BY COLLEEN LUTOLF
Staff Writer
WOODBRIDGE — A school board member’s joke about hiring someone to paint graffiti over signs on school property was met with silence at a recent meeting.
Lawrence Miloscia, who sits on the buildings and grounds committee, spoke out against the SCC (School Construction Corporation) at the meeting, after he said he read published reports on misuse of funds at the SCC.
Woodbridge voters approved a bond referendum in September that would provide every school in the district with $86 million in upgrades or additions.
Forty percent, or roughly $29.8 million, will be funded by the SCC.
Although construction work by the SCC has been suspended, Woodbridge is not affected by the suspension because the SCC was not hired to do the district’s construction work, School Business Administrator Dennis DeMarino said.
SCC signs are still required to be placed in front of the schools being renovated because the corporation is funding portions of the projects.
Miloscia said he has a problem with the signs.
He said at the meeting he looked into the district removing the signs from in front of the schools.
“I wanted to see if we could omit the signs,” he said. “I was told we can’t, so maybe I could go on eBay and see if there are any graffiti artists available for hire.”
The school district spends approximately $10,000 annually to clean graffiti off school property, DeMarino said.
“That’s including manpower,” DeMarino said.
Compared to urban school districts, $10,000 is not a lot to spend on graffiti, the business administrator said.
Because they can’t afford to paint over the graffiti, DeMarino said some school districts, “just let [vandals] spray paint over and over. So we’re pretty lucky.”
“It was an unfortunate choice of words,” Jackie Cheslow president of CUBS (Community United for Better Schools) said. “It was an inappropriate comment. Even said in jest, he has a responsibility in his position to be careful not to be misunderstood even if he was joking.”
When asked if it is appropriate for a board member to joke about hiring a graffiti artist to deface property, Miloscia said he would choose his words more carefully in the future.
“Maybe I should have phrased it slightly different,” he said. “Maybe I should have [asked] if there were any artists available. Maybe I’ll say that at the next meeting.”
Miloscia said he has no problem with the sign itself, but with the bad publicity attached to the SCC in past weeks.
He called the “corruption” at the SCC a “slap in the face” of people who have done an honest job on construction with SCC funds.
“Knowing Larry, it was just his sense of humor,” board member Brian Molnar said. Molnar is the board’s Buildings and Grounds Committee chairman. “I could see his point with the whole SCC thing. I think he was trying to make a point about the signs being bad publicity. He was just poking fun.”
Lewis Huber sits on the committee with Miloscia and Molnar.
“Larry’s a friend, but even said in jest, you have to watch what you say,” Huber said. “Especially when they’re paying 40 percent of the debt and we didn’t get the check yet.”
The SCC was created to build public schools in the state’s Abbott districts. Over $8.5 billion was set aside for distribution to state schools.
State Inspector General Mary Jane Cooper concluded in a preliminary report that SCC misused funds.
The current structure of the SCC makes the agency “vulnerable to mismanagement, fiscal malfeasance, conflicts of interest and waste, fraud and the abuse of taxpayer dollars,” Cooper said in the April 21 report.