They rode the rides and called it leadership training. I know the sentence. It is what a public agency says when the brochure has the word “development” on the cover and a theme park on page four. Nobody in this story gets on a roller coaster and calls it a roller coaster. They call it a course. They call it a retreat. They call it team building. And the money that paid for the seat belt was supposed to be special education, early childhood programs and job training for teenagers in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. I have been to leadership retreats. I wore a cardigan to one that cost more than the speaker. I know exactly how good the dessert is, and I know exactly who never sees the invoice.
Here is the record. On Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, Pennsylvania Auditor General Timothy L. DeFoor released a performance audit of the Delaware County Intermediate Unit — the regional agency that serves 15 Delaware County school districts and, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, 134 schools — covering fiscal years 2023 and 2024. His office’s release says the IU “spent more than $300,000 to send executives to leadership training and provide catered meals for board and staff meetings.” The headline items: “nearly $40,000 for seven senior level administrators to join another Intermediate Unit at a leadership training course in Orlando, FL, that included a Ride-N-Dine event at Universal Studios featuring rides on two attractions and a five-course dinner with an open bar”; nearly $14,000 on a team-building retreat in Annapolis, Maryland, with “a four and half hour cruise around the Chesapeake Bay”; and approximately $250,000 for dinners at monthly board meetings and food and refreshments at routine staff meetings. The Inquirer’s Maddie Hanna reports the Orlando trip cost $100,000 in total, offset by reimbursements including $15,000 in sponsorships. Then the part that should bother you more than the rides: the release says the audit found DCIU “failed to keep records of contracts, purchase approvals and could not show evidence that goods and services were received.” Four findings, 21 recommendations. And here is how the money gets there in the first place: each year the commonwealth withholds a portion of school districts’ education subsidies to fund the intermediate units — nearly $2 billion statewide across those two fiscal years, more than $83 million of it to DCIU. The districts never touch it. It goes around them, to an agency their voters can’t name, run by a board of 15 school-board members, one from each district.
Now the defense, and it was delivered from the audience. The Delaware County Daily Times’ Alex Rose reports interim executive director Jim Scanlon called the process “flawed” and “unfair,” said the IU received the 89-page report about half an hour before DeFoor’s 11 a.m. news conference on the courthouse steps in Media, and said, “There’s no violation of school code. There’s nothing illegal, unethical in there.” He said sponsors paid for the trips and that no taxpayer funds were spent on them, at least in the records he has reviewed in two months on the job. In its written response, the IU says it “has verified that no DCIU assets were used to purchase alcoholic beverages for individual attendees,” and that it “does not agree” that the nature or cost of a team-building activity alone makes it “extravagant.” Its former solicitor, Michael Puppio, bristled that a meal of $26 a person had been flagged as extravagant for volunteers who sit on a board. Fine. Twenty-six dollars is not the scandal. But “nothing illegal” is the bar a public agency sets for itself after it has already lost the receipts, and an agency that cannot produce its own contracts does not get to tell me which money paid for which ride. Then turn around and look at the podium, because it is also the state. DeFoor is a Republican with a camera crew six days before a general election; he answered a couple of questions and, the Daily Times reports, left abruptly when Puppio pressed him on the open bar. A Democratic state senator in the crowd, Tim Kearney, called the whole event a “head-scratcher.” Both parties are the help. One side held the clipboard. The other held the menu. Neither one held the contract, because nobody could find it.
Deb says her leadership training was a church potluck in 1983 and a casserole dish she still hasn’t gotten back. Buck wants to know which two rides, because it matters. Cricket laminated the menu from the press release. I love them. They are seasoning.
“Leadership training” is the alibi. The missing contracts are the story. Sit with it until it confesses. An agency that is funded with money skimmed off the top of school districts’ subsidies before those districts ever see it — no levy, no ballot line, no board member any voter chose for the job — has built itself a world where the food is catered, the retreat floats and the paperwork is optional, and its defense is that nobody has proved a crime. The auditor’s defense is a microphone. The cardigan stays. Fill the notebook. Then ask your own school board member, out loud, the one who sits on that IU board: where are the contracts, who approved the trip, and how much of this year’s subsidy went around you before it got to the kids?
Sources:
- Pennsylvania Department of the Auditor General, “Auditor General DeFoor Says DCIU Spent More Than $300,000 on Executive Travel and Catered Meals for Meetings,” Oct. 28, 2026
- The Philadelphia Inquirer, Maddie Hanna, “Pa. auditor general accuses this Delco education agency of ‘frivolous’ spending on travel, food,” Oct. 28, 2026
- The Delaware County Daily Times, Alex Rose, “Pa. auditor general presents ‘unacceptable’ DCIU audit findings, prompting blowback,” Oct. 28, 2026
— Theo Ashford-Lindström
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