School Board Says No, Tell Us More

A new push for accountability in the Board of Education’s multi-million-dollar contracting process led members to table multiple items at a committee meeting, including funding for a new program for foster youth run by former Alder Sergio Rodriguez.

At the board’s Finance & Operations Committee (F&O) meeting this past week, a school administrator requested $7,000 from the general fund to hire former Upper Westville Alder Sergio Rodriguez to coordinate services for students in the custody of Department of Children and Families (DCF). But the administrator didn’t have ready quotes on a reasonable salary, any data on the number of foster youth in New Haven’s schools nor any comparison for how other Connecticut cities look out for orphaned children.

Without that information, three board members said they felt uncomfortable approving the contract, and they tabled the salary appropriation.

That veto last Monday afternoon at 54 Meadow St. was presented as the start of a new way of doing business at the F&O, the panel that reviews all the district’s contracts and grants: scrutinizing their details and promoting competitive pricing, rather than no-bid contracts. The new move arises amid questions about how the board has been approving contracts.

Joined by Darnell Goldson, the board’s new president, Frank Redente and Jamell Cotto, the committee co-chairs, grilled staff about the procurement process and tabled at least two more items.

The first casualty of the increased oversight was Rodriguez, the state’s educational manager for foster youth.

Gemma Joseph-Lumpkin, the distrcit’s youth, family and community engagement director, had requested $35,000 for Rodriguez to serve as a point of contract with DCF, as the school system tries to hone its programs for homeless and foster youth.

“As a matter of fact,” she said at the meeting, ​“we have zero idea how many of our kids are in the foster care system. We could be talking about 500 or 2,000. A big part of this is to figure out where they are and what their needs are.”

Under her proposal, most of the money, $28,000, would come from the federal government’s payments for services to the homeless. But another $7,000 would need to come from the district’s operating fund.

Goldson, who previously served alongside Rodriguez as an alder, asked how he’d been picked for the role.

“We need to do more around the RFP [request for proposal] process,” Joseph Lumpkin said, referencing a way to solicit competitive proposals from highly specialized providers. ​“But we needed someone who can get this work off the ground running. Sergio did extensive work with DCF and foster-care students.”

That wasn’t the answer Goldson was looking for. He suggested cutting the extra $7,000 from the contract.

“We don’t know how many kids we’re gonna get anyway,” Redente added.

“Let’s at least have a baseline to know if we got something,” Goldson said. ​“Otherwise, if we got 50 kids, and he says, ​‘That’s what it was,’ we can’t do anything else about that. But if other towns have already done this and have [up to] 400 kids, that’s a big difference. He’s one guy.”

Joseph-Lumpkin said she’d look into what Hartford and Bridgeport were doing and get the board members answers at their next meeting.

Goldson said that transparency about the process would protect both the district and the contractors themselves.

“This is not a reflection on [Rodriguez], just like other questions on contracts. In order to protect them from bad press that comes out of this thing, we need more information about how this process works. And I have a real issue about this coming to us, especially after those articles came out that have painted us as pushing grants to political friends, to sit up here and say okay with it,” Goldson explained. ​“Sergio is a good friend of mine; it doesn’t reflect on him. I don’t want him to be a victim of this. I need a better idea of what process we’re going to use in the future before I could say yes to this.”

Redente suggested tabling the entire contract, which the committee did.

The committee also tabled two grant-funded items at Barnard, and they held up a software program until they heard from a district employee who arrived late to the meeting.

The committee did recommend the following items for approval, which will be sent to the full board on Monday night:

• $200,000 for Tucker Mechanical, Inc., to inspect and maintain boiler and water pumps.
• $90,000 for Elm City Montessori to pay for staff at the charter.
• $80,250 for Columbia University’s Teachers College to support curricular development and instructional coaching at three schools: Edgewood, Davis and King-Robinson.
• $79,513 for Concrete Creations to fix broken mains and sewer back-ups at two schools, plus install a new drainage line, relocate bleachers and power-wash mold.
• $60,000 to Encore Holding to fix frozen sprinklers at five schools.
• $54,825 for Yale University to support three extra-curricular programs and develop a design lab at Bishop Woods.
• $33,475 for Public Good, LLC, to paint murals and design installations at Martinez that reflect the school’s new magnet theme.
• $25,000 for Middlebury Interactive Languages to provide 500 licenses for online instruction in Chinese, French and Spanish.
• $5,900 in pass-through funds for Hillel Mandel to offer a seminar on ​“differentiated learning” for Yeshiva Godlah Rabbinical Institute’s faculty.
• $5,215 for Reaction Distributing, Inc., to install platforms for new trash compactors.
• $2,500 for a translator, Miriam Reyes, to rewrite special education students’ learning plans in Spanish.

The committee also recommended accepting $384,911 in state funds for summer school, shifting $300,000 from the operating budget to a state grant for an ACES’s program for 40 at-risk youth, and fixing $24 in math errors in the amount for daycare seats.

Open-Meeting Laws Ignored

At one point, the committee debated nixing all items that drew from the general fund. The three board members discussed the idea in a private confab that may have violated the state’s open meetings law.

Concerned about the running budget deficit, which will widen to a $19 million gap next year, Cotto suggested the committee table all items that weren’t grant-funded. ​“When you’re operating in a deficit, when we don’t know what the state is going to give us, and when the state’s not answering our questions, that’s not a good thing,” he explained later. ​“We can’t forecast what’s ahead, so we’re trying to find ways” to limit expenses.

For four minutes, three board members and two staff members debated the plan’s merits out of public view.

According to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), all discussion between a board’s public officials must be open to the public, with only a few exceptions. The law does exempt caucuses, where members of the same party discuss how they want to vote before the meeting begins, said Thomas Hennick, the Freedom of Information Commission’s education officer.

Since the school board is composed entirely of Democrats, they might have been covered by law if only board members had participated in the discussion. But Cotto also asked Will Clark, the district’s chief operating officer, and Typhanie Jackson, the district’s student services director, to join the chat outside.

“In my opinion,” Hennick said, ​“it would not be a caucus then.” The caucus exemption only applies with members of the ​“same board, same party,” he explained.

Cotto said he wasn’t trying to hide anything.

“Everything was shared at the meeting,” he said in a phone conversation after the meeting. “We as a team, we have to go into a meeting knowing what we’re going to talk about. That’s just common sense.”

He added, “We were transparent. That’s what it’s going to be moving forward.”

The meeting may have also violated FOIA’s notice provisions. For all meetings, whether for the full board or just a committee, an agenda must be posted at least 24 hours in advance. But the most recent F&O agenda didn’t go up online until shortly after 5 p.m. on Friday evening — over an hour short for Monday’s 4 p.m. meeting.