Letter to the Advocate: Questional Journalism

I was appalled this morning when I read your lead article chastising the Stamford Public Schools Administration for submitting legitimate expenses for reimbursements. My initial reaction, based upon what I read on the front page, was that Dr Starr and his staff were going out for Steak dinners every weekend, then buying Starbucks coffees for the entire 5th floor and charging these back to the city. Then I realized after finding the rest of the story buried deep in the paper that the administration has submitted a grand total of $19k over the past 42 months. These legitimate expenses represent less than 0.00317% of the entire SPS budget over the same period of time, which begs the question of why is the Advocate flaunting this story as gross negligence or overindulgence, when in fact they are very reasonable expenses incurred by professionals who are in the business of supporting our schools and continuing to make our community great. Meanwhile further down on the same front page is a story about a real oversight by a different city department of over $700k that is going to have significant impact on the tax base this year. Why is the Advocate making freedom of information requests on this information and not spending their precious time and resources investigating more egregious issues within our city government? It feels like you are more interested in tabloid journalism and personality politics, rather than doing real investigating and reporting, to give us the subscribers the real facts so we can draw our own conclusions about what is really going on downtown.