Is Superintendent's Paid Leave Connected to Financial Audit?

Plenty of mystery and few answers from the Millcreek  School District today, as school officials push back on revealing why superintendent Michael Golde is on paid leave.

Action News learned from informed sources that Michael Golde's sudden departure may be connected to the results of a recent audit of the district's finances.

Elizabeth D'Aurora has more on this story.

We have asked Millcreek School District officials to see that audit, which was paid for with public tax dollars, but so far the district has refused to make it available.

And repeated calls to the district's publicly funded auditing firm Felix and Gloekler, who did the audit, have not been returned since we broke this story last week.

What's surprising is that the audit we want to inspect is the one Felix and Gloeckler reported in a legal notice in the Erie Times News at least three times, stating that it was available for public inspection.

So when we took this notice to the district today, communications director Erika Howland told us that that notice was a mistake, the accountant was in error, and it's not available to the public.

Action News attempted to find out when the error was discovered and when the retraction to the legal notice was subsequently published in the newspaper. And that's when the district's communications director stopped communicating, and instead referred us to the district's solicitor, Tim Sennett.

Sennett says he could not comment until the meeting tonight where he says he will provide more information, but he says the notice was properly printed in the paper and thus should have been given to us when we requested it.

What we also know is that all of these developments have cast a huge cloud of uncertainty over the proposed renovation of McDowell High School and the relocation of Gus Anderson Field, which has a price tag approaching 100 million dollars.

Even school board president Terry Scutella is now publicly questioning the project, and did not return a phone call today.

We asked the question, if the district's finances and leadership are not in question, why all of sudden are some supporters of the project questioning it? What do they know that you don't?

The group that has opposed the plan from the start , No New McDowell, is expected to make its position known on all of this at tonight's school board meeting.