“Don’t Say Anything — No One Will Know”

“I don’t want anyone else to know about. I don’t want it to become public. We can do a P.O., and if you don’t say anything, no one will know about it.”

The school board president said that’s what Superintendent Carol Birks told him and another board member this spring, as she sought approval to pay a contractor $5,000 through a purchase order on the QT.

Birks admitted that she had asked individual board members about arranging an additional payment. The money would have paid for an in-person presentation by the firm that’s examining the district’s curriculum and whether it stacks up to state standards. But she denied asking them to keep it a secret.

The two different versions emerged Monday night at a Board of Education meeting. It’s the latest flash point between board President Darnell Goldson and Superintendent Birks, at a time when the board has been discussing the possibility of having her leave office.

The allegation stems from from an incident that occurred earlier this year.

This February, the Board of Education unanimously voted to approve a curriculum audit for $112,500 (plus up to $20,000 for expenses). That would be done by Curriculum Management Solutions, Inc. (CMSi), an Iowa-based contractor that had submitted the most expensive bid of the three companies asked for quotes.

The review of the district’s lesson plans was supposed to be the first comprehensive look at what’s being taught in the school system in decades — at a time when standardized-test scores show, among the city’s eight-graders, 60.8% in math and 35.5% in reading lag so far behind that they aren’t even close to reaching grade-level proficiency.

The contract with CMSi was supposed to end on June 19, with the delivery of a draft report.

“They’re going to tell us basically, by June, all the pieces where there’s gaps so we can work on it,” Ivelise Velazquez, the deputy superintendent, told the school board this February. ​“One of the things I envision is that, this summer, we can do curriculum work. It’s the perfect time, because that’s when most of that can happen when teachers aren’t with students.”

A follow-up presentation about its contents, however, would cost more money.

That’s clearly spelled out in CMSi’s bid: ​“OPTIONAL,” it says in all caps. ​“Additional contract needed” to ​“present the final report, in person.”

Still, Superintendent Birks faulted her former second-in-command, who resigned after less than a year on the job, for not negotiating that clause into the contract.

“When the former deputy superintendent, Ivelise Velazquez, negotiated the contract, she did not include that they’d be coming back” for a presentation, Birks said. ​“I didn’t know that, because I didn’t negotiate the contract, that that wasn’t embedded. [Velazquez] didn’t put it in.”

When she followed up, Birks said that CMSi offered to log on to Skype for a virtual session, but the company said that flying in to New Haven to unpack the 450-page document in meetings with board members, administrators and parents would cost an extra $5,000.

“If they do it in person, there’s another fee; if it’s electronic, it’s less,” Birks said. ​“But as you know, technology is different than having that conversation in person.”

Because the board has put a spending freeze in place, Birks said she called up its officers to ask whether they’d approve the payment using grant funds.

“I asked board members individually what they thought about it, when I learned that this happened,” she said. ​“I just asked — because we didn’t have a contract ready yet — about how they thought we should handle it.”

After Monday night’s meeting, Goldson gave more details about that conversation. He said the superintendent phoned up him and another board member, separately asking each of them for permission to pay with a purchase order.

Birks ​“asked us to not inform the rest of the board that they were doing it,” he added.

After that, the two board members talked on the phone, Goldson said.

“The other board member called me back and said, ​‘She told me that you said yes.’ I said, ​‘Are you crazy? I didn’t say yes to that,’” Goldson recalled.

Goldson said that the two board members never signed off on the $5,000 payment, and Birks never brought a change order to the full board for consideration.

The other board member did not offer comment on the allegation.

Birks denied that she’d asked the board members to keep it a secret.

“Why would I want it to be private? It’s going to go before them,” she said. ​“All the purchase orders were given to the board, so it’s not like it could be private. I don’t even know why that was ever stated, because people would know it’s there.”

Secretive Payments

Right around the same time, Birks was already dealing with the fallout from another round of secretive payments she’d made to her transition-team leaders.

In May, the Independent reported that Birks made hush-hush payouts to three consultants in unusual arrangements. Rather than signing contracts that would have been reviewed by the board’s Finance & Operations Committee, the district paid them through purchase orders or hired them as part-time employees, avoiding any public notice.

In July 2018, the district paid $9,998 to the Urban Schools Human Capital Academy, a consultancy in the Washington, D.C., suburbs that employs Susan Marks, Norwalk’s former superintendent, who co-led the transition team’s Talent Management and Development Committee.

Marks received $1,666 a day to write job descriptions.

In November 2018, the district also paid $9,000 to the Transformative Solutions in Education, a consultancy in Boston run by Michele Brooks, who co-led the transition team’s Family and Community Engagement Committee.

Brooks received $3,000 a day to lead meetings.

And in February 2019, the district approved an $8,880 part-time role for John Ramos, Birks’s former boss in Bridgeport, who co-led the transition team’s Equity and Access Committee, according to a hiring document recently released through the Freedom of Information Act.

Ramos was supposed to be paid $440 a week to provide ​“executive coaching” to an elementary school principal. But after board members started asking questions, Birks said that Ramos turned down compensation.

No Report Yet

Almost two months late, CMSi still has not provided the promised report, Birks said on Monday night. The company told her that it missed its deadline because one of the audit’s leaders was hospitalized, while Birks said that the city had also held up the release of funds.

Birks said that the total cost of the audit had been cut down to $90,000. (UPDATE: Birks corrected herself a week later at a Finance & Operations Committee meeting, saying she had mixed up the cost of strategic planning and that the curriculum audit had actually cost the full contracted amount.) She said the final payment to the company had just gone through, and that she expected CMSi to turn in a draft within the week.

At the meeting, some board members questioned whether that delay constituted a breach of contract.

“In the contract, did it say that they were going to basically hold it until they got the final payment?” asked board member Tamiko Jackson-McArthur. ​“If this vendor does this, wouldn’t they have to know that we needed it more than a week before school?”

“If they really were a reputable vendor, they would not have made excuses and they would have given us the product in time so our supervisors can make plans for the year,” added Ed Joyner, another board member. ​“If it went the way [Birks] described it, it really is inexcusable.”

At the end of the meeting, Goldson asked for the district’s administrators to submit a written report to the Finance & Operations Committee about what had gone wrong with the contract.

In an email on Wednesday, Birks also said that, because ​“this expense was not resolved during the 2018 – 2019 academic year,” she would be submitting a new $5,000 agreement to the board for the post-audit expenses ​“at a future date.”