In celebration of the proposed 1 billion dollar deficit in the Chicago Public Schools and budget roll-out this Friday I thought it would be nice to get a blast from the past (April 2002) to see if Chicago schools have had a history of cronyism, budget fraud and just plain crookery.
'Zombie payrollers' haunt Chicago schools' budgets
Perhaps they aren’t like the classical ‘ghost payrollers’ of the old days, but Chicago has a new breed of clout-heavy —and enormously expensive — payrollers haunting the school system’s $4 billion budget.
When most Chicago Public Schools teachers or career service staff retire, they apply for their pension and either relax or go out in search of part-time work.
Politically connected Board of Education administrators and principals, however, have the option of having their cake and eating it, too. Thanks to policies begun under the Vallas administration,principals and other administrators with clout can "retire" and begin collecting relatively large pensions. At the same time, many remain on the Board of Education payroll in their old job titles, in semi-official positions or, with increasing frequency, as highly paid consultants.
An ongoing investigation by Substance has revealed the tip of what many insiders consider an enormous scandal, one that is costing the school system more than $10 million dollars per year in salaries, secretarial perks, and other hidden costs.
Despite an ongoing effort by top officials of the Chicago Board of Education to thwart full disclosure of the policy to the public through routine violations of the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, Substance has been able to put together a number of pieces of the large puzzle. The puzzle involves the off-the-books placement of dozens — possibly hundreds — of retired and "reassigned" administrators, principals, and other bureaucrats.
After retiring from his full-time job with the Chicago Board of Education, Buzz Sawyer — left at a recent press conference announcing "cuts in the bureaucracy" — returned to work as a consultant at an annual rate of $115,000 (higher than his salary had ever been as a full-time employee). Sawyer is one of dozens (perhaps hundreds) of former officials who have benefited from the deregulation of Chicago’s public schools by becoming private consultants instead of public employees. Substance photo, George N. Schmidt.
The 1995 deregulation of Chicago’s public schools opened the door to unprecedented patronage behind the fig leaf of ‘school reform’...
Most of these activities are not revealed at the monthly public meetings of the school board. New policies recommended by Chicago Board of Education president Michael Scott keep large numbers of consulting contracts from coming before the public at on the meetings’ agendas. Nor do the costs of these appointments appear in any form in the annual school board budgets, which are made available to the public and subject to public hearings.
Instead, the enormous costs of these payrollers are now buried throughout the budget of the vast school system, while the payrollers themselves are spread from one end of the vast city to the other. The people involved report to work at school board places across Chicago. The various locations of central office staff now include the Board of Education’s Loop headquarters (at 125 S. Clark St.); its subsidiary headquarters (at the old Medill school on the west side); the offices of the Inspector General (located at 310 S. Michigan Ave.); at two additional headquarters staff centers (located at Julian High School and Wadsworth Elementary School on the south side); at the system’s six "Region Offices"; and, in many cases, at elementary and high schools across the city.
The combination of budget dishonesty, the suppression of public information, and the relocation of what was once the central office now make oversight impossible for all but the most knowledgeable insiders. These payrollers report to work at some of the system’s more than 600 school buildings and branches — and in more than a half dozen administrative and quasi-administrative offices.
"Chicago learned its lesson," said one school staff member who asked not to be named. "They don’t want to put politically powerful payrollers into ‘Ghost’ positions where they don’t show up and never do work. This new generation can’t be called ‘ghost’ payrolling, because they are really there. But since some of them come back from the dead after retirement, maybe this new thing can be called ‘Zombie Payrolling.’"
Whether ghosts or zombies, the number of patronage employees being paid salaries and consulting fees that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago has been increasing enormously since Chicago’s City Hall took over the public schools under deregulation seven years ago.
Prominent examples abound:
* During most of the 2000-2001 school year, former District Superintendent Reginald V. Brown Jr., who had retired prior to the beginning of the Vallas administration, worked as "Interim Principal" at Julian High School on the far south side. Brown bragged that his $300 per day salary was guaranteed. At the same time, Brown was also drawing a pension of $75,000 per year from the Public School Teachers and Retirement Fund of Chicago. Nothing in the public reports of the Chicago Board of Education during the past 24 months mentions the fact that Brown received more than $100,000 per year in pay and benefits from the Chicago schools budget during that time.\
* For at least the past two years, Chicago has paid a large but undisclosed pension to Buzz Sawyer through its municipal pension fund, which covers career service employees. A former top financial official of the school board, Sawyer retired years ago, then continued to work in his old job as a "consultant." On March 27, 2002, the Chicago Board of Education (according to Board Report 02-0327-PR19), without discussion, renewed a consulting agreement with Sawyer that will pay him $115,000 during the coming year.
* A similar consulting agreement is in force to retain the services of Andrew Gilchrist, who once served as Interim Chief Financial Officer of the school board. Gilchrist himself is not named in the annual board reports that approve his current salaries because he has established a corporation, located at his home, from which his contracts are handled.
* For the past three years (at least), retired principal Robert E. Bures has been paid $30,000 as a consultant in reading. Bures was hired by Paul Vallas on a no-bid basis (according to the board report) "because of his extensive experience and unique qualifications in the area of student preparation for taking standardized tests and because of his initial development of the program during the previous year..." Bures also receives $57,000 per year as his pension.
* Paul Vallas was awarded a consulting contract worth at least $250,000 at the time of his resignation in June 2001. Vallas was supposed to provide the school board with "general consulting services as reasonably requested by the Board..." In addition to being paid his regular salary through September 30, 2002, Vallas also receives his "Board-offered benefits." Between June 27, 2001, when the agreement was signed, and March 19, 2002, when he was defeated in his bid for the Democratic nomination for governor, Vallas had not provided any written materials to the Chicago Board of Education.
* One of Vallas’s top deputies, Chief of Schools and Regions Blondean Davis, was also awarded a consulting contract (worth at least $150,000) when she left the system last summer. Davis is now drawing a pension in excess of $100,000 per year from the Chicago teachers pension fund and recently applied for a job as head of the suburban Orland Park school system.
Retired administrators earning large consulting contracts are one of the most important secrets currently being withheld from the public by the Chicago Board of Education’s routine violations of the Illinois Freedom of Information and Open Meetings laws.
By far the largest number of those earning pay in this category, however, are principals who have either lost their positions or been reassigned due to problems at their schools. One example that has recently caught the attention of critics is the controversial principal of Kenwood and Phillips high schools, Beverly LaCoste.
"[Beverly] La Coste officially retired as Principal of Philips High School more than two months ago," an informed source in the administration, who asked to remain anonymous, told Substance. ". . . She is still working as a consultant, usually Tuesdays through Thursdays, at Philips — supposedly to help the current ‘Acting Principal’, Dr. Samuel Williams. I hear she’s getting over $300 a day. They built her a little office, put in electric hookups for computers and phones, the whole deal. Not to mention that everyone seems to run major decisions on school policy, staffing, and things like that past her [La Coste] before they go to Williams with them — if he gets them at all. I don’t get it; I heard he [Williams] worked as a principal at Englewood. Why does he need all this help to run a smaller school than the one he came from? And La Coste didn’t set the world on fire while she was here, were still down near the bottom on everything academic. What makes her such an irreplaceable expert? I think it’s just the central office taking care of someone with clout."
Ms. La Coste came to Philips in 1996 from Kenwood high school, where her career as principal was stormy. At Kenwood, according to Substance reporters Leo Gorenstein, who taught at Kenwood at the time, La Coste held the distinction of having more grievances for work rules violations filed against her by teachers than any principal in CPS history.
La Coste was appointed to Phillips by Paul Vallas. She arrived at Kenwood after Vallas, with help from outside contractor Barbara Sizemore, forced out the previous principal, Juanita Tucker, and fired half the staff under the guise of "Reconstitution." That term is a euphemism for the Board administration taking over a school, appointing a new principal, and giving that principal the power to hire and fire staff without worrying about union rules. This process was also known as ‘re-engineering’ and intervention.’
One of the many unusual appointments to Arne Duncan’s "leadership team" was University of Chicago Consortium executive John Easton (above right, with CEO Arne Duncan, above left, at an October 2001 press conference). Under a special arrangement between the University of Chicago and the Chicago Board of Education, Easton, a former full-time employee of the public school system, is being paid $100,000 per year as a consultant to the school board. Easton has retained his position at the Consortium as well. The Consortium — the recipient, directly and indirectly, of more than $1 million in contracts from the Chicago Board of Education since 1995 — has benefited in many ways from a special relationship with the school system’s top executives, beginning with Paul Vallas and continuing with Arne Duncan. That special relationship has given Consortium researchers unprecedented and complete access to school system computers since the mid-1990s — provided the Consortium’s executives and published reports do not criticize the policies of the school board or Chicago’s claims that the Daley administration engineered a miraculous turnaround in the city’s 600 public schools after deregulation began in 1995. As a result, Consortium materials provide scholars from outside Chicago with important information supporting the city’s public relations version of the school system’s post-1995 realities. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.
JoAnn Roberts (above) wasted millions of dollars between July 2000 and July 2001 as the $115,000-per year head of the school system’s disastrous ‘Intervention’ attack on the city’s poorest high schools, teachers, and principals. Ms. Roberts even decked five high schools with massive banners claiming that the schools’ test scores would surpass ‘national norms’ by statistically impossible goals after one brief year of ‘Intervention.’ It proved impossible to cook the books according to Roberts’s recipe, and the ‘Intervention’ program collapsed. It was exposed as a massively bungled failure after test data were released in June 2001, but Roberts was quietly reassigned by Paul Vallas to a principalship. Vallas’s successor, Arne Duncan, continued Intervention without the expensive central bureaucracy that Roberts had overseen, while Ms. Roberts herself went to Donohue Elementary School. With Ms. Roberts is Dion Smith, who has been serving in the post of ‘Deputy Chief Fiscal Officer’ at a salary of more than $110,000 per year since April 2000. Prior to the creation of the position for Mr. Smith, it did not exist. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.
Goofy failures — ‘Intervention’ and ‘Reconstitution’ in the high schools are just two examples — destroy teachers, not the administrators who concocted them
Under La Coste, as our source stated, Philips didn’t improve to any meaningful extent in the TAP or other high school tests, but once LaCoste was in place and loyal to Vallas, the school no longer faced the threats the continued to be wielded against other inner city high schools with comparable problems. If test scores are the measure of a school administration’s success or failure (and Substance policy disagrees with this measure), then Philips is still one of the "bottom" five high schools in Chicago. Including the school’s dropout rate, low attendance, and discipline problems — or any of the myriad Vallas-set criteria by which schools were to be rated and subsequently rewarded or punished — Phillips has not improved since LaCoste arrived there. When Substance called Philips high School on March 20th, the clerk told us that "Ms. La Coste has retired and is no longer working here."
* At Austin High School, Arthur Slater(consultant 2010), upon receiving a four-year contract from the school’s Local School Council (LSC) a year ago. According to Substance sources, Slater then simply decided he no longer wished to be principal. Paul Vallas let him move into an unspecified position in the Region Three Office, which is housed inside the Austin High School building. He is being paid out of the Schools and Regions budget, according to Substance sources, but still brags, according to Region Three sources, that he is "one of the highest paid principals in the system."
Austin High School, meanwhile, currently has a full-time principal, Lerna Brewer-Baker, so Mr. Slater’s position would seem to be superfluous, if not redundant. Mr. Slater did not return Substance’s phone calls. One principal who objected to the refusal of the Board of Education was Shirley Woodard, who has waited three years to take her position as head of the South Loop Elementary School. At the board’s February meeting, Woodard informed a surprised Michael Scott that she had won a lawsuit to be returned to her job at South Loop, only to find herself assigned to a desk at the Region Three Office, where she remains as of this writing. At the March school board meeting, a parent from South Loop detailed the devastation at the school that has taken place since Woodard was removed illegally from her job by Paul Vallas.
Some principals find productive work in exile
Not every principal working outside the schools is underemployed and possibly featherbedding.
"I’m very happy working for the Office of Schools and Regions" ex-Harper principal Richard Parker told Substance in a phone interview. Parker works at 125 S. Clark St supervising staff in the area also known as ‘Camp Beverly.’ ‘Camp Beverly’ is in the 10th floor of central office headquarters where suspended (or otherwise not working administrators and teachers) are kept until all legal matters have been concluded.
"I’ve been at the Office of Schools and Regions for more than two years," Parker said. "I have no desire to return to the schools as a principal or in any other capacity."
In answer to a question, Mr. Parker said "I don’t have any contract with the CPS. I’m getting my full pay as a reassigned principal. I work regular hours [8:30 to 4:30]. Why go back to a school?"
He was originally ‘reassigned’ there as another example of Paul Vallas’ idea of punishment under "Reconstitution" during the summer of 1997. The reassignment of Parker was supposed to help improve Harper High School. According to the Board of Education’s June 2001 TAP test results, Harper High School remains among the city’s worst scores, four years after Vallas ousted Parker (and two dozen teachers, some of whom were subsequently fired) in a move Vallas claimed would improve the South Side school.
Unlike most of those who have been the subject of this investigation, Parker can cite the work he does as an administrator in the Office of Schools and Regions. That office was headed for six years by Blondean Davis (now-retired but earning a one-year consulting fee estimated to be valued at more than $130,000) and is now headed by William McGowan.
"I’ve worked on plenty of assignments since I’ve been here," Parker told Substance.
"I’ve coordinated the Academic Decathlon, [handled relations with] the Rotary Club, organized the Winter-term graduation, end-of-school-year projects, and other assignments. I enjoyed doing all of them."
Nathanial Mason is currently the principal of Harper. He is assigned. Like Mr. Parker, Mr. Mason is getting full principal’s pay.
From DuSable to Clark St.
In September of 2000, Loretta Lesley, the interim principal at DuSable was moved to ‘Camp Beverly’. DuSable was yet another high school that was "reconstituted," etc. during the late 1990s Vallas purge, although the 2000 purges were called "Intervention." DuSable too has a new principal, Gloria Archibald. Under the Vallas rules, teachers who were displaced from positions had a maximum of one-year to find a new job or be taken off the payroll. The same rules apparently did not apply to teachers.
At least two central office staff at 125 S. Clark Street claim that Ms. Lesley was still there last fall and winter. She was drawing her principal’s salary, funded through the Office of Schools and Regions — long after her one-year grace period should have expired, had principals faced the same rules applied to teachers.
Chief Officer William McGowan of the Department of Schools and Regions was "on vacation," according to his office, during the time Substance made inquiries for this article. Other central office administrators failed to return Substance’s phone calls. McGowan’s vacation was over by March 27, when he was present at the Chicago Board of Education’s monthly meeting.
If the Chicago Board of Education did not routinely violate the Open Meetings Act and the Freedom of Information Act, even the Sun-Times and Tribune could see the corruption at the top
After promising he would allow her to remain as principal of Bowen High School, Paul Vallas removed principal Alejandra Alvarez in July 2000, after Bowen was placed on "Intervention" following a hearing that was considered a kangaroo court by the majority of school staff. Alvarez is presently working at 125 S. Clark St., while Fausto Lopez — whom many staff, parents, and students consider sadly inept in the face of Bowen’s challenges — continues as Bowen’s intervention principal.
Without any of the fanfare that accompanied its beginning, "Intervention" even lost its teacher bashing chief after only one year. JoAnn Roberts, who was hailed in the media when she and Paul Vallas first attacked five supposedly "failing" high schools in the spring and summer of 2000, was quietly removed from her $115,000-per-year position as intervention head by Arne Duncan in August 2001. Roberts is now working as principal of the Donohue Elementary School on the South Side at the same salary she was making when she headed the highly publicized "Intervention" attack on inner city high school principals and teachers.
"This really sucks," a Chicago public high school teacher who asked to remain anonymous told Substance. "The Board, the Mayor, and the Governor are already poor-mouthing this year’s and next year’s school budget. You know they’re going to tell the public there is no money to give those ‘greedy little teachers’ a raise. But there seems to plenty of money for central office bureaucrats and to pay for two principals at some of the worst schools in the city just because they have clout.
"Here’s my plan. Fire everyone who isn’t in a classroom or dealing directly with school children," the teacher continued. "Do that and you’d have enough money for a 20 percent raise for every teacher and a more efficient school system to boot!"
Substance has filed a Freedom of Information Act request in an effort to find out how many "ex," "retired," and "reassigned" principals are still being paid as regular school principals, who are still on the administrative payroll, or who are working as highly paid consultants without working in a Chicago public school.
Substance also filed a Freedom of Information request for information on the 45 members of CEO Arne Duncan’s "management team." Duncan’s "team" was announced in July 2001, but the board reports appointing these individuals still have not been approved in all cases.
In a FOIA request dated August 29, 2001 and reiterated by mail and fax on February 15, 2002, Substance asked for
* the names of all the persons listed on the "team";
* their budgeted salary;
* a job title and job description for each;
* a copy of the curriculum vitae of each.
The Board of Education continues to refuse to provide the job descriptions and curriculum vitaes of the majority of the 45 highest paid managers in the city’s school system. In many cases, the salaries are also being kept secret from the public.
A growing number of staff members — including many within the school board’s Clark St. headquarters — now joke openly that the only qualification for a $100,000-per-year management job in Chicago’s public school system is that the person claiming the job has a political sponsor and no teaching experience. Some also say that top Chicago school officials are now required know nothing about public schools and have a sponsor "up the street" or "from The Hall."
The phrases "from up the street" and "from "The Hall" refer to Chicago’s City Hall. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s office is located on the fifth floor of City Hall, three blocks from Arne Duncan’s CEO offices (which are on the fifth floor at 125 S. Clark St.).
"They will never give you that information, no matter what the law says," a school official who asked to remain anonymous told Substance in late March. "Even the Sun-Times and Tribune couldn’t ignore the story when it came out that the dozens of the highest paid people on Arne’s ‘management team’ — quote unquote — are even less qualified that the CEO himself. And what will people say if they ever learn that hundreds of others arenow in high paying jobs across the school system because they’ve been put there because of their clout with the Daley administration."
Original Article
By Tom Sharp
http://www.substancenews.net
William McGowan (right at the February 2002 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education) refuses to answer media questions about "Camp Beverly" and the policies of the Chicago Board of Education of assigning retired and reassigned principals to the Office of Schools and Regions (now headed by McGowan), to the school system’s six region offices, or to schools. In March, McGowan’s office regularly told Substance that he was "on vacation" while he worked in his job as Chief of Schools and Regions and attended numerous meetings, including the March 27 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education. (Substance Photo by George N. Schmidt).
- This article was published in Substance eight years ago, and that things have gotten worse since then.
- Some of the people we were talking about eight years ago are still working in the system (JoAnn Roberts is principal of Paderewski, for example) while others (John Easton) are now working for the U.S. Department of Education, helping spread the Chicago plan.
- This article was posted on the "old" Substance site and that we are now updating to the current site.
To this day CPS continues to manipulate the personnel files and refuse to disclose who is working for CPS and how much they make.
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