2009 may night be the best year for Morris Brown College. Morris Brown has lost its accreditation. And without accreditation, it cannot receive federal or state financial aid – nor can any of its students. Which pretty much explains why Morris Brown now doesn’t enroll enough students to fill a high school, much less an entire college. It also explains their debt of 32 million. And all their trouble started with two people people trying to help ...
In 2006, its former president, Dolores Cross, and its former financial aid director, Parvesh Singh, were convicted of bilking the federal government out of millions for students who didn’t exist.Now the school, whose budget is 80 percent-enrollment driven, was struggling before Cross and Singh pulled their stunt sometime between 1998 and 2002. A judge even said that they used most of the embezzled money to bolster the school’s ailing finances. But what they did pretty much choked off any crucial lifeline that the college might have grasped for.
And anytime a school or, for that matter, any institution is in trouble because of a scandal involving theft, that makes it tough to persuade any deep-pocketed donor to step up – at least not without a major change in management.
Now the water has been shut off. A major campus building is facing foreclosure, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in liens have been filed against it. Altogether, Morris Brown faces $32 million in debt. And twilight is closing in.
Of course, there’s at least one bright spot. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Morris Brown’s alumni and supporters rallied to raise $70,000. Much of that money came from alumni living in the metro Atlanta area.They may ultimately raise enough to get the water turned back on. But while that may buy the troubled school some time, once that time is up, they may not have much of a prayer. Thsnks Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com for this info.