March 24, 2010
-
News: Tampa School Board Member Ordered To Pay
Another American school district is dealing with the bad publicity of abusive credit card actions of a school board member. Jennifer Faliero, formerly with the Tampa, Florida's Hillsborough County School Board, was handed a $30,780 judgment resulting from her misuse of the Suncoast Schools Federal Credit Union issued credit card to the Hillsborough county school district. Faliero is also being sued by Chase Bank for an additional $6,548 of credit card debt. When questioned by the St. Petersburg Times, Faliero said she has every intention on paying back the more than $53,000 that she owes to creditors.
Faliero said she started getting into financial difficulty after her divorce in 2007. While she gained custody of her two daughters, she did lose the benefits of her husband's six figure income. Like many families who have undergone economic crisis, Faliero said the $37,000 income she received wasn't sufficient to maintain expenses. Using the school district's credit card was the only way she was able to make ends meet. Faliero said that over the past two years, she has paid $560 a month toward the balance of the credit cards and has not missed a payment or added new charges. She also added that one of the lenders raised the interest rate from 10.9 percent to 28 percent making it even more difficult to pay off the debt.
State legislatures are considering lowering school board members' salaries which would take another $8,000 away from Faliero's salary. She is campaigning to prevent state legislators from doing so; a move that could hurt her chances for re-election in the fall. The credit card scandal has most likely already done a significant amount of damage to her campaign, but Faliero refuses to pull out of the race for a third term on the Hillsborough County School Board from District 4. Like hundreds of thousands of other Americans who do not have access to anyone else's credit, Ms. Faliero says as a single mom, she has her family on a strict budget.