November 2007 Ethics Dunces

Esther Monclova-Johnson

Audit records show that Emerson Crawley and William R. Jones, who work for Monclova-Johnson, billed more than $13,000 worth of "elaborate lunches and dinners, happy hour cocktails and nightcaps" and entertainment (including multiple trips to a strip club!) to a student activity fund at Shaw Junior High School over a two year span. Crawley and Jones are employees of a D.C. program called "Afterschool for All," which provides special instruction and afternoon supervision to thousands of impoverished children at more than 80 D. C. schools. Program activities are funded by federal grants and local money channeled into student activity accounts.

D.C.'s auditor recommended that Crawley and Jones be forced to repay all the money they misspent, but their supervisor, Esther Monclova-Johnson put Jones and Crawley on a 90-day probation while only requiring them to repay the $518 spent on alcohol, allowing them to work overtime to repay the money that was spent on food and entertainment.

According to the Washington Post, they probably didn't even do that. Auditors found that Crawley and Jones had submitted time sheets for holidays when the schools were closed and when their after-school program was not operating. Monclova-Johnson doesn't seem to mind: she apparently thinks these guys are good employees. Not only do they still work at "Afterschool for All," they have even been given additional responsibilities during her tenure.

Hint to readers who may work for the Washington, D.C. government and who therefore can't be expected to know this: in just about any other working environment, an employee who misappropriates earmarked funds for personal activities is summarily fired and often prosecuted. But that requires that someone in the chain of command actually recognize the difference between right and wrong. Here is Esther Monclova-Johnson's assessment of her two star employees, who used funds intended to benefit students to feast in pricey restaurants and watch naked girls grind on poles:

"These guys are extremely talented, and the work that they give to the program is not worth them being dismissed over a practice that may have been approved . . . by past directors," she said. "They weren't doing anything that they felt was wrong at the time, but maybe it was."

They didn't feel taking school money for their own use was wrong.

But "maybe it was."

Maybe!

"Everybody does it," as regular readers of the Scoreboard know, is the most popular rationalization for ethical conduct. It also contains a measure of disturbing truth: when there is an unethical act that virtually everyone in a particular group or society does do with impunity, that act will become the accepted norm, and thus will no longer be regarded as wrong or unethical in that society. It will still be wrong, of course; and that society will be greatly diminished and handicapped by ceasing to recognize that fact. When a society forgets that genocide is unethical, you get Nazi Germany. When a group forgets that murder is wrong, you get the Mafia. And when a city forgets that stealing from public funds is wrong, you get Washington, D.C.

Washington Post op-ed writer Colbert King has spent more than a decade documenting the corruption in the D.C. government, and he recently quoted a D.C. city councilman on the most recent spate of revelations, who simply shrugged and said, "People steal."

Translation: in this city, at least, everybody does it.