Report details dubious spending, actions
Virtual School probe of Kruppenbacher finds questionable purchases, ‘boorish’ comments
As the top attorney at the Florida Virtual School, Frank Kruppenbacher used school employees for “excessive” work on his own “outside business activities,” paid his daughter’s boyfriend to investigate a former virtual school executive and likely made “boorish” comments to women in the office, according to a report released Tuesday.
Kruppenbacher, 66, is a wellknown lawyer in Central Florida whose clients have included the city of Apopka, Bright House Networks, and the Orange and the Osceola county school boards.
He resigned from his general counsel role at the virtual school on Aug. 12, the same day the school’s board of trustees voted to hire an outside law firm to investigate a dozen complaints against him.
The complaints from employees — none of whom are named — accused Kruppenbacher of making “off-color jokes” and using profanity. The accusations about Kruppenbacher’s use of “boorish and gender-based comments” to women “likely” occurred, the report said. If Kruppenbacher was still an employee, “the appropriate
employer action” to the accusations “would be to either discipline or remove the offending employee,” the report said.
In an emailed statement on Tuesday, Kruppenbacher denied the accusations, which he said were a “smear campaign” against him in retaliation for his finding “many instances of taxpayer waste and mismanagement” at the public school.
The complaints in the report also alleged Kruppenbacher used school money to purchase “extravagant furnishings” for his office, sought reimbursement for expenses “without appropriate documentation” and “took several multi-week trips to Asia for outside business activities without using vacation time.”
The report made no reference to Orlando’s airport authority, where Kruppenbacher is the volunteer board chairman and has traveled extensively on authority business in recent years.
But travel records obtained from the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority and vacation records from the virtual school show that Kruppenbacher did not use any school vacation time for 14 international trips made on behalf of the authority. Those included multiple trips to China and Japan.
Those trips spanned 80 weekdays, including the days when Kruppenbacher departed or arrived for his travels.
His employment contract does not state how much vacation Kruppenbacher was entitled to, but it does note he would be entitled to be paid for unused vacation.
The Orlando Sentinel has asked school officials for the number of annual vacation days Kruppenbacher was entitled to and if he was paid for unused vacation time when, in fact, he was traveling for the airport. The school has not yet responded to those questions.
The virtual school board, meeting in Orlando, discussed the whistle-blower report by the law firm FordHarrison for the first time publicly Tuesday, though Chairman Robert Gidel said he has had the report since mid-September.
The virtual school, often called FLVS, is the state’s public online institution, serving more than 200,000 students a year with more than 180 online courses. The five members of the school’s board of trustees are all appointees of Gov. Rick Scott. Kruppenbacher served as its general counsel from 2011 until his resignation this summer.
Gidel said he did not share the report with the full board months ago because, with Kruppenbacher gone, there was no immediate action needed and because he feared it would create more chaos in a school then operating without a permanent chief executive or a top attorney. But he said the school would revamp employee guidelines and training and create better procedures for employees with concerns, looking to rebuild trust at the 20-year-old institution, which is headquartered in Orlando but serving students across Florida and the nation.
“The process we had … was horrific,” he said, noting that school employees took their concerns to human resources, which then had to report them to the general counsel’s office — even when the general counsel was the subject of the complaints.
“The organization gave them no trust,” Gidel added. “If nothing else, the ultimate goal is that the people who work here … must have trust in us.”
In its four-page report, FordHarrison wrote that not all the complaints could be verified and that some employees’ accounts of events might have been colored by their “negative feelings” toward Kruppenbacher.
Kruppenbacher “vehemently denied” those accusations when interviewed by FordHarrison, the report said.
As an attorney, Kruppenbacher has specialized in government affairs and also has served as a volunteer board member for various public agencies. He is part of the Morgan & Morgan personal injury law firm, too, and is representing Orange County Property Appraiser Rick Singh, who is the target of a Florida Department of Law Enforcement review and federal lawsuit filed by former employees over allegations of misbehavior while in office.
The virtual school provided the Orlando Sentinel with a copy of a five-year employment contract for Kruppenbacher that ended in 2016. Kruppenbacher’s salary, according to that contract, was $180,000 annually. The school has not yet responded to whether Kruppenbacher had subsequent salary increases or a new contract.
The FordHarrison report said that three years ago, Kruppenbacher authorized the school to pay his daughter’s boyfriend to have dinner at a “high-end restaurant” and take photos of a former school executive as part of an unspecified investigation. Kruppenbacher admitted he had authorized that payment but said the boyfriend was a “skilled investigator,” the report said. A separate audit report the board reviewed Tuesday noted the payout was $3,500.
The report also said that two employees performed an “excessive” amount of work for Kruppenbacher related to his “outside work activities for other employers and entities.”
Kruppenbacher admitted one employee sometimes did work for an “outside business,” but he claimed the work was done voluntarily, after work hours, and that he paid the employee “out of his own pocket,” the report said.
The report did not name those other employers who might have benefited from work by a virtual school employee.
The three allegations about misspent money would require an additional audit because they were outside the “scope of this investigation,” which centered on employment law concerns, the law firm wrote. Though the board received an audit Tuesday that dealt with some expenditures authorized by Kruppenbacher, it did not delve into most of the allegations in the FordHarrison report.
The board did not, during discussions of the report, vote for another audit. A schools spokesman could not immediately say if there would be a further investigation.
Kruppenbacher said in a statement that he is being targeted for his efforts to improve school operations.
“In my role as general counsel I uncovered and, repeatedly reported to FLVS leadership, many instances of taxpayer waste and mismanagement,” Kruppenbacher said. “These accusations, of which I am yet to be provided in writing, are by individuals who have not been identified to me and I assert is retaliation for my continuing to report these matters.”
Kruppenbacher’s client, Singh, has labeled his accusers as disgruntled.
His former employees, a finance director and a communications director, filed a federal lawsuit, alleging that Singh spent taxpayer money on personal trips, falsified documents, used a racist slur, and asked employees to cover up having strippers in the office.
Last year, Kruppenbacher hired Belvin Perry, who served for more than a decade until 2014 as chief judge for Orange and Osceola, to review claims of the two former employees.
Earlier this year, Perry, whose work was paid for with public funds, reported that the complaints could not be substantiated. Perry is also an attorney for the Morgan & Morgan firm.