Christopher Peak Photo
Sergio Rodriguez.
New Haven’s schools will pay a contractor $1,400 a week to look after the district’s foster youth along with homeless students, while Connecticut’s other major cities are getting the work done without any separate hires.
The contractor, former Upper Westville Alder Sergio Rodriguez, was put in charge of coordinating services for homeless and foster students last winter. Last week, the Finance & Operations Committee recommended renewing that “no-bid contract” for another school year.
The agreement pays out $40,000 at a time when other cities are doing it without any additional spending.
Rodriguez’s contract is scheduled to be put to a vote before the full board Monday night.
Gemma Joseph Lumpkin, the public schools’ chief of youth, family and community engagement, said that an outside contractor is needed “to comply with federal mandates.”
She’s referring to the Every Student Succeeds Act, the Obama administration’s replacement for No Child Left Behind. The federal law, which took effect in December 2016, states that each school district must designate a “point of contact” who’s responsible for foster kids’ “educational stability.”
New Haven has roughly 125 students in foster care, Rodriguez told the committee. (Across Connecticut, 4,345 children are in the state’s care, said Gary Kleeblatt, spokesperson for the Department of Children & Families.) To meet those kids’ needs, New Haven has chosen a different setup from the state’s two other biggest cities.
Rodriguez presents to the Finance & Operations Committee last Monday.
Outside the Elm City, district employees serve as the point of contact on top of their existing work. In Hartford, the job is handled by the special education compliance manager. In Bridgeport, the job is handled by the director of social services.
In both cities, the positions are permanent, paid with general funds rather than grants.
The assistant superintendent in Hartford, June Sellers, said she picked someone who’d already worked with DCF while still having extensive responsibilities throughout the school system. The compliance manager was chosen “due to the broad reach of their role within and beyond the Office of Student Support Services and because they report directly to the [assistant superintendent],” Sellers wrote in an email.
Sellers added that the other school employees besides the compliance manager work closely with DCF, too. For instance, the director of social, psychological and behavioral services handles any “regulatory and procedural concerns”; the homeless and family services coordinator looks into eligibility for “services and protection under the McKinney-Vento Act” for anyone without a fixed residence; and the assistant superintendent of talent management reviews “practices, data … and case studies” at quarterly meetings with DCF, Sellers said.
Joseph Lumpkin said she’d tried to reach out to Hartford and Bridgeport last school year, but she said she didn’t “get a lot of specificity” in the answers she received. Rodriguez did meet with them, though, and wrote up an “extensive” memo about what’s working, she said.
After being told that both cities had kept the work in-house, Joseph Lumpkin said, “New Haven is different,” requiring an extra step of connecting with nonprofits in the community.
“Our determination in addressing their needs is to have someone who can just focus on them, rather than asking someone to fit it in, as an add-on to somebody else’s job,” she said. “We want someone to do home visits, to engage those families in deep ways and to help connect them to the community services.” She added, “Students and families are better off when we ensure that work is extended outside the school day.”
The district already has two employees who the state thinks are coordinating services for homeless students. In addition to liaisons stationed in each school building through federal McKinney-Vento program for homeless students, plus social workers, psychologists and YouthStat mentors, there’s two overall McKinney Vento coordinators, several records say.
Daniel Diaz, the parent engagement coordinator, and Renee Osborne, the extended school hours coordinator, are both listed as the main McKinney-Vento coordinators on the State Department of Education’s website and as “proposal developers” for federal McKinney-Vento grant funding on district documents.
Diaz, in particular, was widely praised last year for successfully connecting at least 200 Puerto Rican evacuees, including some high-school seniors close to graduation, with the services they needed to adjust after Hurricane Maria’s devastation. Osborne left the district in April.
Joseph Lumpkin said the state’s website was “incorrect.”
“We’ve never had two McKinney-Vento coordinators,” she said.
She added that New Haven needed someone “out there doing the work.”
A school administrator “can’t go knock on doors and make home visits and be up at DCF and the BOE,” she said. “You would kind of feel that you’d get half-baked results, when you simply try to make it an add-on to work.”
Gemma Joseph Lumpkin.
This February, when first making the pitch for Rodriguez’s hire, Joseph Lumpkin didn’t have ready quotes on a competitive salary, any data on the number of foster youth in New Haven’s schools nor any comparison to how other Connecticut cities dealt with the federal regulations.
At the time, Darnell Goldson, the recently elected president, voted to table the contract. (The committee approved it two weeks later, without answering those questions.) He said that a more transparent process would not only justify the price, but also protect the contractors from any appearance of political favoritism.
“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 said at the time. “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.”
After that, the full board committed to revamping its procurement process. They agreed to set new “contracting standards,” focusing in particular on who counts as a “sole-source provider” that can bypass an open bidding process.
The board said they’d have those rules set by June 30. Nothing’s been approved yet.
Without a clear process in place, the risk of looking like a patronage job is particularly nettlesome for a person like Rodriguez, a five-term alder and city clerk candidate. It might look like he’d been handed the gig because of his political connections, despite having a résumé to prove he has spent decades working to make a better life for Connecticut’s most vulnerable kids.
In 1996, he and his wife co-founded the ‘R Kids Family Center, a nonprofit in Dixwell licensed by the state to place children with foster homes and adoptive parents. The couple personally fostered almost three dozen kids themselves over the years. More recently, since December 2013, Rodriguez worked in the State Department of Education, until that position was eliminated in May 2017.
“It’s been my life’s work,” Rodriguez said in a phone interview. “It’s been a passion of mine and it continues to be. Hopefully this contract is approved, and we can do whatever we can for some of these children.”
Last school year, Rodriguez was paid $35,000. That was funded mostly by $28,000 from the federal McKinney-Vento program. An extra $7,000 came from the overdrawn operating budget, which is now an estimated $7.2 million dollars in the red.
In his roughly three months on the job, Rodriguez compiled a database of students without a permanent home and he assembled a network of social-service providers, Joseph Lumpkin said. So far, he doesn’t have student outcomes to show, though he did start doing a few home visits, she added.
“I think it’s really soon,” she said. “Getting that community network is a lot of work. You got to go to Hartford; you got to go to DCF.”
Last school year, while setting up services, Rodriguez was also working as deputy operations director for Ned Lamont’s gubernatorial bid. Over three months, he was paid $4,942, according to campaign finance reports. Rodriguez said he’s no longer working for the campaign.
Joseph Lumpkin didn’t submit any evaluations with the contract, which the school board’s finance committee requests before continuing any services. In the latest application, she wrote that Rodriguez’s performance would be “evaluated by monthly assessment of data,” which she’d said back in February.
At last week’s presentation, Rodriguez said he will spend the coming school year focused intensively on 340 homeless students living in the riskiest conditions, getting them connected with services. He’ll keep in touch with another 400-odd homeless students through letters and phone calls.
“These kids, who we haven’t seen in school for 10 days, where are they? It’s those kids we really need to spend time finding and link up to services,” Joseph Lumpkin said.
Jamell Cotto and Tamiko Jackson-McArthur.
This year Rodriguez will be paid $40,000 for 28 weeks of work, all funded through the federal Title I program for schools with a high number of poor kids. Midway through the school year, when that money runs out, the district intends to switch Rodriguez back over to McKinney-Vento funds.
Joseph Lumpkin said the $1,400 weekly salary was negotiated with Rodriguez. “It’s a fair rate for a consultant,” she said. “Based on his experience and what he’s capable of doing, it’s viewed as a fair rate.”
Before the work gets started, a Finance Committee member said, he wants to consider adding to Rodriguez’s team. Jamell Cotto, the board’s vice-president and executive director of the Farnam Community House, asked Joseph Lumpkin to come back with a proposal.
“In order to engage the 400 that you’re not able to engage, what would it take to do that?” he asked.
“It would take probably some additional people,” Rodriguez said. In the meantime, “we’re developing significant partnerships within our communities,” he said, adding, “Like Farnam might be a good connection to help out.”
Cotto asked Joseph Lumpkin to send in a proposal for additional staffing within two weeks.