Funny coincidence that the women has been in buisness for years and only now that she is running for office do they yank her payments and cancel her contract.And its charlie Epps seat she is running for.HCDO at its best.

Say candidate's company owes J.C. schools $555K

Friday, June 01, 2007
By KEN THORBOURNE
JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

On the heels of a scathing state audit - the second in three years - the Jersey City Board of Education has halted all payments to an early childhood education provider owned by state Assembly candidate Sheila Newton-Moses.

Newton-Moses is running in Tuesday's Democratic primary for state Assembly in the 31st District on a ticket headed by Louis Manzo, an incumbent state assemblyman vying with Sandra Bolden Cunningham for the nomination for the district's state Senate seat. Bolden Cunningham is the widow of Jersey City Mayor Glenn D. Cunningham.

The audit, completed last month, states that Sunnyside Academy, the company Newton-Moses founded in the early 1990s, "underspent" its 2005-2006 Abbott early childhood education budget by $222,083 - meaning the money was spent, but not for the purposes it was allotted for under the court-mandated, state-funded program.

An earlier state audit had found that Sunnyside Academy, which serves 150 3-year-olds in Jersey City's Abbott early childhood program, had underspent $232,582 during the 2003-04 school year.

Combined with a district review that found $100,000 underspent during the 2004-05 school year, Sunnyside Academy owes the district a staggering $554,945, district officials said.

Given the amount owed, the district has given up trying to recover the money through a repayment arrangement it had made with the vendor.

Instead, Superintendent of Schools Charles T. Epps Jr., who is also a state assemblyman, has decided to withhold May and June 2007 payments to the company totaling $356,000 and will likely not renew its contract for the upcoming school year, as recommended by the most recent audit, officials said.

Newton-Moses claims the audits are way off the mark and that in fact the district owes her company about $500,000.

Nonetheless, she agreed in January to a repayment arrangement with the district of roughly $14,000 per month until her forensic auditors could establish the real figures, she said.

But in the midst of this arrangement, the district pulled the rug out from under her, she said.

"It's like you're paying a mortgage and the bank calls in the loan," Newton-Moses said.

Newton-Moses's biggest complaint is that the district never gave her a chance to refute the findings of the latest audit - an assertion district officials dispute.

Newton-Moses also argues the district's actions are "political," and claims Epps and other staff members have been out to get her since December 2003, when she convinced Mayor Cunningham to intervene on her behalf during a similar dispute.

Asked about this assertion, Gerard Crisonino, a spokesman for Epps, said "the facts should speak for themselves."