Are developing a grant management system and grant monitoring program for a state agency overseeing grants that serve employees of the horse racing industry and their families
Monitored federal grant monies distributed to schools in one of the nation's largest school districts.
Monitored services for approximately 22,000 children with disabilities younger than age 3. Read More
Developed training on the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, School Board Roles and Responsibilities, Board Oversight, Ethics, Using School Data, Facilities, Roberts’ Rules of Order, Administrative Cost Grants, Emergency Planning, and more.
Developed more than 100 pages of training on conducting fiscal and educational reviews of schools.
Designed monitoring tools and related materials for fiscal, Special Education, and other reviews.
Developed policies and forms for security, substance abuse, suicide prevention, sexual harassment, search and seizure, drug and alcohol testing, anti-bullying, zero tolerance for weapons, and more.
Organized a Safe Schools Symposium, featuring 29 speakers and drawing 288 attendees.
Developed programs to address alcohol abuse and suicides among Native American youth. They included student-developed videos addressing this important topic.
Developed Substance Abuse Prevention: Best Practices Resource Guide for Educators and a 112-page manual on Safe Schools Planning. We developed a Parents’ Guide to Mental Health, Student Health Guidelines, sample Memoranda of Understanding, Student Codes of Conduct, job descriptions, and nearly 20 forms ranging from Lost or Stolen Equipment Reports to School Entrance Health Forms.
Conducted investigations and data analytics into fraud, waste, and abuse in educational systems and other organizations.
Served as a subject matter expert on an engagement assisting the government of Indonesia in designing software with built-in algorithms to detect fraud in its procurement system.
Designed and implemented 20 site visits to Bureau of Indian Education schools to gather ground-level information concerning safety/security and incident-reporting practices and issues. VWG designed protocols that included hundreds of questions – including those related to internal controls and information technology security - to ensure that the most accurate portrait of these issues possible would emerge. This was part of a larger project that included analysis of 230,000 school safety and misconduct reports, training, and other services. Our tools include custom-built databases.
Analyzed payroll records for approximately 50,000 school employees and identified dozens of employees being paid for more than 250 hours a week, hundreds of active employees living across the country from their assigned work locations, two dozen employees with paychecks but no addresses, and much more.
Analyzed $40 million in credit card expenditures and identified 145 suspect users. Because of the new scrutiny, our client saved $5 million to $7 million a year.
Assisted Chicago Public Schools in developing Safe Schools planning guides and provided a detailed security assessment of one of the system’s largest high schools.
Served as the outsourced Inspector General of the Public Building Commission of Chicago.
Evaluated business processes and performance in multi-billion-dollar organizations in the government and corporate sectors. Its founder and/or team has reviewed and recommended improvements in more than 20 major functions, ranging from information technology and recruitment to financial management systems. Such analyses require mapping business processes to support execution of performance objectives.
Conducted hundreds of investigations in the corporate sector.
FEATURED PROJECTS
Early Intervention
Early Intervention programs provide coordinated services to children with disabilities younger than age 3 and high-risk infants and toddlers. The Vander Weele Group’s success in delivering compliance monitoring services for the State of Illinois, the sixth largest Early Intervention system in the United States, affords us considerable expertise on program logistics, staffing, training, and reporting to share with our clients.
We create agile and responsive compliance monitoring protocols and tools aligned with the Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, state laws, and agency rules. We manage large-scale, complex compliance monitoring programs and provide continuous technical support infused with our deep knowledge of best practice.
We also harness data collected through compliance monitoring reviews and special investigations to identify systemic challenges and work closely with key partners and stakeholders to devise and enact solutions.
In a five-year program, Vander Weele Group has provided compliance reviews, evaluations and technical assistance to nearly all of the 183 schools funded by the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE). The firm made on-site visits to more than 140 locations in 23 states.
Each year, the Vander Weele Group has provided a final report with recommended systemic reforms that addresses challenges such as high leadership and teacher turnover, inadequate technological infrastructure, insufficient understanding of student achievement data to drive educational programs, insufficient parental involvement, excessive carryover funds, violations of internal controls, Going Concern problems (schools improperly budgeting and at risk of exhausting their funds), and more. BIE and schools use the information from the monitoring visits and these recommendations to drive new strategies, future training, and technical assistance. This project demonstrates the firm’s ability to manage large-scale programs, hire and manage staff, develop internal and external communication tools, complete project deliverables in a high-quality manner on deadline, make business process and performance recommendations, measure implementation against grant applications, assist clients in developing strategies for systemic change, compare field conditions against federal mandates, manage/analyze data, assess internal controls, conduct evaluations, and more. Executing this volume of materials requires strong project management skills, one of the core competencies of the Vander Weele Group.
