Milwaukee Public Schools financial crises pile up, questions loom

From the Fox 6 studios, this is Open Record. I'm Brian Polson, and I am joined by Fox 6 investigator Nicole Herzog. Hello, Nicole. And we're joined once again by Fox 6 political reporter Jason Calvey. Jason, welcome back. Great to be here. Thanks. You're becoming a regular here on the podcast for sure. We are recording this on Wednesday, November 11th. Happy Veterans Day. Today, we are taking a closer look at the recent financial controversy surrounding Milwaukee public schools from... A multi-million dollar contract raising serious questions to a scam that cost the district hundreds of thousands of dollars. What went wrong? What is MPS doing about it? And who is accountable for the taxpayer dollars at stake? We're going to break down what we've uncovered and the questions we are still asking. But first, we're going to start with the district's $4.8 million deal to demolish Lincoln Avenue School and why a local contractor challenged that decision right after this. We are back on Open Record. You guys may remember, if you've been following along on Fox 6 News, a massive fire destroyed Lincoln Avenue School, a Milwaukee public school, in June. Milwaukee public schools started looking for a contractor to tear down that building. And they started doing that last month. MPS signed a $4.8 million contract with an Illinois-based company, TW Chicago, to do that work. Normally not something that would probably make really big news. Before the school board could approve the deal, a local contractor appealed that bid, questioning the district's transparency. Jason, this obviously was all happening right around election time. It almost got lost in the mix of electing a new governor. We just came out of the World Series. This is a pretty big deal. What happened here? Yeah. So just a reminder back in June was when Lincoln Avenue school burnt down. I mean, major fire and a month later in July, the city determined that that building could not stand. It had to be demolished. So there was a raze order. And then Fox six reported that there was this big controversy over the contract. You just set it up that TW Chicago gets the bid $4.8 million bid to tear that thing down. Meanwhile, the local contractor appealed and said Ours was... Several million dollars cheaper. In fact, it was a little bit over $928,000 for their bid. How did they lose? They appealed, and then the district went through and said, yes, we will agree to start the rebidding process over again. That's an extraordinary difference. I want to be clear. This is not the kind of contract. Sometimes you have contracts where the low bidder is going to win, and that's why bids are secret, because you can't let each of the other bidders know what the other bidders are going to bid, The lowest dollar amount comes in is going to win. This wasn't a case where the low dollar amount necessarily would win. There were certain terms of the contract they had to meet. But they're still secret bids, right? Like one bidder doesn't know what the other one's doing. Right. Well, now they do. Now everybody knows that TW Chicago's was four point eight and MRD group. That's the local, that's the local Milwaukee contractor. Their bid was nine twenty eight. Now that they're doing the rebidding. Now, every all the competitors know that MRD's was nine twenty eight. So we'll see if they come in at a dollar less than Price is Right rules. But again, as you mentioned, Brian, like you keep on the Price is Right rules that drives it right home. I'll go one dollar. Yeah, exactly. But you're right, though. This contract was not going to be awarded. It wasn't a low bid. You get the low bid, you win. No, there was scoring done. And MRD Group actually got the scoring. They did a couple open records requests, finally said they got the scoring. That revealed TW Chicago got a score of 91 out of 100. Meanwhile, MRD Group, that local Milwaukee company, got a 76 out of 100. And they're questioning, well, what's the scoring? We don't know what the scorecard is. How will they come up with that score? That's really the question, right? We haven't seen the criteria for that, how they determine how somebody gets a certain score. Yeah, and that's a big question that we're still working to get the answers to. That is something that we want to know exactly what the scorecard was and how they gave this TW Chicago, which has less experience in demolition, has less experiences, is not local. So how did they get the 91? The MRD group is saying, hey, even the price itself should have given them a lower score Because the price, the cost of the contract should still be part of the scorecard. And even though it's not the low bidder or it wasn't a low bid contract, the discrepancy in the bids is so vast that it obviously stood out. I know you've heard from the MRD group, from Marcus Dunkey, who said this was, you know, essentially outrageous. You know, it's unheard of in the industry, like a five times difference. What is in this bid that would make theirs so much more expensive than a local bidder who has experience doing the same kind of work? That we don't know. And that's why these open record requests are going to be so crucial to dig into those, digging into the score sheet and also the bids and see, okay. Because that was the big question MRD Group had at first when they saw the $4.8 price tag. They said, wow, that's so much larger than what their bid was. And they said their bid, they're local. So they were able to maybe bring their costs down a lot because they weren't going to be traveling 100 miles. To the Chicago suburb, no, they're going to be local so they can keep their price low. But to have it be that much higher, they're like, well, did we miss something in what the district was asking? What exactly extra are they giving for that extra four plus million dollars? Do we know why the district went with this bid over the other? Have they said what it was? Was there something they were going to do that this local bidder wasn't going to do? Was there some scope of work that was greater? They're planning, we're going to have more security and fencing and fancy equipment or something that justifies this cost, or we just don't know. I don't think that's come out at all. I think that that is the whole question here of why, you know, this local contractor is saying, hey, what did happen here? Because we are offering essentially the same work. And I recall the story. They said, you know, we've never seen anything like this in our time, you know, working on similar projects and doing similar types of things. So this is just raising so many questions because of that. Now. This isn't one where MPS came back and said, hey, scoring's the scoring, that's the bid, and the school board's going to sign the contract. The contractor appealed, and they have agreed to re-bid this contract. Tell me what we know about that. Yeah, so the contractor MRD group, the local Milwaukee contractor that... saw this price discrepancy. We can get to that and how they figured that out in a couple of minutes, but they filed a formal appeal. That's something that you can do when you're doing this to the government contracts and you feel like you were unjustly not given the bid, you can appeal that. And so they went through the formal process of an appeal and the district decided, yes, we're We're going to. Rebid this. There's enough here that we need to relook at this. And exactly what we asked the superintendent was the original picking of the one that was $4.8 million, was that fair for the taxpayers? The district is funded by taxpayer money. And if you're going with a bid, More, so much more. He's five times more than a lower bid that's local. Is that a good use of the taxpayer money? Are you being good stewards of the taxpayer money? And her response there, and I think we'll hear from her in a little bit, but she said, well, it wasn't taxpayer money because it's actually the insurance company was offering up to $4.7 million for the demolition. So it would have been covered by the insurance company. She said this was a negotiated rate with the insurance company. So the insurance company was going to pay it. But my guess is when the insurance company is paying out five million dollars to demolish a building, eventually taxpayers are going to pay for that because the insurance rates are going to go up in some way or another. This money doesn't come out of thin air. Right. But she is at least saying this wouldn't have been a direct five million dollar hit to the district. Yeah, because my question was, this is taxpayer money. And her clarification was, well, it's insurance money. This is one of the questions. TW Chicago is an outside firm. It seems that the local firm has some advantages. They have experience doing this. They are nearby. They certainly came in with a lot less expensive bid. We don't know what it was they were picked over. But Jason, you did say you discovered something that still raises some questions because if you haven't yet got a bid and it's not a signed bid. You wouldn't start working on the project, but you got information that, in fact, TW Chicago was already or maybe a subcontractor hired by them was already starting work on this project. At least notifying the state. So a subcontractor, not TW Chicago, but a subcontractor had alerted the state when you're doing asbestos work, when you're doing anything that could potentially put asbestos out into the environment. Thank Obviously, you're doing remediation to make sure that doesn't happen. But anytime you're doing asbestos work, you have to notify the state. And so guess what? When you look at the documentation with the state, you there was a subcontractor that filed a notice with the state on October 21st that said, hey, we're going to begin. very We're going to begin in November doing this asbestos work. We're notifying you ahead of time as the law requires. much. Here's your notice. We're going to do this. That was October 21st, Brian. Before any of this, there was no contract signed. Well, before the school board decided to vote on this. Yeah, the school board was not to sign off on a contract until later, about nine days later on October 29th. So does that mean I'm trying to imagine what could that mean? Now, on the one hand, let's imagine positive intent for a moment. They were getting ahead of the game. Hey, we want to get these notices in in case we win the bid. And if not, then the notices don't really matter. On the other hand, Did they feel like this was in the bag? We've got this. We know we do. So let's get started on the work. Yeah, normally with these governmental contracts, you know, the governmental body, whether it's the common council and the mayor, or in this case, the school board, they will officially sign off on the contract. But normally these things are negotiated ahead of time so that the people, the facilities management of the district is. gone through the whole process, whatever the decision-making was done. And they said, okay, this is the one we're going with now. But hey, we got a $4.8 million contract. We need a school board signature on this. So it'd be a formality on the 29th, right? But it was a formality except that MRD group saw the number in the board documents that said 4.8. Wait a minute, 4.8, we bid 928,000. What's going on here? Right. And it wasn't approved at that meeting. So therefore, that does raise some questions here because they're asking, hey, well, look, these documents were submitted well beforehand. Why is that? And to your point, it could be, you know, just they were getting ahead of the game here, but it's still very unclear. It sure feels like they had every expectation. We're getting this deal. We've been assured we're getting the deal, something to that degree. We don't know that more to come out on that. But what's interesting is this. And we're going to hear later on. We do have a Jason. You caught up with Superintendent Caselius. And you also talked to Marcus Dunkey with MRD Group after a public listening session that was held on November 5th. A couple of sessions that were held about this. Once this became public, it became quickly a very big topic of conversation. We're going to hear some of what they had to say. But this and Mr. Dumpke actually says in one of those interviews that are one of those comments that. he thinks this really, the appeals process worked so quickly because it's not the only thing that was going on. There are other things going on in the news. It's not the only financial problem that MPS is having. Just days before the demolition bid was challenged, MPS revealed it had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a bank impersonation scam. How much money MPS lost and why the district's former chief financial officer is now under the microscope. We'll talk Let's talk about that after this. Welcome back to Open Record. While many of us were focused on who would become the state's next governor or still celebrating the Milwaukee Brewers being World Series champions, Milwaukee Public Schools released some major news on Election Day. The district had fallen victim to a bank impersonation scam. MPS says it originally lost $450,000 in that scam but recovered $255,000. And officials say the bank is still working to recover the remaining $195,000. They say they're implementing long and short-term controls to protect the district's finances. Nicole, I know you've been digging into this, and we're going to talk about a lot. There's kind of a mess here. Financial oversight issues have been identified long before this happened. Yeah, and this is, as soon as I saw this story that came out, I knew I had to dig into this further, because we know about plenty of money sort of mismanagement issues within MPS, Yes, particularly starting in 2024 was when all of this sort of. started coming to light. We know that MPS failed to file some financial reports and audits on time, which essentially resulted in the state temporarily withholding millions of dollars in aid. And so I looked into that more. And I also found while I was sort of digging this 2024 audit. So this is, you know, obviously coming years before this bank impersonation scam that we just heard about. However, in the. This audit, essentially, you know, MPS's auditors are saying that they found all of these different things here, and namely one of them is that they found half of the sampled office of finance employees had not completed any mandatory fraud prevention training, which I thought was interesting considering MPS has this, yeah, and this is years ago, so that was one of the main findings that I thought was, you know, of note here. Essentially also calling for an extra review of certain payments to make sure they were being properly approved. A lot of the things that MPS had outlined to their Office of Finance employees after the scam came out, they had said, hey, we need to do all of these things. We need to be completing fraud training. We need to make sure that payments are being properly approved. These were all weaknesses that had been identified years ago. And I think it's important to point out this is not a situation where MPS employees themselves did something inappropriate with the four hundred fifty thousand dollars. They were victims. We don't exactly know who was directly victimized or how the scammers pulled this off. MPS was victimized in this case by what occurred. But obviously, whatever lack of controls they had made them vulnerable to a scam of this. That's a pretty significant scale. Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Exactly. And that's a question that we're still asking, too, is we really don't know how this scam even occurred. We don't know which employee fell victim to this, how it happened. Was this over a couple of days? Did it was it a phishing scam? We don't know how that occurred. And so that's what we're still looking to. It sounds like someone was posing as a U.S. bank employee, possibly, or someone with access to the funds were able to con them out of it. This is another situation, by the way, Jason, where we hear the superintendent say, oh, by the way, insurance, we have insurance for that. So, yes, we're out $195,000 still, but don't worry, that's covered by insurance. At a certain point, you go, okay, well, how many times can insurance pick up the slack for MPS having these financial problems? She said that, I believe, in the interview last Thursday. And as you mentioned, Brian, you know, when you make a claim. Insurance rates are going to go up, right? I've had my own experience with that with my car insurance, where you make a claim. And then the next bill is a lot higher than last year's bill. Jason, don't ask the Poulsen family about that. I'm going to take a real quick aside to say we've had a couple of car accidents, a tree fall on a car, no, two trees fall on cars, and a light pole that fell on a car. So don't park near a Poulsen vehicle, any of the Poulsen family members. But again, insurance being an issue, this is not, as you said, you go back to 2024, there were the financial reporting issues. And at the time, MPS said, we're going to clean house. We're going to clean things up. They brought in new people. But it seems to have been somewhat of a musical chairs or revolving doors of people in charge of finances. At MPS ever since then. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So when this all happened in the email to media, as well as to the Office of Finance employees alerting them about this scam that MPS had fallen victim to, they said, hey, we're actually going to announce that Jennifer Burroughs, who was originally hired as deputy CFO in July, she's going to step into this role now as CFO. So that led us to question. What happened to the former CFO? So we know that Aicha Sava. I think she's still CFO, right? The other one is acting, but she is. Yes, correct. She is still technically the CFO. Now we'd have a new acting CFO. But that still leads us to question. What happened to her role? What is she doing now? Where is she? Sort of, which is a question that Jason actually asked as well. And that is Aicha Sava, is that correct? Yes. Yes. And so she had come in to the district in 2024 in September, where she was hired after these mismanagement issues led to the state funding freeze. And she came in, they were You know, she's going to sort of help. Bring everything back together. We're going to get things tied up here. And so that led us to some questions here about where is she? And when we asked, MPS told us that she's still a district employee, but they wouldn't provide any additional details of any personnel matter. That's the response that we kept getting. I just saw the is suddenly very quickly once they say that there's this been this fraud that's been exacted upon the district. She's the one who's sidelined, but they're saying very little. And Jason, we're going to hear this later. But still, you were there as the people are asking. And I think you were asking the superintendent. Where is she? Yeah. Where is she? I don't know where she is, was the answer. We'll hear from that. I don't want to give too much away. But, yeah, it's very confusing because you you're paying. A CFO, but then you have an acting CFO, which means that you're paying two people for the same job. Where is this person? She's not, she's technically still an employee of the district, but she doesn't seem to be working for the district. Is she coming in every day? Is she being paid to stay home? It doesn't seem like she's coming in every day. Cause when I asked, where is she? The superintendent says, I don't know where, where physically she is. She's still with the district. She's still technically on staff of the district, but I, here's the thing. So the, the financial fraud, I believe the district discovered that on a Monday. And by the next day, Tuesday, the acting CFO was put into place. So they acted very quickly once they found out about the bank fraud. Which seems to suggest they had concerns about her performance to have singled her out, unless it's just heads have got to roll and the person at the top does. But I think I want to step back from that because, Nicole, Jennifer Burroughs was brought in and hired as deputy CFO. I believe that was the title. Yes. Which was a position that didn't exist. They previously had a budget director and another role that was replaced with deputy CFO. The previous budget director, Nick Sinram, is that I have the name right? I think I do, is currently at Milwaukee County. He went from he left MPS in 2025 and went to Milwaukee County to work for the county executive's office where he oversees the budget there. And oh, by the way, they just had a four and a half million dollar surprise error in the budget that is now weighing on the newly elected governor. The questions of what did he know and when did he know it? So that's someone who was just at MPS as well and left. Then Jennifer Burroughs is hired. Now she's been moved into this position of acting CFO. There's a lot going on here. There's a lot going on. And we still don't even know what, like you said, what Sava's role was here because, you know, was it someone under her that fell victim to this scam? Was it something that she did here? We don't know. I asked that as well of the district. They said that they could not comment on any details involving. Any part of what her role was here and what we know. But I did also request Sava's personnel file. And there is when I discovered that in twenty twenty five she had received a notice of concern about financial reporting errors. And she had essentially essentially the superintendent had said that there was a significant error in the financial. Information submitted to the board, essentially noting that there was an $80 million deficit that was incorrectly entered in the financial documentation that she had prepared. There had already been, you know, at least one example here of a concern that the superintendent had before this occurred. Let me look at the timeline here. So Sava gets hired at the end of 2024, September 2024. So after the financial problems came to light for the district, she gets hired on. She comes from city government. She had the comptroller role. So she's overseeing the finances for the city of Milwaukee. And then she goes to MPS to help clean house 2024. Then. In 2025, the new superintendent, who hadn't hired her on to be CFO, gets hired. Brenda Casellas gets hired on in 2025, right? That's correct, yeah. So then at the end of 20, or the fall of 2025, she disciplines in the personnel record. She says, you need to fix this problem. Correct. You're not doing well here. Correct. And we also know that in March 2025, yeah, this is interesting too. We know that the former Miami-Dade County Public Schools CFO, Judith Mart, she had come in on a six-month contract essentially to mentor Sava and sort of help the finance office maintain their budgets, things like that. And so that was interesting to know too. I started looking in just a little bit into Mart's history. We know that she retired from another Florida school district, which was It was unclear why at the time. And there were a couple of. of other people who also had left around the same time, but it also came after a 2022 grand jury report accused her of misleading the school board about the financial impact of an $800 million construction bond, though the superintendent defended her at the time. I wish we could. I like what Jason was doing. Let's get real quickly with that timeline. Again, you have the financial mismanagement stuff that happens, by the way, that surfaces right after. Voters approve a two hundred fifty two million dollar referendum for MPS. All of a sudden we find out they're many, many months behind on their financial reports. Then they bring in Aicha Sava and then Brenda Casellas comes in as superintendent. And then you have this mentor who is hired to to help. Uh, uh, With Aicha Sava and the person who's hired as the mentor has a history with a grand jury finding there were some misleading issues in Miami-Dade County. And then we have the budget director who leaves and goes to Milwaukee County, who, by the way, is currently overseeing an errant issue with the budget there. And then you have the deputy director who was hired. When you hire a mentor or a chief financial officer, it suggests there's not trust there. This person's not up to speed. We need someone to help them out. Then she's disciplined. And now she's the first person to be sidelined when this surfaces. Everything points to the district, to Superintendent Caselius, having concerns about HSA. Right. And that's something, again, that we're still asking questions about. We're still working to learn more about... What exactly happened here? Where is she? What is her role? Is she going to continue to serve in this role? Those are all questions that we're still working to find out. And we've not had any luck, I imagine, getting in touch with Aitisada. And I did try her, because we have her personnel records, so we have her official cell phone number. We called, no response for our story. So if she's listening, we'd still like to have her on to get her side of the story. Because all we're going on is what we have in her personnel file and public reporting and what we've seen in the district. So we'd love to have her side of the story about what happened here, the discipline she had at the end of 2025, and where she goes from here. When they brought on Jennifer Burroughs to be the deputy, what was her background? And that was a position they didn't have in the past, so now they're having this deputy position as well. Do we know much about Jennifer Burroughs? Do we know, or is that more? Yeah, I do. So she, sorry, I asked the question. Let me ask myself. You have the answers. She used to work for the state, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, where she helped the district as, you know, DPI. They were helping the district work through those financial problems, you know, over the course of the 2024, when there was these audits and the state froze the funding. The district had to continue working with the state regulators, the state department of instruction to rectify and get those audits up to speed, which they had been delayed for so many months. The audits were backlogged and I believe even, was it a whole year where the audits were delayed? In 2024, it was. Yeah, it was. It was significant time. And like I say, in each of these cases, what rings so so familiar about what's going on right now with Governor-elect Crowley and the county executive's budget, the four and a half million dollar error there that wasn't revealed that they knew about two weeks in advance, but didn't reveal until after Election Day is that this those financial the late financial reporting that was so far behind was known for a long time, was certainly known by people at MPS. Before the referendum, and this came out immediately after a $252 million referendum passed, which upset a lot of voters who said, wait a minute, we just gave you $250, you know, a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money, but you didn't tell us you were that far behind and had this mess. So there's a very familiar ring to what's going now with this, and obviously a lot of people are paying attention. People are looking at it now. It didn't get lost in the World Series or the election. It is something we're looking at. I want to point out, we invited Superintendent Brenda Casales to come here on the podcast and talk about this. Obviously, there's a personnel matter right now going on with the investigation into the sidelined CFO, Aicha Sava. We were told by a district spokesperson that she would be happy to come on the show when that investigation is complete and when the contract bidding process is complete for Lincoln Avenue school demolition. We will take them up on that. I informed them when that all happens, we'd love to have the superintendent on. But Jason caught up with Superintendent Caselius, and we're going to hear some of what she had to say. On Thursday, November 5th, right after this. Welcome back to Open Record. The story of the massive bid discrepancy broke on Monday, November 2nd. Three days later, Milwaukee Public Schools held a public information session, actually a couple of them, at Mitchell Street Library. Jason, you were there. You caught up with Superintendent Caselius afterwards. First of all, what was the purpose of that meeting? Were there a lot of members of the public there? What were they talking about? This meeting was not to talk about the conflict over the contract with the DW Chicago previously said, yeah, these were meetings to tell the community about things like how noisy was it going to be? Were they going to be waking up at six in the morning with sledgehammers going? The answer to that is no. They laid out the timeline for how the demolition was going to work for the community members who might live around that area. People that might have to drive through that area pretty much. So it wasn't about the bid process, but it became about that afterwards. Part of that, as we asked the superintendent questions afterwards, there were actually also, there was one of the contractors from MBD Group who was there and also asked a question during the public forum about the bid being reopened, because that's when the district revealed publicly that the bid process was going to be reopening. So this MBD Group, the local demolition company, was surprised and... Glad to hear that their appeal had won. They didn't know about it until that meeting. I want to take a quick sidestep to just point out that we like to talk on this podcast a little bit about our reporting process and how these things work. There are a lot of times we show up to things and we end up asking questions of a public official that wasn't the purpose of the thing they were there for. And sometimes people say, well, why did you do that? Why don't you just like sit down with them at their office and tell them that's what you're going to talk about? Well, we asked to do that and they say no, and we can't just barge into their office. So our only opportunity to get some of these public officials and ask them these questions directly is when they have some place we know they're going to be. And that's usually at some sort of public meeting. So that's why we then go and ask them the questions. And when they're in front of a camera with a microphone, they can walk away, but they know how that looks. So they will often stop and talk. And we know that Superintendent Conceles says, I'm not suggesting she would have walked away here, but she wasn't agreeing to do sit down interviews. We catch her at a public meeting and that's where these questions are asked. One we're going to look at here is talking about the bid process and a little bit about the superintendent's reaction to why they are now opening that up for a new one. So, you know, obviously we put out a bid and there was an appeal by another company, which is a common thing that happens. And so we took the appeal seriously with our Office of Accountability and Efficiency. That now has been resolved. So questions to the bid should go to him about the appeal. And then now we said in an abundance of caution, we want to make sure that it is absolutely a fair process moving forward, got our attorneys involved, and we'll make sure that that goes forward appropriately. Was the process fair the first go-round? That would be a question for our Office of Accountability and Efficiency on the appeal. As superintendent, though, and thinking about taxpayer money, are you concerned that the original pick was several million dollars more than another? Yeah, I think, you know, we worked with our insurance company, and so the insurance company was working to pay for that funding, so that wouldn't have been a loss to the district, just so that the public knows that that 4.7 was the negotiated rate with the insurance company to pay that. The reason that it is more expensive, though, is because we want to be sure that the immediate community is safe. From the potential environmental hazards, we've been putting 24-hour security around the building, making sure that we water and keep all the dust down for the community, and safety is our number one priority right here. And being able to do this work is very complex and delicate work when you're dealing with hazardous materials. I think. It's just interesting there because, you know, she says that, you know, we know that we had to pick this more expensive deal because we were trying to keep people safe here. But as we've discussed, you know, what is the impact of taxpayers then in that case? Because she seems to be covered by insurance. It's insurance. What's the harm? Right. But as you mentioned, it's like, well. Well, let's you know, those those rates are going to go up. So what's going to happen here? I think the question I have, and I know we'll hear a little bit from MRD Group, the competing bidder. But the question was, what did they put in their bid that was so much more expensive? Was there something about the scope of the work, this public safety aspect that MRD Group missed? And they said, no, we look back at it. No. Same terms. We fulfilled the scope of what they wanted in the bid, you know, the RFP, the request for proposals. So it's not as though it doesn't seem any way as though there was some massive public safety effort that they said, no, we're going to shortcut that. We won't do that. At least we don't know. We don't know the details. But you still wonder what was $4 million more expensive. She seems to be suggesting something to do with fencing and watering things down cost an extra $4 million. I think we'd like to see what's really behind that. What exactly is in that deal? And that's part of the demolition process. When you have your house, I remember when a neighborhood home was demolished where I lived in Maryland, and they had to have, they're supposed to have water going for the entire demolition so that all the... The substances are going back down to the ground and not going into the air. So this is part of demolition. When you demolish a building, you have the water, you have the fencing around. You don't want children getting into a demolition site, right? So you're going to have safety, security fencing around that facility. You're also going to have the water hoses going so it waters down anything that would be coming up into the air. Next, you had a chance to ask the superintendent about the CFO, Aicha Sava. What's her status? What's going on with that? And this is what she had to say. Jennifer Burroughs is our acting chief financial officer now. She comes from us from the Department of Public Instruction. She worked with us on all of our audits last year is how I got to know her. And so we were really lucky to get her here. Secondarily, with the fraud, we are working with U.S. Bank to get that money back. That, too, is also an insurance thing where we will not have to pay out as much as there is because we have insurance for crime fraud. And the reason we came out so quickly with this news was because we wanted to get the message out to all other school districts, governmental agencies, that these bank impersonations are real, they're sophisticated and complicated, and everybody really needs to be vigilant and on high alert. Where is the chief financial officer right now? I don't know where she is right now. I mean, she's still with the district? She is still with the district. We're finishing our investigation, and then we'll make determinations. So is she on, like, a leave then? She is currently not with the district, and we are looking and finishing our investigation right now. So is it linked with the fraud, linked with the CFO's office? Well, I can't speak to personnel matters, as you know, but once that's finished, we will make sure that we are transparent in that process and give everybody information about the investigation, what we found, and what new controls are putting in place. She is with the district. But she's not with the district. Right. She said those things almost back to back, which leaves you going, scratching your head, I guess, a little bit. What does that mean? And then we still have the same question. Where is she? We start with, she's still with the district. Well, she's not with the district. So what is the answer here? We still don't know. All we do know is that there is a personnel. She said we don't talk about personnel matters. The district has referred to an investigation. So it would seem there is a personnel investigation into Aicha Sava's conduct as CFO all around the time of this bid going to CW Chicago for four point eight million dollars versus nine hundred twenty something thousand. And then, of course, the four hundred fifty thousand dollar. Bank fraud that was imposed on the district that they are trying to recover. So we know she's under investigation. Right. That's about all we know. And I think it's fair to say the first, I think if I could parse, what is the difference between she is not with, she's with the district. She's not with the district. I think what it means, I'm interpreting here. I think it means she's still on, she's still being paid. She's still an employee of the district that was confirmed that she is an employee of the district still. I don't think she's working for the district. I think as this investigation has played out, I think the right word that reporter asked was, is she on leave? And I think she's not with the district. She's with the district. I think that's, she's getting paid by the district, but during the investigation, she's not serving as the CFO. She's not physically working there right now. That's really the simple question I think everyone was asking there is, is she on leave and is it paid? And she danced around that, which is why we end up with the nonsensical, she is with the district, she's not with the district. I think I'd take away from you. She is with the district as an employee being paid. She is not with the district doing work for us while she is under investigation. That would seem to be what they're saying, but we're kind of extrapolating a little bit there. Now, one more thing we had, we did also talk to Marcus Dumpke, who is with MRD Group. They were the bidder. They're the ones who put in the $900 and something thousand dollar bidder. Yeah, $928,000 that lost to a $4.8 million contract. They discovered that and then they filed an appeal. And here's what he had to say right after that meeting. We knew it wasn't a low bid project from the beginning, but the discrepancy is where we had some issue. That large discrepancy, if I'm doing my math correctly, it was about 5.2 times our bid and a large, about $4 million difference between ours and the winner. And that was just surprising to you to see that? Yeah, that's unheard of in the industry, in the trade. That's unheard of for that large of a discrepancy. So our first reaction was, did we miss something? Like, what other scope items was TW Chicago going to be taking care of? But from what we saw in the published documents, it was strictly... demolition and the abatement as described in the RFP. That's uncalled for in the industry and usually 40 percent is pretty like, oh wow, maybe they missed something in the bid, like how come our number was so off, right? So we first thought that there was possibly some additional scope items that would be included in TW's work, but it seemed that we were bidding on the exact same scope. It's relieving to us that that appeal process seemed to have worked, it's going out for re-bid and that doesn't mean we're entitled to win it in this next round, we'll have to be competitive and now that our number is out in the news, we're going to have to look at that internally, but we will be preparing a bid response once we see the proposal request. We talked about that earlier, but he says again, there are a couple of times we look to see, was there something we missed? Did they offer to do something in the scope of the work that we didn't? He said, no, once we see the published documents, it's the same. They just don't know why one was scored so highly over the other, despite a five times discrepancy in the price. Anything else he said there that kind of stood out to you? I mean, I think the appeal process piece, he's grateful that it worked. And we heard the superintendent say, look, the appeal worked. We're moving on. We're going to rebid this thing. But they wouldn't have had someone not appeal. This would have been signed and sent to CW Chicago. And in the end, the superintendent says, it's insurance money. The last moment, I mean, the board was getting ready to vote. That's how they discovered this. I was checking in with Marcus Dumke from the group. And he said they found the contract in the board documents for MPS. and they found let me i've got just got a message from him so let me see so they discovered it like everybody else did in the school board this by the way this is Fox Six now right here because we're getting we're literally getting the text what's he saying so this is Marcus Dumke on the 25th we found the agenda note and the TW contract page so the board meeting was on the 29th so this is several days before they usually put the agenda together it's public record which is why it's I think it's important to look at the open records for the meeting notes or the... The agenda items for your local school board, because you might find something like this in there. He found the contract to say, wait a minute, that's the school we were bidding on, Lincoln Avenue School Demolition. That's a $4.8 million dollar No, no, no, that's. As a professional, he didn't think that that project would have ever cost that high of amount. He said that that was not a normal bid for that project. So then he goes into the state records and also finds that a subcontractor already placed a notice of asbestos, that they're going to be working on potential asbestos for that project at Lincoln Avenue School even before the contract is signed. Certainly, the one thing we don't know, they're going to re-bid it, it'll end up going to someone, there'll be a transparent process, although the question is, I think we go back to the beginning, is why was CW Chicago being given this contract? We don't know. There's always going to be those questions from the outside until we know the facts. Is there some sort of corruption behind this? We don't know, and I'm not accusing anyone, but when you don't know the facts, those are the questions that you want to look into that we as journalists want to know is, was there some reason they were favored? That is not really part of that bid process. Or was there something in the scoring that we'll later look at and go, OK, that made a lot of sense. Certainly with the dollar figures, it doesn't seem to at this point. Yeah. And now with the rebidding process, too, it'll be interesting to see what happens here and whether they get the bid again or if it will be someone completely different. What will happen there is going to be interesting to see. One thing is clear. This is not the end of this story. And we are looking forward to having Superintendent Caselius on the podcast when these things wrap up. That's what we have for now. We are going to go off the record when we come right back. It is time for us to go off the record. This is the part of the podcast where you get a little more casual, have a little fun by answering a question we've not prepared for. Once again, our assistant news director, Sarah Smith. Her title every time I come on here is different. It gets higher and higher as she's working her way up. But former co-host Sarah Smith always comes up with these questions. And this is a very Sarah Smith question. What could you throw further? You, or throw further, a baguette or naan? You know what naan is? Okay. Which one do you think you could throw farthest? I feel like naan is kind of like a frisbee. Yeah. You think you could throw the Frisbee? Yeah, probably. Don't test me on it. I don't want to actually try it out. I told Sarah, I think actually we should do a segment where we all test these and we measure. We get one of those like roller measure things and we try to see who could throw the farthest. What do you think, Jason? Definitely the baguette because you're able to really either, you can throw it like a football, right? So that's going to go farther than the Frisbee. You get a good aerodynamic baguette. You can kind of spiral it. Yeah, it's good. Like a Jordan Love deep to Christian Watson. You get to carve it so it's a little bit more triangle. There were no rules. It was just which one do you think you could throw for him. I think the baguette's got more weight. The naan is a little bit more loose. And so I think the weight on the baguette's going to make it go. You just throw it like a football. Tim, what do you think you could do? You know, I'm sitting here. I don't know what you're talking about. I mean, I guess. A baguette is like, for baguette is like a, is like a baguette is like a kind of a solid piece of bread, kind of longer loaf of bread, right? A little like a French baguette. Yeah. So they're, they're kind of long and narrow. So almost, you know, almost like a football, I guess. And then a non is like a flat bread. Oh, then we've been clearly the bag at them. Okay. Because I, you know, I, my first thought was, I thought Frisbee also, like you take the naan, you know, if you play disc golf, if you're a good disc golfer, maybe you can throw that. But I, so I don't know. But the air is going to get into the pocket of the naan, right? And it's going to fill it. It's going to slow it down. Wait, the non has a pocket? Is it like a pita? It's, I thought it was just a straight blood brain. Yeah, it does. I mean, it's a little bit of a. Pita-ish, right? Right? No. Now, then I started thinking, what about other types of bread? What other breads could you throw really far? Like, I think, like, a good solid, like, rye roll or something. That, you could throw, like, a baseball. Or, like, a croissant. Well, a croissant would fall apart. Well, yeah. The moment you throw that, it would just crumble. But there's, like, those sturdy ones now. Like, you can get the really cool ones at the bakeries downtown that have, like, the square shape and, like, circled around one. Crescent-shaped flaky, and that wouldn't work well at all. Wait, what's your answer, though, Brian? You didn't say. Oh, you're right. I didn't. So like I said, I first thought non Frisbee, but I think the solidness, the weight of the baguette, I think I could probably throw that further. And by the way, I. As I do most things these days, I asked Gemini, I asked AI to tell me which one would go further. And apparently this has been tested and baguettes can be thrown roughly a maximum of 80 feet. Wow. Nons about 60 feet. Yes. But then I thought to myself, home plate to first base is only 90 feet. I feel like I could get a baguette to first base. I don't know if that 80 is an average, but I think I could get a baguette to first base. Next week, we're going to try this. No, I don't know. I think we needed to have the baguette and the non-hero as a demonstration show. And you can touch it. Between this week and next week, we will have in our... Fox 6 parking lot, we will try the baguette non-challenge. We'll see about that. If you do it at home, send us the video. I want to see what you do. That's all the time we have for this week. We'll wrap things up right after this. The Fox 6 Investigators, Milwaukee's most experienced investigative team. Honored. Trusted. Respected it's not just about telling a story, it's about making positive change in our community, holding the powerful accountable. You're just a piece of by helping the powerless and exposing what you have a right to know. Not really sure why no one wants to talk about it. The Fox 6 investigators. We are Milwaukee's investigative team because you matter. If you have a topic for Open Record or a tip for the Fox 6 investigators, send us an email to fox6investigators at fox.com. As always, thank you to the people who make this podcast possible, including our director of production, Cale Zimney, executive producer, Brian Graham, photojournalist, editor, and technical director, Tim Primo, and of course, my co-hosts, Nicole Herzog, Jason Caldy. With that, I'm Brian Poulsen. We'll be back next week.