PAYING ATTENTION!
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| Politics 101 |
Contracts, Contracts, Everywhere Contracts!
The main reason Robert Antonucci and John Silber wanted formally superintendent Jim Scully fired was not the loss of accreditation of the high school. As we established in the last edition, the high school accreditation problem was the smoke screen to remove him. What the Department of Education was really after was education contracts. They spelled it out in writing loud and clear. They wanted to take control of contracts in the Lawrence School System and Jim Scully was not about to let them have it. Contracts were the main part of firing of Jim Scully if you remember. Contracts were part of the smear campaign by the Boston Globe, and contracts were part of the takeover negotiations with the DOE after Scully was wrongfully terminated.
In January
of 1998 a newly elected Patty Dowling, presented the
School Committee with the state’s final offer in the
takeover negotiations. There was only one issue left on
the table. The state Department of Education was willing
to let Lawrence control our own budgets, our own hiring,
and even conceded control of picking a new superintendent
to the School Committee. What they were not willing to
concede was the control of consultant and union
contracts. The millions spent in consultant contracts by
the Lawrence School Department is not a discretionary
amount. The School Committee and superintendent have no
choice as to how much to spend on consultants in the
budget. The state mandates that specific amounts must be
spent on consultants every year. So, what the state
wanted in our final negotiation was the right to award
those consultant contracts in the Lawrence School System.
If that money is not spent on consultants, it can not be
used to buy books or hire teachers. In fact, if we do not
spend the money the way DOE tells us to, we lose all our
funding for the next year. The Mayor, and a few of the
other members were ready to give in on contracts just to
get the agreement signed and over with. But Mike Sweeney,
myself, and Marguerite Kane refused to give away any
local control, and fought to make sure that the
consultant contracts, union contracts and any other
school contracts would be controlled locally as called
for in the Education Reform Act.
Mayor Dowling was very responsive to the differences on
the committee as she recognized that this needed to be a
unanimous show of support or the agreement would never
work. When we signed the final agreement with the state,
we had control over the budget and the contracts as the
state was to act only in an advisory position. The state
wanted to control contracts because very high officials
in the DOE had already promised the high school and
grammar school building projects to certain local people
for their support on the takeover effort in 1997.
Now, two years later, the state has a very deep concern
with the way Lawrence handles it’s education
contracts. All of a sudden the state is lobbying for new
education reform in the Legislature, which will give the
DOE complete control over all contracts because these
“wasteful cities like Lawrence” have been
reported in the Boston Press to be abusing their
financial appropriations on consultant contracts. In
other words, they force the city to hire education
consultants, force us to spend specific amounts of money,
and then when we spend it, the state complains in the
media that we are wasting children’s money. When the
state is finished reworking the formula for the new
Education reform it is going to financially cripple our
schools and put the rest of the city into receivership.
Some say, that is by design.