A former Prince George’s County, Maryland, school board member who kept his seat despite working a new job in Missouri, got paid thousands of dollars until he resigned last summer, according to a report published by the school system’s integrity and compliance office on Monday.
In a news release, the Office of Integrity and Compliance (OIC) said David Murray collected $9,792.32 even though he “abandoned his board member duties and responsibilities.”
It accused the school board of failing to take action and hold Murray accountable for violating the Board of Education’s attendance policy, and said the board doesn’t have knowledge of or understand its own internal policies.
The findings come over three months after Murray first announced his resignation from the Prince George’s County school board. Murray started a job as the chief academic officer for the Ferguson-Florissant School District near St. Louis, Missouri, in early January, but didn’t resign from his board seat in Maryland until July. His resignation came around the same time a complaint was filed with Maryland’s State Board of Education.
“Every penny that doesn’t go to the students of Prince George’s County, and it could be looked at as being wasted, is a problem,” said Frank Turner II, the school system’s integrity and compliance officer. “We don’t want to see any money that could have been used for programs that the students of the county benefit from, either wasted or sent out to a person who benefited from receiving these funds, but he wasn’t actually earning the funds.”
Murray was paid the nearly $10,000 during the time he remained on the board earlier this year, Turner said.
WTOP has contacted Murray for comment.
In a statement, PGCPS said: “There are no grounds to force him to pay the money back since he was never dealt with administratively by the FY24 Board of Education. His position is that he was an elected board member with the Board until his date of resignation in July 2024.”
According to the report, the school board first learned that Murray started working in Missouri while remaining on the board through news reports on July 22. The next day, the board asked the integrity and compliance officer to launch an investigation. But, the report said, the office asked for information about how the board’s chair and vice chair had been enforcing the attendance policy in March. The board didn’t provide information about actions it had been taking to make sure members followed the attendance policy, the report said.
“Time needs to be carved out to handle these types of potential policy violations, so they can enforce their own policies, for their own accountability for each other,” Turner said.
As of July 8, according to the report, Murray missed more than eight consecutive meetings in the fourth quarter and over half the meetings in the previous year. Any board member who missed three or more regularly scheduled meetings is subject to “being charged with willful neglect of duty by the Board upon a Board voter,” the board policy said.
As early as April, the board started notifying Murray of attendance violations, but didn’t take action on the issue during an executive session on April 25 because time ran out before the matter could be considered, the report said.
The attendance violations were discussed on May 9, outside the 30-day period to take action on violations, which meant the “former Board Chair did not file a timely and actionable complaint with the State Board.”
WTOP has contacted a school board spokesman, former board member Judy Mickens-Murray and board Chair Lolita Walker for comment. A spokeswoman for the school division declined to comment.
Because Murray didn’t respond to interview requests, the office was unable to determine his residency status during the seven-month period earlier this year, the report said. Murray’s new employer in Missouri declined to respond to a series of questions that Turner’s office sent.
This past summer, Murray told WTOP that he is a homeowner, taxpayer and has domicile in District 1, and that his secondary residence is out of state. He said he tried to fulfill all of his commitments through the end of the school year, but then “decided it would be in the best interest for me to retire from the Board of Education.”
WTOP’s John Domen contributed to this report.
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