Amelia Lafont, Orleans Parish public schools parent
PO Box 51153, New Orleans, LA 70119
********
Attachment To Written Testimony
Regarding Education Matters:
On The Current Condition Of Education
In New Orleans
Louisiana House Education Committee
Submitted May 1, 2008
http://michaelhoman.blogspot.com/2007/06/nothing-fishy-here-just-more-red-dots.html
posted by Michael Homan Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Nothing Fishy Here, Just More Red Dots for Bingler
Steven Bingler’s company, Concordia, will be receiving $3.8 million to plan for the rebuilding of public schools. Hopefully they’ll bring in the same type of community involvement they did with the Unified New Orleans Plan, and we’ll get to stick red dots on a map to show where we live, and then go home. If we as a community can put more red dots in Mid-City, we just might get a better school. Thanks for listening. I would only have charged $2.8 million for that type of community involvement, but of course the bids will never be released to the public. I wonder just what it would take for Concordia to read the recovery plan crafted by the people who live in Mid-City?
http://thinknola.com/post/so-much-for-the-rsd-master-plan/
So Much for the RSD Master Plan
December 12th, 2007
Matt McBride
“ …That’s 25 schools to be taken down with hardly any public notice. One would think demolition of 25 schools would be important to a Master Planning effort.
I can’t find any evidence that the RSD master planning effort has moved past the first public meeting. Here’s the website meant to keep citizens informed (it supposedly launched November 5):
http://www.sfmpop.org
It hasn’t been updated since the announcement of the first meeting on November 17th. It says “Full Web Site Coming Soon.†“
http://thinknola.com/post/rsd-civic-participation-joke/
Have You Heard the Latest Joke In Civic Participation? Planning the Future of School Facilities as They Are Demolished
February 19th, 2008
Alan Gutierrez
We’ve been receiving email notifications from the School Facilities Master Plan. As our intrepid fellow citizen reporter, Matt McBride told us So much for the RSD master plan:
‘As I mentioned in my Monday email, the state-run Recovery School District has been pulling demolition permits for schools all over town. This is not entirely news.
What is news is that they are supposed to be engaging in a Master Planning process involving the public simultaneously. Tell me, how can the RSD engage the public in a plan if they’re not telling the public what’s going on?’
We’re supposed to be filling out unscientific surveys, categorizing ourselves as parents or advocates, and sitting through visualization exercises. Through this guided meditation, we’re supposed to determine the future of the public school facilities in the City of New Orleans.
This is feel-good civic participation that has nothing to do with bricks and mortar… Read through the experience of Bart Everson in his post So dark the con of man:
‘ We did some kind of silly exercise that involved talking to other people at our table about what we hoped the schools would be like in ten years. Then we were instructed to imagine a visitor coming to the future New Orleans and checking out the schools and being very impressed. As they leave the city, what’s their overall impression of the schools? We discussed this with the people at our table.
Then Steve Bingler got up and made a presentation. In 2006 Bingler was the target of many a blogger’s wrath — or at least skepticism. He derided the old “factory school†model and hyped a new model which combines public amenities with schools.
Then we all answered multiple-choice questions on a form, while discussing them with our group. The questions were phrased in such a way as to be extremely leading.’
While we’re subjected to yet another humiliating civic participation process purported to be citizen input on New Orleans public school facilities, the Recovery School District has spent the last two months pushing to demolish 27 facilities.
Three of these facilities are on the “K-8 School Planning Area B†meeting agenda tonight. Those are Hardin, Shaw and Lockett elementary schools. When you attend tonights meeting, you’ll be asked to sit at a table representing the facility that is most interesting to you. You’ll be invited to imagine the future of the facility.
You will not be told that the RSD already has a demolition permit for the facility of your imagination.
Is it all imagination? Are we asked to look at and review the actual facilities? Some of them are structures rich in the history of New Orleans and African-American history, or are we simply going to share our feelings?
Mrs. Aletha Davis Duncan says in the comments of Matt McBride’s Recovery School District demolition post…
‘RSD has completely ignored the history of our schools and are taking the easy way out, “tear them down†and to hell with the people who once went there and their feelings about their neighborhood schools…
I thought smaller class sizes (should be)was an important issue. Tearing down these schools will cause the new schools to take on a larger population - larger class sizes and back to the problem of teachers not being able to reach/teach effectively…
I oppose the demolition of Johnson C. Lockett and Valena C. Jones because of their historical significance to the neighborhoods in which they are located.’
Oh, why does it matter? It’s obvious that our input into the future of these public buildings on public land are not important to the RSD. They are eager to raze building and close schools.
Why do they bother with the pretense of civic participation? Because they are required to and because it actually makes it easier down the road to show people the sign in sheets and say, yes the wholesale demolition of New Orleans Public Schools is just what these people wanted.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Think New Orleans.
http://www.savefrederickdouglass.com/
May 2008 Bywater News about plans to close Douglass
High School Closing?
After 68 years on St. Claude Avenue, Frederick Douglass High School (formerly Nicholls) may soon be empty. The Recovery School District’s Master Plan, to be revealed at the end of May, calls for the building’s closure, although the school itself would be recreated as a Public Safety Academy, holding its first classes in portable units located in the lower ninth ward. The school’s principal announced these changes at a hastily called public meeting April 9, indicating that next year’s freshmen could be the first class to move into trailers and pursue the new curriculum.
But the more than 50 people who attended this meeting have a different idea of what the future should hold for Douglass and its students. Alumni, teachers, and neighborhood residents are meeting regularly in order to determine an alternate and brighter future for this Bywater landmark. Left out of the planning process (the consultant held only one public meeting for input), this dedicated group has already begun to collect signatures on a petition to keep Frederick Douglass High School open and improve its core curriculum.
The idea of a Police/Fire/Public Safety Academy was a shock to Coalition members, who had developed plans for a college prep/arts curriculum community school and presented these to both the former and current RSD superintendent Paul Vallas. Apparently these plans were either not presented to Concordia, the consultant on the Master Plan, or disregarded. The Public Safety idea has been credited to Mr. Vallas.
The planned closure of Douglass has been attributed to a $35 million repair estimate; yet other RSD schools with multi-million dollar price tags will be upgraded and remain open. At an April 14th status report to state schools superintendent Paul Pastorek, questions about the future of Douglass were not answered, and a vitriolic Vallas declared that it was all the community’s fault for doing nothing for 40 years.
On April 16 a meeting was held to strategize how to save our school, and another meeting is scheduled for April 29 at 6 p.m. at Douglass School. These meetings are leading up to a May 6 meeting with Paul Vallas, also at Douglass, at 4:30 p.m. To get involved please come to one or both of these meetings, or contact Ze’ daLuz at 947-8884. There are better solutions to the upgrades needed at Douglass than to close the school and have students placed in trailers in a poorly drained field! Let’s find those solutions and be proud of our school and our students.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/27/AR2006092702134.html
Heralded Iraq Police Academy a ‘Disaster’
BAGHDAD, Sept. 27 — A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.
The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed “the rain forest.â€
“This is the most essential civil security project in the country — and it’s a failure,†said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. “The Baghdad police academy is a disaster.â€
… Even in a $21 billion reconstruction effort that has been marred by cases of corruption and fraud, failures in training and housing Iraq’s security forces are particularly significant because of their effect on what the U.S. military has called its primary mission here: to prepare Iraqi police and soldiers so that Americans can depart.
Federal investigators said the inspector general’s findings raise serious questions about whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has failed to exercise effective oversight over the Baghdad Police College or reconstruction programs across Iraq, despite charging taxpayers management fees of at least 4.5 percent of total project costs. The Corps of Engineers said Wednesday that it has initiated a wide-ranging investigation of the police academy project.
The report serves as the latest indictment of Parsons Corp., the U.S. construction giant that was awarded about $1 billion for a variety of reconstruction projects across Iraq. After chronicling previous Parsons failures to properly build health clinics, prisons and hospitals, Bowen said he now plans to conduct an audit of every Parsons project.
“The truth needs to be told about what we didn’t get for our dollar from Parsons,†Bowen said. A spokeswoman for Parsons said the company had not seen the inspector general’s report.
The Coalition Provisional Authority hired Parsons in 2004 to transform the Baghdad Police College, a ramshackle collection of 1930s buildings, into a modern facility whose training capacity would expand from 1,500 recruits to at least 4,000. The contract called for the firm to remake the campus by building, among other things, eight three-story student barracks, classroom buildings and a central laundry facility…Complaints about the new facilities, however, began pouring in two weeks after the recruits arrived at the end of May, a Corps of Engineers official said…The most serious problem was substandard plumbing that caused waste from toilets on the second and third floors to cascade throughout the building. A light fixture in one room stopped working because it was filled with urine and fecal matter. The waste threatened the integrity of load-bearing slabs, federal investigators concluded.
The Baghdad Police College was built so poorly that feces and urine trickle from the ceilings, and floors rise inches off the ground and crack apart.
“When we walked down the halls, the Iraqis came running up and said, ‘Please help us. Please do something about this,’ †Bowen recalled.
Phillip A. Galeoto, director of the Baghdad Police College, wrote an Aug. 16 memo that catalogued at least 20 problems: shower and bathroom fixtures that leaked from the first day of occupancy, concrete and tile floors that heaved more than two inches off the ground, water rushing down hallways and stairwells because of improper slopes or drains in bathrooms, classroom buildings with foundation problems that caused structures to sink. Galeoto noted that one entire building and five floors in others had to be shuttered for repairs, limiting the capacity of the college by up to 800 recruits. His memo, too, pointed out that the urine and feces flowed throughout the building and, sometimes, onto occupants of the barracks. “This is not a complete list,†he wrote, but rather a snapshot of “issues we are confronted with on a daily basis (as recent as the last hour) by the incomplete and/or poor work left behind by these builders.â€
The Parsons contract, which eventually totaled at least $75 million, was terminated May 31 “due to cost overruns, schedule slippage, and sub-standard quality,†according to a Sept. 4 internal military memo. But rather than fire the Pasadena, Calif.-based company for cause, the contract was halted for “the government’s convenience.†…Federal investigators who visited the academy last week, though, expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the buildings and worries that fecal residue could cause a typhoid outbreak or other health crisis.
“They may have to demolish everything they built,†said Robert DeShurley, a senior engineer with the inspector general’s office. “The buildings are falling down as they sit.â€
Inside the inspector general’s office in Baghdad on a recent blistering afternoon, several federal investigators expressed amazement that such construction blunders could be concentrated in one project. Even in Iraq, they said, failure on this magnitude is unusual. When asked how the problems at the police college compared with other projects they had inspected, the answers came swiftly.
“This is significant,†said Jon E. Novak, a senior adviser in the office.
“It’s catastrophic,†DeShurley added. Bowen said: “It’s the worst.â€
From Amy Lafont, New Orleans public school parent
Notes on Bingler litigation history research:
“In September 2007 I testified at the BESE committee meeting in New Orleans at UNO. I related my experiences with Dr. Jarvis, UNOP and the recovery planning processes. I expressed concerns about apparent bid-rigging between Dr. Jarvis and Steve Bingler in late 2006 and early 2007, in reported weekly non-public meetings while Dr. Jarvis refused to be accessible to communities for planning, and Bingler subsequently received a $3.8 million contract to design master plans for N.O. schools only months later. There were many, many problems with the $10 million UNOP process Mr. Bingler led, including the lack of inclusion of specific information in the Citywide reports, the recommendations for multiple future planning processes, and the lack of specific information and decision making about public facilities needed for direction in the recovery. Additionally, I am extremely concerned that the future of education facilities for New Orleans children has been placed in the hands of Mr. Bingler and Parson’s, a firm presently under Federal investigation for its extreme, on-going failures and potential fraud in rebuilding Iraq, particularly the Baghdad Police Academy.
After the BESE meeting, BESE member Mr. Walter Lee, who is the superintendent of schools for DeSoto Parish, Louisiana, affirmed that the BESE board would investigate this questionable contract, and he would make sure of it, since his district had already had a very negative experience with Concordia. He suggested I follow up by calling his office for more information. On September 21, 2007, I called the DeSoto Parish Schools offices and on Mr. Lee’s instructions I was put through to Mr. Steven Stanfield, who is the Senior Business Officer for DeSoto Parish Schools, and the President of Government Finance Officers of Louisiana. Mr. Stanfield was very gracious with his time with me out of concern for the people of New Orleans presently having to go through a bad experience the people of DeSoto Parish had already been through. Mr. Stanfield said he would testify before BESE or other government agencies about his experience with Concordia and Steve Binger over 12 years.
Here are my notes summarized from our conversation:
‘In 1987 DeSoto Parish passed a tax to build new schools. 4 new board members had just been elected and somehow they found Steve Bingler in New Orleans. Bingler made a pitch that he had built other schools, although they later found out he had actually built zero at that time. His designs were so far from what had been passed for taxes and funded in agreement with the taxpayers that the District had to go to the State Supreme Court for the design not being in compliance with the tax bond issuance and the promise made to voters of what they were funding to construct. Bingler then had responsibility for site selection, and chose a site with a $3million oil and gas environmental cleanup. He should have known about the contamination, and chose a bad site. Then for mechanical engineers he used an HVAC firm from Seattle, resulting in very inappropriate climate control systems and unreasonably high energy costs, which would have made the brand-new school facility financially unsustainable. The construction bids came in over $3 million over budget and many contractors complained that the plans were unreadable. The District finally fired and went to court with Bingler. The case went on in court for 12 years. The expert passed away. The District walked away from the lawsuit with no money. Mr. Stanfield noted he “wouldn’t hire Steve Bingler to build a dog house.” He said the District paid Bingler $1.2 million for nothing. He said Concordia wanted reimbursables for everything under the sun, such as travel, telephone, etc., nickel and diming the District. He said Bingler is trying to build monuments to himself. He said if Louisiana had a contractor rating system similar to Ebay, Bingler would not have been able to get a satisfactory rating and would not have been chosen for New Orleans. He should need to prove he has practical experience. There are native Louisiana companies with school-building expertise who successfully complete projects. Bingler should be asked how many schools has he actually built. Budgets should be done to standard formats as agreed by ‘Public Budgeting in America’. Mr. Stanfield did not understand why Bingler would get the Orleans Parish facilities contract since he had been previously sued by a Louisiana Parish School District with bad results.’
Mr. Stanfield suggested I also speak with the attorney for DeSoto Parish, Ken Sills of Baton Rouge. Mr. Sills remembered the litigation. Here are my notes of our conversation of 9/21/07:
‘Bingler represented himself as a well-known and respected architect in school design. His design was too extravagant. The lowest bid was way in excess of the budget and disputes built up. The firm’s people were providing info that the costs would be within budget and when the contractors had the chance to bid, the bids were way over. Disputes from there. Question of redesigning plans arose and the contract with Bingler was terminated. The litigation was over the contract termination. No project Bingler designed was built in DeSoto Parish. The designs produced resulted in bids far in excess of available funds.â€
http://wecouldbefamous.blogspot.com/search/label/Paul%20Vallas
http://wecouldbefamous.blogspot.com/
Monday, January 28, 2008
Recovering the School District
… But let’s be careful here. Vallas wants to get in and get out. Controversies dogged him in Philadelphia once Vallas’ budget bit off more than it could chew. Observe these Vallas quotes from the Philly Inquirer:
“The first two years you literally get to do just about anything you want. You’re a demolition expert,” said Vallas, who can spin the heads of his audience with his incessant speech and ability to rattle off details of his agenda. (they ain’t used to that in Baton Rouge!)
“By year four, there’s a lot of people walking around pissed off because you’re getting so much credit for it. And by year five, you’re chopped liver…”
…He won’t stay in New Orleans as long: “Three years tops.”
Vallas has now learned to get out after he can take credit for spending money quickly but before the budgetary realities catch up to him and begin to make his decisions seem less responsible. Here’s an article detailing some of the anger that developed toward Vallas’ leadership:
It was perhaps one of the best-orchestrated public responses to mounting concerns about the academic and financial condition of the 174,000-student district in years, with members of the clergy, the local NAACP, and advocacy groups joining in.
Parents, teachers and students complained about rising class sizes, lack of art and music programs, fewer librarians and their fears that even more programs and services would be taken away as a deficit that stands at $182 million next year without cuts and more funding is closed.
I was a public high school student in Philadelphia when Paul Vallas was hired. The district at the time needed miracles. Vallas came in and had all sorts of ideas out in the papers. For years Philly school people had been decrying the state of Pennsylvania for holding back funding from the district. Vallas took a new approach, promising to enact reforms to squeeze new money from the existing budget. He proposed selling off the Philly district’s posh downtown facility and trimming the fat from the bureaucratic staff. He promised new facilities, smaller classrooms, higher scores, safer schools, and so on and so forth. At first, the man was an absolute revelation.
Sound familiar?
The first article I cited provides a good overview of his time in Philadelphia, it’s “Vallas in with roar, out with rancor”
Here’s a letter to Vallas from Michael Nutter, hero of the Philly internet community and the man who will take over as mayor in January.
Tom Ferrick, an ace columnist with the Inquirer writes a send-off to “the master of pretend and spend”
A take from Young Philly Politics. Here’s another FANTASTIC take by those fellas on the media’s Vallas-inspired boner.
Here’s Vallas embroiled in a severance pay controversy, but that might just be sour grapes on both sides.
Meanwhile, Philly’s public school district is still looking for miracles. Paul Vallas is famous.
The lesson he learned is that he needs to leave sooner, before his budget fantasies turn into budget realities. He hasn’t learned that he needs to be a more realistic and responsible steward of a budget.
The Baton Rouge people got their pants charmed off and won’t provide the guidance and oversight to force Vallas be a responsible CEO.
“The first two years you literally get to do just about anything you want.”
They will, however, happily stonewall the city of New Orleans three years from now when we have a multi-million dollar school budget shortfall and look to the state capital for a bailout. Baton Rouge might hate New Orleans more than Harrisburg hates Philadelphia. Vallas won’t have to worry though, because he’ll be on a plane to another city giving interviews for puff pieces in that town’s local papers, Time magazine, and the New York Times. Vallas won’t have to worry about “all those people walking around pissed off because he’s getting the credit,” he’ll be long-gone. “Three years tops.”
Mr. Vallas, please don’t get ahead of yourself. We know this is an emergency. Let’s be sensible. I want to like you. We know you know that nobody is watching you. When you move on to bigger things (he’s run for governor of Illinois in the past) upon the “achievements” that you’ve broken our budget to list on your resume, please try not to saddle us with additional burdens to the ones you inherited.
——————–
That’s what I wrote in October.
———————
Since then, We Could Be Famous has remained largely silent on the Recovery School District, Mr. Vallas, and the state of public education in New Orleans.
I had to learn a few things, myself.
And though I still have a great deal to learn (about everything), I have indeed studied a whole bunch of material related to the RSD and Mr. Vallas’ record in Philadelphia.
My silence on public schools must end.
Indeed, I think I’m running for Mayor and I’m the only candidate who cares about children.
This week, barring unforeseen developments, I hope to present what I’ve discovered.
—
In the meantime, the RSD has been making headlines.
Sometimes district news makes you cringe about how bad things have deteriorated in our public schools over the years. This is from December 8th:
Halfway through the school year, the Recovery District is still discovering millions of dollars in unpaid bills from last school year, causing what Superintendent Paul Vallas calls a “cash flow” problem that will delay teacher bonuses by two weeks.
“There was no budget” last year, Vallas said, when asked why invoices from last school year are still popping up. Vallas took the helm over the summer after the state-run system’s tumultuous first year.
The district is trying to build a detailed budget for the 2007-08 school year — from scratch — and hopes to have one finished by February.
—
Pastorek said the district is in a difficult position because it gets reimbursed from FEMA for capital costs long after it spends the money — and sometimes long after the contractors need to be paid.
He told the state board this week that “every day is a crisis in the RSD financially because of cash flow problems.”
(Kind of fits into this larger context, no?)
That promised item-by-item budget has yet to materialize. This past Thursday, a long-time Vallas lieutenant who had major budget responsibilities, decided to leave the district…
Simultaneously, Mr. Vallas was making personnel changes elsewhere, firing the principal of Rabouin High, the largest school in the RSD.
Addressing the move at Rabouin, Vallas said, “I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty about why she was reassigned. Suffice to say, I felt I needed a stronger leader . . . People need to get used to the fact that, on occasion, we will go in, and if we feel a leadership change is good for the school, that’s what we will do.”
—-
“I never want to work for the Recovery School District again,” she said. “I felt blindsided and I do not want to continue my career being uncomfortable.”
She blamed the school’s troubles on a wide-ranging lack of support from administration.
“I really think I did a great job with what we started off with and what we had to work with. I gave my all — 12, 14, 16 hours a day. I never missed a day of work,” said Boyd, a teacher for 10 years and a former assistant principal at Livingston Middle School. “I was met head-on with tons of challenges.”
Boyd’s removal sheds light on the challenges Recovery District schools face
