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Our last story is heaped with hope for future generations. Yesterday, the San Diego Union Tribune ran a super encouraging citizen-journalist story headlined, “Two San Diego teens investigated their high school foundation’s finances. Then one got called in to the principal.” The sub-headline skeptically added, “The school principal and foundation blasted the report as untrue but didn't identify anything specifically wrong in the students' findings.”




Alert student Kevin Wang, 17, a Canyon Crest High School senior, became annoyed after twenty-five percent of his robotics club’s fund-raising was ‘taxed’ to the school’s foundation. Even worse, at the end of each school year, the foundation further taxed the club thirty-four percent of its total annual revenue.

So Kevin and his classmate Litong Tian, 17, decided to question authority. The duo dug through public records, including the foundation’s Forms 990 disclosures, combed its annual audited financial statements, reviewed its website and bylaws, as flyspecked robotics club’s financial spreadsheets. The pair interviewed Canyon Crest students and coaches, and compared everything to other schools in the school district.

“What I found was, like, really shocking, and it just kept building up,” Kevin concluded.

Last week, the two sleuthing students published their results in a 15-page report, on a website titled “Ravens for Transparency.” Among other things, they found that the so-called charitable foundation failed to disclose its executive director salaries —required by law— and buried substantial costs ($3.5 million over 12 years) in a murky “other expenses” category.

According to Kevin’s report, for some unknown reason, administrative expenses for his school’s foundation run over twice as high as all other schools in the district. And they also found a former foundation president who agreed with them:

CCAF's Former President
A former president of the CCA Foundation's board contacted us by email to express her support for
our original report. She criticized the principal's response to our criticisms, and also alleged that the
former Executive Director ignored concerns and campaigned to remove members of the Foundation
who disagreed with her.

In their rebuttal to the foundation’s hyperbolic objections, the students described a recent school board meeting, in which nearly all parent commenters supported their work and requested reforms—except for one deranged parent who called them ‘fascists.’

For the record, Kevin and Litong deny being fascists.

These so-called charitable tax-exempt organizations, like all the D.E.I. NGO’s and the ‘get out the vote’ groups, are where you find all the graft and corruption these days. I believe that government should be banned from giving grants to nonprofits. Let taxpayers donate to nonprofits voluntarily, if they like what the nonprofits are doing.