuals have helped us get to where we are today,” she said. “So I definitely want to say thank you to everyone, because it takes communication and us coming together for solutions. And I appreciate it.”
Councillors congratulated everyone for working together.
But not everybody was celebratory.
“I’m a little turned off by people patting themselves on the back here,” said Councillor Kevin O’Connell. “I’ve been trying to get meetings between everyone forever now. And people — it shouldn’t have came down to this ugliness that happened on Monday to make this happen. And everyone’s like, ‘Oh, make sure you get credit now.’”
Sophia Haynes-Cardwell said she was able to pick up a check for what was owed for Stajez’s work with the schools — more than $10,000.
But she says she’s still unhappy about how she was treated. “No one even called us to say, ‘We’re having issues in our finance department,’” she said. “There was just no communication at all. The lack of consideration for my staff that I had to pay… there was none.”
Now, she says, she is trying to decide whether to continue working with Randolph Public Schools.
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
