Monroe Dispatch - No Struggle, No Progress

A report from an audit of former Monroe City Schools Superintendent Brent Vidrine appears to show that he allegedly submitted false records related to his retirement. The information in question was allegedly submitted by Vidrine himself for the purchase of retirement service. At the heart of the audit is an alleged false receipt from the Teacher’s Retirement System of Louisiana (TRSL) that seems to indicate that Vidrine made a required payment of about $48,184.92 and a false estimate of the cost of purchasing a year of creditable service from the TRSK system that resulted in a $20,000 overpayment that he was not authorized to receive. According to the report, Vidrine may have violated state and federal laws because of the false documents he submitted to the Monroe City School (MCS) Board and, as a result, received money he wasn’t supposed to receive.

The audit also showed that when the MCS Board was negotiating Vidrine’s retirement, it would contribute about $57,771.37 on behalf of the superintendent to TRSL and that Vidrine, in turn, would contribute $16,752.82 to TRSL, with both items occurring within ten days of Board approval of an agreement between it and Vidrine. As the public has learned more details of Vidrine’s 2018 contract, it appears that he was able to write his own contract, according to a report submitted late last year to the Board by Workplace of the South, an independent audit agency. However, what may be difficult for Board members to answer is the approximately $82,766.06 the Board paid Vidrine for 25 days of sick leave and 69 days of annual leave. The big question is what happens next. Though the report indicated that Vidrine “violated” state and federal law, an attorney for Vidrine seems to indicate that the Legislative Auditor's office may have come to or “created an improper conclusion that exceeded authority”.

According to the report, Vidrine’s attorney also seemed to indicate that any recommendations made to the Board to pursue legal action against the former superintendent “were misleading to the public”. The Monroe City School Board has a new superintendent in Sam Moore after concluding what some may call a short search process, but the Board needs to put the Vidrine matter legally in the rearview mirror so Mr. Moore and the Board can focus on the reason they are in place, which is, first and foremost, the children who attend Monroe City Schools and that their educational needs are met.