The Vallas Jobs Program: Connecticut Residents Need Not Apply

Jul 30

jonpeltoBridgeport, Paul Vallas 29 Comments

What’s a million dollars between friends… (especially when taxpayers think cuts are being  made).

Anyone with a child in Bridgeport’s public schools understands that funding is scarce.  Some school programs are being modified, others are being cut and teachers and professional staff are being let go or transferred.

What taxpayers may not know is that while Paul Vallas, Bridgeport’s $229,000 part-time Superintendent of Schools brags of cutting central office expenses, he has “found” the funds to hire a new set of central office administrators with a combined salary and consultant fees of over $1 million dollars.

Furthermore, every single one of these new administrators was brought in from outside of Connecticut.

Many list themselves as being part of “The Vallas Group,” the Superintendent’s private consulting company.  Others are consultants that Vallas has worked with in the past, especially when he was the CEO of the Philadelphia school system.

Connecticut ranks 1st or 2nd in the nation in the number of college graduates per capita.

There are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of extraordinarily talented school administrators in the State of Connecticut, and yet Paul Vallas could not find a single qualified Connecticut resident to hire as a new senior administrator in his Central Office operation?

Just take a look at Vallas’ Bridgeport Management Team:

Connecticut residents in BLUE = There are none!

NAME

TITLE

DAILY RATE

SALARY

Paul Vallas

Superintendent of Schools

$229,000

Dr. Sandra Kase

Chief Administrative Officer

$900 Per Day

$220,000+

Marlene Siegel

Chief Financial Officer

$800 Per Day

$197,000+

Don Kennedy

Chief Operating Officer

$900 Per Day

$220,000+

Don Cochran

Executive Dir. Human Resources

NOT LISTED

NOT LISTED

Shively Willingham

Special Assistant to the Superintendent

$500 Per Day

$136,000+

Marcel Kshensky

Grievance Officer (50 days)

$500 Per Day

$25,000

Lawrence Block

Mentor/Professional Development (90 days)

$750 Per Day

$67,500

Maria DiMarco

Mentor/Professional Development (90 days)

$800 per Day

$72,000

Wendy Shapiro

Mentor/Professional Development (90 days)

$700 Per Day

$63,000

Anne Gargan

Mentor/Professional Development (90 days)

$800 Per Day

$72,000

Edvige Mancuso

Mentor/Professional Development (90 days)

$800 Per Day

$72,000

Ozborne Wright

Mentor/Professional Development (30 days)

$500 Per Day

$15,000

Wendy Gussack

Curriculum Development (20 days)

$600 Per Day

$10,000

 

Every document Team Vallas send out refers to his claim that, under his leadership, Bridgeport’s “Central Office has undergone a 32% reduction in force as part of the district’s 2012-2013 budget and school improvement plan with the funneling of additional resources and personnel going directly into schools.  Pretty  impressive that he dumped one in every three central office staff people.

He goes on to point out that he has eliminated any long-term contracts and that all senior central office staff are now only on one year contracts or working on a per diem basis.

And Vallas’ budget documents note that the real bargain is that the taxpayers of Bridgeport and Connecticut don’t even have to pay for the central office staff.  According to the documents, “the cost of Superintendent Vallas’ salary and additional Central Office administrator salaries were offset in the 2012 budget by foundation support provided by the Fairfield County Community Foundation.  This support was necessary due to the concurrent cost of former Superintendent John J. Ramos contract.”

So here are a few questions;

(1)   Is Team Vallas claiming that the new foundation provided Bridgeport with more than $1 million dollars to pay for all these new central office administrators?   Hardly.  The amount donated by the foundation barely covers Vallas’ pay and benefits let alone the additional dozen administrators he has brought in.  Most of the $1 million in expenses are being picked up by unsuspecting taxpayers.

(2)   As to the long-term savings, when these  one-year and per diem people leave with Vallas in less than a year, the City will need to hire all new central office administrators, thereby pushing central office costs back up.  (Those costs would increase even further if the Foundation hasn’t committed to providing funds year after year).

(3)   And despite all the talk about fundamental, long-term change and the sustainability of those changes, by failing to hire ANY Connecticut school administrators, who exactly is supposed to continue to implement Vallas’ Five Year Plan when all the administrators that helped create it pack up and move on to “greener” pastures.

(4) And finally, at the July 16th meeting of Bridgeport’s illegal board of education, citizens urged the board to hold approving any more contracts until the new democratically elected board takes office in early September.  According to the Connecticut Post, the Chairman of the illegal board, Robert Trefry, agreed and said he would “defer action on the contracts.”

One of the contracts that was put on hold was a new $143,000 full-time contract with one of Vallas’s people, Shively Willlingham, the Philadelphia principal, that Vallas has been paying $500 dollars a day to serve as a “special assistant superintendent for safety, security and school climate.”

Turns out, “put on hold” is a relative term because the agenda for tonight’s board of education meeting is scheduled to include a vote to hire Willingham after all.  And the best part is that the guy will “start” in his new position on Sept. 4, the very day Bridgeport voters will finally have the opportunity to get the democratically elected board of education they deserve.

The only problem is that board will inherit Paul Vallas, his new $1 million staff, and even more employment contracts that will have to be funded.

 

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  • Roger

    This is great stuff, Jon.  I hope the people of Bridgeport are paying attention.

  • guest

    I guess “cutting central office staff” and slashing administrative costs are two of the popular school reformer claims.  Steven Adamowski brags about doing exactly the same thing in Windham.  I saw some older Hartford BoE minutes, from when Adamowski was Super, and he insisted he was doing that there.  Yet now they have all these new positions, like Chief Talent Officer and Communications Director… I wonder when Secretary of the Privy Chamber will make a comeback?  That was, hundreds of years ago, the official ass-wipe–literally.  What do you think happened in the privy?
    Now all these syncophants are ass-wipes. 

  • Not Born Yesterday

    Bridgeport Public Schools is not exempt from EEO and other federal and state hiring laws, such as the requirement to legally post positions for X days, interview candidates, etc.  Where these laws followed, or did Vallas arbitrarily issue contracts?

  • guest

    Someone was asking about ACLU intervention and lawsuits.  Here is a new one, which sounds promising.  From what some commenters here have written about Adamowski’s fraudulent reforms in Hartford, passing students on regardless of whether they could read or if they showed up in class.  See http://www.educationnews.org/education-policy-and-politics/aclu-files-right-to-read-lawsuit-in-michigan/  and here  http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/16/us/michigan-education-suit/index.html

  • Jeff Klaus

    Under Paul Vallas and Paul Pastorak New Orleans turned itself into a student and parent centered system. The results so far are very promising.

    http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2012/05/new_orleans_charter_schools_ar.html

    • Linda174

      While the New York story played out differently because of the players. local and state politics the script for the wrong-headed school reformers is basically the same. In New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina we changed the criteria for failing schools thus declaring more than 100 public schools as failing and turned it over to the free market (charters).  Just like New York the reforms created a failure, seven years later the New Orleans reformed school district ranked 69 out of 70 of all the school districts in the state taking mandated standardized tests last spring. Equally as disturbing, the high poverty schools in the reformed school district in New Orleans scored lower than the high poverty schools in several cities across Louisiana in 11 of 12 areas tested.  The bottom line is that despite the billions of dollars from the federal government and foundations, firing of all those old bad teachers, no teacher union and no local elected school board the New Orleans reforms failed miserably.

      • guest

        The players aren’t all that different–you had Pryor in New York (Partnership for NYC, working for Kathryn Wylde), moving on to disaster funds, then to Haiti…  While Pryor was implenting some Bloomberg-style school reforms around 2006/7, Vallas’s name actually came up as a potential NYC Superintendent. Connecticut is currently a site of reunification for reformers like Vallas, Pryor, Dacia Toll and other free market, neo-liberal privateers.  Aren’t we lucky?

    • Linda174

      When I asked Paul Vallas what made New Orleans such a promising place for educational reform, he told me that it was because he had no “institutional obstacles” — no school board, no collective bargaining agreement, a teachers’ union with very little power. “No one tells me how long my school day should be or my school year should be,” he said. “Nobody tells me who to hire or who not to hire. I can hire the most talented people. I can promote people based on merit and based on performance. I can dismiss people if they’re chronically nonattending or if they’re simply not performing.”

      On the latter, a quote from an article Vallas wrote for the aforementioned Manhattan Institute:

      We also have flexibility when it comes to work rules, which are decided by the board rather than the state. This has allowed us to do a lot of privatization. Our alternative schools are private schools, as are many of our special-ed schools. Our vocational education programs are also privately run to some extent. And we have contracted out for custodians, lunchroom attendants and the trades. In our system, schools have a choice. If they are not happy with their in-house services, they can privatize them. There’s competition.

      http://madisonamps.org/2012/05/23/who-is-paul-vallas-and-why-is-he-coming-to-madison/

    • guest

      Here is what a real New Orleans parent thinks of Paul Vallas’ “student-centered” and “parent-centered” system http://parentsacrossamerica.org/2011/02/paul-vallas-gets-an-earful-from-karran-royal-harper-in-n-orleans/

    • Linda174

      Here is Vallas having a hissy fit and being told to sit down and shut up…watch until the end…..

      http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PFmXue_luks

    • guest

      Promises, promises.

    • http://www.facebook.com/melanie.savage.1610 Melanie Savage

      Do you actually BELIEVE the crapola that you spew? In other words–are you deluded, or are you a psychopathic liar?

      • guest

        Clearly he is a liar.  Look at his background!  Recall the banking scandals–which occur all the time, by the way, but the most recent ones relating to the sub-prime deals, later bailed out by tax payers.  Klaus has been through all of this.
        Note the move from “mortgage” markets, especially the scandals of lending to the working poor in many cities–those people lost everything, but it was the banks that got bailed out.  Wall Streeters and corporate types then tried to grab social security, but it hasn’t worked out.  Now their eyes are on school children–lots of public money to steal from that pot.
        His wife, Dacia Toll, is rakng it in as head of a charter management organization, and her ties to Pryor go way back.

      • Linda174

        Letters of concern and/or details as to why you are closing your Webster account should be directed to:

        James C. Smith
        Webster Bank, CEO
        Office of the President
        145 Bank Street
        Waterbury, CT 06702

    • Bronx

          It’s amazing that you are this delusional Mr. Klaus. So New Orleans ranking near the bottom of the state is a promising direction? So one arbitrary student a big business owned newspaper props up as a success story makes up for charters bilking millions from taxpayers, taking away constitutional rights from pretty much everyone that didn’t have a relationship with Paul Vallas, and failing the overwhelming majority of the rest of the students? And since when do systems that are ‘student and parent centered” pay hundreds of thousands in salary to thousand dollar suit wearing administrators with bogus titles while leaving the scraps for children?
         I’m wondering how deluded you are on a few other topics…Do you think Stefan Pryor was really named the Commissioner of Education based on his ability and experience level? Do you really consider your wife an altruist, instead of a opportunistic vulture? Do you think Concann receiving a “Bunkum” award from the University of Colorado, for their ridiculous education reform notions was a “mistake?” And finally Mr. Klaus, do you think all teachers boycotting Webster Bank, after you have disparaged them, would be good for business??? Perhaps that is a question that can be asked to James C. Smith, CEO of Webster Bank, directly…

  • Linda174

    Lance Hill of the Southern Institute of Education and Research reflects on the evolution of charter schools in New Orleans.

    Charter schools that perform better by recruiting and retaining better students don’t exist in a vacuum: skimming the best and most profitable students affects other schools, though it is hard to detect in systems with few charters.  The systemic effects are easier to see in a “closed system” as we have in New Orleans in which 80% of students attend charters.  Every high-performing charter creates a chronically low-performing school somewhere in the system. The students that charters reject, who are high-needs and high-cost, become concentrated in a separate set of schools.  These “dumping schools” concentrate students with enormous skill deficits and disruptive behaviors, making it impossible for educators to teach and also creating an intractable non-compliant student subculture.  Privatization creates good schools by creating even worse schools.
    The evidence of this “rob peter to pay paul” phenomenon is not difficult to find.  As charter schools increased in relative performance the first few years in New Orleans, the remaining state-run public schools were locked into chronic failure.  For four years in a row, the direct-run state schools posted an average 80% failure rate on the 8th grade math LEAP progression test.  This, despite the fact that the state had doubled the expenditure per pupil for a period of time and all these schools were directly run by Supt. Paul Vallas who selected the “world class” school administrators, contracted to staff the schools with the “best and brightest” teachers (TFA), and controlled the curriculum and hours of instruction.  It was clear that the every year charters would skim the best students from the remaining schools and dump the low-performing students forced on them by the lottery.
    In 2007, the highest ranking official in the state takeover of New Orleans schools said in a meeting that I attended that some charters were systematically dumping challenging and low-performing students into the remaining public system. Six years after the takeover, only 6,000 of the total 42,000 students remain in non-charter dumping schools:  100% of those students are in state-run schools that the state graded as “D” or F” in 2011.  It is a wonder that New Orleanians can’t figure out why we have the highest per-capita murder rate in the nation, and school-age teens are the principal perpetrators of the most reckless of the violence.
    Creating excellent schools is not the same as creating excellent school systems.  The free-market has one goal: profit.  It did not come into existence to create innovative and equitable public services.  The New Orleans Model ensures that successful schools are created at the expense of the system as a whole; one student advances at the expense of another.  If other school systems opt for the New Orleans Model, they need to do so knowing that the result will be a separate and unequal system of “college prep” and “prison prep” schools.
    Lance Hill, Ph.D.

    • guest

      Adamowski did this–with the “dumping schools”–in Hartford.  He will try to do it in Windham (but it’s a small district) and in New London.

  • Linda174

    From Ravitch blog…date: 5/18/2012

    The very rewarding job of saving schools..

    Those pesky public schools! They get reformed, and they don’t stay reformed!

    They get saved, and they don’t stay saved! What gives?

    Take Chicago: First, Chicago was saved by Paul Vallas in the 1990s; President Clinton congratulated Vallas for raising test scores and all sorts of innovative reforms. Then came Arne Duncan to lead the Chicago school system, and he developed a new plan to save the schools, called Renaissance 2010. Under this plan, 100 or more schools were closed and 100 or more charters and other privately run schools were created. Schools closed, schools opened. By the time 2010 rolled around, Duncan was U.S. Secretary of Education and he took the lessons of Renaissance 2010 and applied them to the nation.

    Sadly, even with 2010 having come and gone,  Chicago did not stay saved, so Mayor Rahm Emanuel imported a new Superintendent, J.C. Brizard, from Rochester, to save Chicago public schools yet again. Brizard had a pretty awful record in Rochester (proficiency rates on state tests were only in the 25% range and graduation rates fell). But no matter, Mayor Emanuel decided he was the very one to save Chicago this time. So it goes.

    The original saviour of the Chicago public schools meanwhile went off to the Philadelphia public schools, where he saved them as he had saved the Chicago schools. Once again the media hailed a turnaround. The state-controlled School Reform Commission got annoyed when Vallas ran up an unexpected deficit, so he exited and went to save New Orleans. In New Orleans, Vallas won national media acclaim because he encouraged privately-run charters to open and basically put the public school system out of business (Hurricane Katrina had cleared the way). Millions on millions of private and public dollars poured into New Orleans to open charter schools. Now about 80% of the Recovery School District are enrolled in charters. No one thought it worthwhile to revive the moribund public schools. Why bother when so many eager reformers were eager to run their own schools. (Please ignore the fact that most of the New Orleans charters were rated D or F by the state and found to be one of the lowest-performing districts in the state–but that was before Governor Bobby Jindal took change of the State Board of Education and the State Department of Education).

    Vallas left New Orleans to try to do for Haiti what he had done for New Orleans, but I don’t know where that stands. He also made an appearance in Chile, but students turned out by the thousands to protest any new measures to privatize that nation’ s schools and universities. Apparently they are fed up with the University of Chicago privatization reforms. http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2439

    Now Vallas has been hired to save the public schools in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he has been given a free hand, as is his way. Jonathan Pelto, a political blogger in Connecticut, has been raising questions about Vallas’ deal with Bridgeport. http://jonathanpelto.com/2012/05/16/vallas-says-no-prob-1m-deal-wont-affect-his-work-in-bridgeport/  and http://jonathanpelto.com/2012/04/22/i-wouldve-sworn-you-used-the-word-transparency-the-art-of-moving-public-funds-off-line/

    The most interesting part of Vallas’ deal is that he is not only superintendent of schools but runs a consulting company on the side. The Vallas Group just won a contract for $1 million to advise Illinois on saving its schools. It’s one of those “look, Ma, no hands,” moment, when Vallas says that he can handle both jobs. I don’t know of any other superintendents who run a private business on the side, do you?

    But see how things go in circles when it comes to saving schools: Vallas is back to save the Chicago schools that he saved more than a decade ago. Maybe he could pick up a contract to save the Philadelphia schools again, since the School Reform Commission wants to hand a large portion of them over to private management.

    Whatever else you might say about school reform, two things are clear:

    One, the schools don’t stay saved for long;

    And, two, it’s a very rewarding business for those who make a profession of saving them.

    Diane

    • guest

      I think I am going to be sick!

      • Linda174

        I know…there is a revolving door of reformers reforming each others’ reforms and cashing in while they suck us dry…..and teachers are the problem? Follow the money.

  • Linda174

    Letters of concern and/or to details as to why you are closing your Webster account should be directed to:

    James C. Smith
    Webster Bank, CEO
    Office of the President
    145 Bank Street
    Waterbury, CT 06702

    • Guyfromconn

      I don’t understand this posting.

      • Linda174

        See previous two posts by Jon…see Klaus statements and readers reactions.
        Klaus is married to charter management chain CEO and regularly posts demeaning comments about public schools, public school teachers, adminstrators, etc. He is a senior VP at Webster Bank. He recently posted:

        “Have you no responsibility for the education of children other than showing up in the morning at some building.”

        If you read the two articles before this one the post will make more sense. I am not leaving my hard earned public school teacher earnings in a bank where their executives display disrespect for public schools and their teachers. His posts drip with disdain.

  • Gcole

    Commisioner Pryor has done the same thing at the State Department of Education. He has hired several of his friends. In fact these people have been hired in positions that didn’t exist. Also none of these positions were advertised. This was the person that the Governor said was going to improve education. Thus far his major contribution to CT has been to spend more of CT tax payers dollars on salaries and benefits for his friends.

    • Linda174

      Yes, with new fancy titles and little if any have ever taught. Many former Yale connections and very secretive…separate gmail accounts for secret emailing. There is a counter state DOE office within the CTDOE.

      Said it before will say it again…the Bloomberg play book..chapter five of the
      Ravitch book..the NYC business model. The goal is less local control, more appointed boards, less transparency, more special masters, appointed supers, supers with Broad training and no teaching experience. Teachers are burdens and kids are cattle represented by test numbers. Break down the spirit of the experienced teahing force…bring in TFA types, malleable newbies to train for test prep, stay 3-5 years, constant turn over, keep a few experienced teachers for appearance sake, pay them a little more, give then a fancy title so they feel good about themselves, create a cheap labor force, save on salaries and pensions, increase adminstrative positions to oversee the revolving door of innocent, shell shocked teachers. Welcome to the test prep factory otherwise touted as the reform movement. And if the test score gap narrows it will be because our high performers leave the public school systems or they are drilled to stupidity. The high performer results decrease…minority increase slightly….POOF! We narrowed the achievement gap. Hooray for the deform movement!

      • guest

        Do you have more info on the gmail accounts?  Maybe we should work on this angle.
        I have some articles relating to Pryor’s New York years… perhaps by putting two and two together, we can document more clearly the secrecy and the creeping privatization.

      • Linda174

        Heard it in conversation with a DOE employee…testing division….say he is non communicative except those he hired…very little dept. unity…they give him three years. They know never to stay long enough to be held accountable for their decisions…just keep moving and scheming.

      • guest

        Three years–that’s too long.
        We need to try to substantiate this.  Having private emails is a typical ploy to avoid FOI requirements.  But if it is possible to show that Pryor and other employees of the state are using their private email accounts for official business, then their private email and cell phone records would become subject to FOI. 

  • Buygoldandprosper

    Sounds very much like Kathy Malloy and her job in Hartford,passing out state money. Sometimes the right people for the right job are just…there. One does not have to open up the process to qualified people in one of the worst economies of modern times. And everyone knows that the Nutmeg State is full of undereducated malcontents.
    As an aside,the posting for the new head of the CCEDA ( $150-225K per year) has over 80 applicants already! I wonder who will “get” that job? They have to have visions (I may have gotten that wrong) and be able to pass the buck,as it were.
    See CarreerBuilder if you are interested:
    http://www.careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker/Jobs/JobDetails.aspx?job_did=J3G6XS6WFZ79XSVHWRV