After leading oversight of Chicago Public Schools during the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid a dramatic shift in the district’s handling of sexual misconduct complaints, Will Fletcher has resigned as CPS inspector general, effective Friday.
During Fletcher’s four years in office, the inspector general’s office uncovered multiple patterns of fraud and financial mismanagement within CPS and expanded its sexual allegations unit, which is dedicated to investigating allegations of sexual misconduct between adults and students.
While tensions between CPS leaders, the teachers union and Mayor Brandon Johnson have recently escalated and led to calls for a new CEO and a mediator as CPS and the CTU negotiate a new contract, the IG’s office has remained independent of district politics and the personnel change is due only to a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to take on a new role, Fletcher said.
The Board of Education will vote Thursday on a resolution recognizing Deputy Inspector General Amber Nesbitt as acting inspector general for Fletcher.
Fletcher said he would then launch a new inspector general’s office to oversee the Gateway Development Commission, an agency created by the states of New York and New Jersey to manage a group of infrastructure projects that will cost at least $16 billion and involve bridges, rail lines and tunnels between the two states.
“I have loved being the inspector general for Chicago Public Schools,” said Fletcher, a CPS alumnus and parent. “Over the last four years, we have been able to build a team and an office that has responded to the volume of complaints we receive and has been able to conduct effective investigations that really matter to the school district.”
The revelations about the district’s finances that the IG’s office has uncovered in recent years include Paycheck Protection Program fraud among CPS employees; the loss of tens of thousands of pieces of technology, worth millions in total; the failure to verify fraudulent claims for supplemental pay; and nearly $30 million in unconditional payments that CPS made to bus contractors who laid off drivers at the start of the pandemic, rather than paying them to keep them on staff, as CPS had intended.
The OIG also created its sexual allegations unit, known as the SAU, in 2018 after a Chicago Tribune report revealed conflicts of interest in investigations previously led by CPS’s legal department. Citing “appalling” district-wide “failures” in CPS’s handling of sexual abuse allegations, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights reached a legally binding settlement with the district in 2019, mandating reforms and federal oversight.
The OIG now investigates all complaints of adult-student sexual misconduct and refers cases involving alleged student-to-student sexual misconduct to the CPS Office of Student Protection.
Fletcher noted that CPS is the only K-12 school district to have formed an investigative unit that addresses “the gap between the types of incidents that police or law enforcement will investigate and the types of incidents that are still serious enough to be investigated and handled responsibly and thoroughly.”
Fletcher, who was appointed by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot in June 2020, said he would like parents to know that every complaint is taken seriously. “A lot of attention is given to every allegation. A lot of resources are invested to get to the bottom of every allegation,” Fletcher said, noting that there has been a “major shift” in “elevating the sense of responsibility of all CPS employees to report any alleged misconduct.”
Fletcher said there is still what he called a “stubbornly resilient” subset of CPS-affiliated adults who continue to face allegations — more often involving inappropriate interactions with students than major crimes. “It’s going to take a lot of work,” Fletcher said, expressing confidence in Nesbitt’s leadership and the district’s respect for the OIG’s independence.
“Even though the investigations that we bring to the board represent difficulties, challenges and systemic issues, I have always believed that they understand where we are coming from and that it makes sense for us to raise the issues that we raise,” Fletcher said.
