(WBBM NEWSRADIO) – Will Fletcher, the legal watchdog who keeps tabs on the Chicago Public Schools system, has been delving into allegations of misconduct for much of his career.
That has included serving as inspector general of the Chicago Park District and as general counsel for the Chicago investigative body that eventually became the Civilian Office of Police Accountability.
“I always knew that I wanted to be in public service from the time I was in law school,” the Columbia Law School alum tells the Looped In: Chicago podcast. “The investigative realm where we’re doing good-government oversight investigations appeals to me because you can make something right for a longer period of time.”
“What you can do is identify systemic flaws that can be remedied,” he adds. “You can work with management to try to tie off loopholes and make sure that the organization runs better.”
As the inspector general of CPS, a position he assumed in 2020, Fletcher oversees investigations into fraud and waste within the nation’s fourth-largest public school system. In addition, his office has a Sexual Allegations Unit that exclusively focuses on CPS staff accused of sexually abusing K-12 students or acting inappropriately toward minors.
To that end, his office recently disclosed in its annual report that eight cases of adult-on-student sexual abuse were substantiated in the 2022-23 school year after nearly 450 investigations. Five cases resulted in criminal charges.
“Generally, I think the Sexual Allegations Unit is a win, even though the subject matter of course is very serious and often very lamentable and very sad for a lot of CPS families,” Fletcher says. “The fact of the matter is that Chicago Public Schools is the only K-12 school district that has an oversight body like mine that investigates the wide variety of sexual misconduct by staff on students, and that gives students a voice.”
The inspector general’s annual report was also noteworthy for its finding that more than 77,000 electronic devices assigned to CPS students and staff during the pandemic were listed as missing – either lost or stolen. The value of the devices was estimated at $23 million.
Fletcher says CPS officials followed his office’s suggestion to offer amnesty for the return of the property and, as a result, collected some 11,000 missing devices. He said CPS officials had many of their own ideas about avoiding the same problem in the future.
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