The Chicago Public Schools watchdog found that spending on overnight travel doubled after the pandemic when schools and the district were flush with federal COVID relief money — and that some trips were “questionable, excessive and even exorbitant.”
The No. 1 destination was Las Vegas, even though some of the seminars staff attended were also offered locally or included virtual options, the inspector general said in an investigative report released Wednesday. There were also staff excursions to far-flung places like Finland and Estonia.
Inspector General Philip Wagenknecht said deficient policies allowed this travel to go unchecked.
“Clearly, in this system there was not significant oversight, and there wasn’t a practice of carefully reviewing school and department expenditures to make sure the trips that were being booked were necessary, that they were justified and that they were done economically,” he said. “If more had been done in that area, a lot of money could have been saved.”
In response to the report, CPS froze almost all overnight travel, effective Oct. 29. It also is forming a travel review committee that will consider the inspector general’s recommendations, including requiring two levels of approval for student travel, enforcing existing cost-saving rules, limiting the number of employees from any one school who can attend the same conference and establishing a “Travel Desk” similar to other school districts that reviews and approves travel.
“We take seriously the findings and recommendations from the Office of the Inspector General and will continue to ensure our District policies and procedures support the highest ethical standards and that our employees act in the best interest of our students, the District, and our city,” CPS said in a statement.
The investigation analyzed the past six years of travel expenses. The $7.7 million tab for 2024 was more than double the $3.6 million spent in 2019, the last full school year before the pandemic. During these post-pandemic years, CPS had $2.8 billion in federal COVID relief money, which the district used in part to pump up school-level budgets for things like out-of-school programs and professional development. Wagenknecht said this extra cash gave schools and the central office “additional budget flexibility” that allowed them to go on these trips.
The district policy calls for staff to seek pre-approval for any out-of-town travel by submitting details such as the itinerary, estimated costs, number of travelers and reason for the trip. But the CPS employee travel manual is “riddled with holes” that employees either misinterpret or ignore, according to the report.
Some staff went on trips without the approval of CPS, staying in luxury hotels and booking expensive plane tickets. In other instances, they went on trips that had been rejected and faced no consequences.
Record-keeping is also lacking. Approval requests, purchase orders and reimbursements are scattered across as many as seven different departments, making it difficult to accurately track group or individual travel costs. There was also no way to distinguish between overnight travel outside of Chicago and routine trips inside the city such as field trips or for athletic events.
This allowed abuses to occur, including one teacher’s $4,700 week-long trip to a luxury Hawaiian resort for a four-day professional seminar. Other instances included multi-day retreats at spas or hotels funded by CPS despite not qualifying because they took place less than 50 miles from work sites. CPS funds were also spent on international employee trips that featured several “optional” tourist activities.
The investigation also found examples of questionable purchases and “outright fraud.” In one case, a clerk altered an invoice from a travel agency to remove a reference to an expensive hotel suite before submitting it for approval. In another, a principal booked a luxury hotel on the Las Vegas Strip away from a conference they were attending — and stayed an extra day on the district’s dime to celebrate an anniversary with his spouse, who isn’t a CPS employee.
CPS is weighing whether to discipline those two employees as recommended by the inspector general.
There were lapses in oversight of international trips as well. Eight CPS schools booked 15 overseas trips to Estonia, Finland and South Africa of “questionable value” through a single travel agency that, while an approved CPS vendor, does not have a contract with the district. The agency tacked on as much as 20% in hidden fees to their bills, the OIG found.
One elementary school had paid the travel agency $20,000 for a staff development trip to Egypt that arguably didn’t meet the threshold for allowable travel, the report states. It included visits to museums and tours more “akin to tourism than typical professional development.”
That trip was canceled after CPS was made aware.