BOE To Birks: Cut The Consultants

Stop handing money to consultants you know (while not telling us) and start putting it into programs for kids, a fed-up school board commanded the superintendent.

The showdown came amid rising tensions between the board and the superintendent, as her one-time defenders ramp up their criticisms of how she’s is handling the job.

That directive came during an intense Finance & Operations Committee meeting on Monday afternoon at the district’s Meadow Street headquarters.

The showdown came amid rising tensions between the board and the superintendent, as her one-time defenders ramp up their criticisms of how she is handling the job.

Just days before, in a secret evaluation session held in a fifth-floor conference room at Meadow Street, Superintendent of Schools Carol Birks disputed the grades the board had given her on her first mid-year report card, presenting thick ​“evidence binders” of the work she’s done so far.

During Monday evening’s three-hour committee meeting, board members began by telling Superintendent Carol Birks to quit giving work to her transition-team members, in what could seem like a conflict of interest. Then, they made a bigger point about not spending money on consultants at all.

The issue arose when Birks said she’d awarded a $2,400-a-day contract to two consultants with The Urban Schools Human Capital Consulting Group, who would be ​“streamlining” the district’s workflow for posting and offering jobs and orienting and transferring staff.

One of those consultants had written her transition team report’s section on talent management and development, which recommended that the district figure out how to ​“streamline all HR processes from application to onboarding of employees.”

Birks convened the transition team a year ago to set out the challenges facing New Haven, along with some potential fixes. Across all five teams, their 48-page report concluded that inequity topped the list of concerns.

That agreement imploded on Monday evening, leading to a series of uncomfortable moments. In the end, Birks pulled the contract with The Urban Schools Human Capital Consulting Group.

But along the way, she received an earful from board members about how the district needs to get its six-figure supervisors to start supervising, rather than paying outside consultants to come in and do it for them.

The board recalled how, just a month ago, it rejected a $144,000 contract for Harvard University’s Data Wise training, for which Birks’s former boss in Hartford is the only certified trainer in Connecticut.

The board also told Birks that it doesn’t want to be vetoing agreements, but it said its members said it will continue to do so if she didn’t let them know about her overarching plans for the district’s grant spending, before each contract came up for review.

Under the board’s cross-examination, Birks also admitted that she’d been giving out contracts under $10,000 through purchase orders that the board had never seen. She said one of those had gone to her former boss in Bridgeport, another transition-team leader. And she refused to answer whether she’d approved other contracts since the board ordered a spending freeze.

“Oh No, We’ve Got Questions”

On Monday, as soon as she was called to answer for The Urban Schools Human Capital Consulting Group, Birks coughed uncontrollably. She said she was sick, and she hacked right into the microphone, as board members continued to press her. She whispered her answers, almost inaudibly at times. Her staff continually brought her cups of water and tissues.

Still, the board didn’t let up on why Birks felt it was OK to pass out consulting gigs to her transition-team leaders, when its departments are now reporting they need staff, not more words of advice.

That controversy arose as Birks said she didn’t want to talk about a $12,500 contract with The Urban Schools Human Capital Consulting Group, because Lisa Mack, the district’s human resources director, wasn’t at the meeting.

“Oh no, we’ve got questions about this,” said Board President Darnell Goldson.

The contract would pay two consultants — Susan Marks, the former superintendent in Norwalk, and Craig Chin, a former deputy human resources director in Boston — to spend three days in New Haven next week working with its HR team.

The contract states that the consultants will ​“identify dysfunctional or outmoded processes and practices; assemble the involved staff; streamline and redesign significantly for efficiency and effectiveness; ensure processes are user-friendly; [and] initiate application of technology to new process.”

The pricetag for three days of work? The Urban Schools Human Capital Consulting Group, which is based in Virginia, asked for $7,200 in compensation, along with $1,800 for flights, $1,800 for hotels, $600 for rental cars and parking, $250 for meals and $850 for other administrative costs. That adds up to $12,500.

Even though the agreement began in February, Birks didn’t present the contract to the board until this week. The agreement includes a clause allowing the board to cancel the contract with 30 days’ notice, though it has to pay for all work within that period.

“We went through a lot,” Birks explained. ​“We have processes.”

This spring, Marks served on the superintendent’s transition team, co-leading the talent management group.

In the section of the report she co-wrote, Marks said that human resources staff spent too much time ​“stuck in outdated and nebulous processes and compliance activities.” She wrote that her team recommended that the department spend more time on recruitment and marketing, focus on retention and differentiate support for new teachers.

“Can’t that be perceived as a conflict of interest?” Jamell Cotto, the committee chair, asked about the latest contract.

“Absolutely not,” Birks responded.

“For the leader of your transition team to make recommendations that you then contract with them to make?” Cotto pressed.

“Absolutely not,” Birks repeated. She explained that she only sees a conflict of interest if she profits directly. ​“I don’t get any benefit from these people,” she said.

Joyner said that Birks was missing the point. ​“If you look at the law, it says even the appearance of conflict is problematic,” he said.

Birks went on to say that she believes the district needs to hire The Urban Schools Human Capital Consulting Group because the five-member human resources department is so understaffed.

Goldson asked why Birks wouldn’t just hire more clerks, who could process applications and do background checks during the peak application season. ​“We need people actually doing the work,” he said.

Birks said she was set on hiring another chief to oversee the office, not more clerks.

Birks added that Marks was familiar with the district, because she’d been volunteering her time to support the human resources department. She also said that she’d hired Marks previously to write job descriptions for part-time employees, after hundreds were let go last summer.

Joyner argued the department doesn’t need anyone ​“to come in from out of town to streamline the process.”

“Now, if we have to train people to post positions or give job offers,” he said, ​“God help us.”

When Goldson asked if there were any records of that hire, Birks said that had been done through a purchase order. School staff said that any contracts under $10,000 can be submitted for payment as purchase orders, as long as there’s multiple quotes attached.

“How are we supposed to know there’s a back way of paying people?” Cotto asked.

Access to Coaches

After that, the board members asked Birks whether she’d signed a contract with another transition-team leader, John Ramos, her former boss in Bridgeport while she was principal at Harding High, who now runs a consultancy called Equity and Excellence Imperative. Ramos led the equity and access team.

Birks said that she’d brought Ramos on this year to coach the principal at Wexler Grant. But she said that, again, there wasn’t a contract because he’d been hired as a part-time employee.

That’s when Joyner, who’s regularly stood up for Birks during her first year on the job, said he didn’t understand why the district’s top educators weren’t handling the coaching on their own.

“You have directors and assistant superintendents to coach principals. If they’re not coaching and developing principals, what are they doing?” Joyner asked. ​“These consultants came in when business people tried to bring all of those practices from corporate America. But if you go to school, you get a six-year degree, you should be able to do the job. If you get promoted to assistant superintendent, then you’re the coach. If you’re not doing that, then what are you doing?”

“A lot of other things,” Birks said.

“We need to be sure that the people we’ve hired in Central Office have the capability to coach the people they supervise,” Joyner responded. ​“This is almost like hiring a coach for a football team who can’t do it so you have another coach to coach the kids.”

Calling it a ​“mess,” Joyner added, ​“All these people get money with no connection to the community. It’s almost like a quid pro quo.” He said the money would be better spent on literacy tutors, textbooks, Chromebooks, daylong field trips for alternative-school students and more early-childhood and bilingual programs, among other ideas.

Goldson went at the contract from a fiscal angle, pointing out that he’d pushed to reduce the number of part-time retirees who’d been hired over the years. ​“It saved us a lot of money to do that,” he said. ​“I see it’s creeping back in that direction.”

Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, the board’s secretary who’s asked at almost every meeting for months about the district’s plan to help third-graders get on grade level in reading, avoided most of the conflict.

But she closed out the meeting by asking the district to find more money, especially in the $1.5 million it is currently reprogramming from the Alliance Grant for the state’s lowest-performing districts, for New Haven Reads. That organization had presented its $40,000 contract earlier in the meeting, saying it has a 125-student wait list.

Currently, even though reading scores have risen districtwide, 70 percent of New Haven’s third-graders aren’t reading on grade level.

“We have $1.5 million,” Jackson-McArthur said. ​“There’s enough money for those kids that really need that help, specifically for this population that we know at half a year were not at grade level. I don’t know if they will be, except by the skin of their teeth. We could use some of this money to accommodate that.”