School District Disarray has a Familiar Stench

This week, a deputy superintendent for Manatee County schools was escorted out of the district administration building and placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. The matter involves a potential unauthorized use of funding and the suspension is likely only the tip of a very big iceberg.

In a somewhat cryptic press release issued on Monday, the district announced that Ron Ciranna, the deputy superintendent of business services and operations, would be put on leave, pending an internal investigation. School board chair Scott Hopes then put out his own statement later that day, explaining that the investigation related to "payments and scope of work related to the ERP process that may not have gone through proper authorization."

Hopes could be referring to payments for work that exceeded the scope of the project as it had been authorized by the board, and/or payments that exceeded the $25,000 maximum that a deputy superintendent is authorized to approve at their discretion. Larger payments require board approval and the chair’s signature. Neither Hopes or the district could comment on the exact nature of what was found while the investigation remains open.

Two change orders to the project have come before the board since Hopes was appointed last July to fill the seat vacated by Karen Carpenter, including one during his very first meeting. Both times he raised concerns, including whether the district was properly staffed to manage the massive integration, which Hopes, who is CEO of a business that essentially does the same sort of integrations in the healthcare field, didn’t seem to think it was.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) management information systems integrate things like finance, purchasing and human resources into one system. The district had been using antiquated processes for things like leave requests, in which physical paper copies made their way up the chain of command. The new system is said to allow employees to access information like pay stubs or benefit enrollment from an automated online portal, vastly improving efficiency, while tying together a myriad of other functions.

However, the district’s long-awaited and much belabored transition to the new system, which finally went live on July 1, some seventeen months late and at more than double the cost originally projected to the board, has been an ongoing headache, the kind of problem that keeps appearing on the middle of the floor no matter how many times it’s been swept under the rug.

It all started as a mere attempt to overhaul an extremely outdated payroll system that was installed in 1999, but a review of the district’s systems and software revealed many areas that needed to be modernized, processes that were said to be costing the district more money through inefficiency than an upgrade would.

Former superintendent Rick Mills first told the board that the district was in desperate need of updating its archaic system shortly after being hired in 2013, in the wake of the financial meltdown that occurred under the administration of Tim Mcgonegal, who resigned in disgrace in late 2012 after admitting that he’d mislead both the board and the public in presenting a multi-million dollar budget shortfall as a surplus. Deep in the red at the time, Mills acknowledged that the district couldn’t yet afford such an investment, but began building support for an ERP implementation in the spring of 2015, once fiscal order had been restored and adequate reserves had been built.

However, Mills, who in getting the district back on its feet in the wake of the McGonegal woes made many enemies among the old guard in Manatee County, ended up taking an early retirement that May, with two years remaining on his contract. The board hired his deputy superintendent, Diana Greene, to replace him. Greene had been hired by Mills in 2013, as deputy superintendent of curriculum. Greene had also interviewed for the superintendent spot when Mills was hired, making the finalist list and getting two votes for the job, before Mills was selected 4-1. Greene came to the district from Marion County, where Mills says she was working as a principal after being demoted from assistant superintendent by the district’s new boss–Marion County elects its superintendent.

When Greene took the reigns, Mills' team, which included several key players with resource management experience such as deputy superintendent of operations Don Hall and planning director Rob Johnson (both had followed Mills from his previous post in Minneapolis), remained intact. Hall and Johnson felt that it would cost $17-20 million and would likely take close to two years to implement a new ERP system.

Nevertheless, Greene told the board that the project could be done with a price tag of no more than $10 million and with a go-live date of February 2017. Both Johnson and Hall were said to have pushed back against Greene’s assessment as unrealistic, and both were eventually sacked, Hall resigning once he was informed he’d be non-renewed in June of 2016, and Johnson, who’s since left the district, demoted that summer. The ERP team was reassigned to CIO Patrick Fletcher who lacked relevant experience. Fletcher would eventually report to Cirranna when he was hired that fall to replace Hall.

Greene, a former classroom teacher, did not demonstrate a strong financial acumen as superintendent and with Hall and Johnson out of the picture, Ciranna (who’d previously served as an assistant superintendent in Polk and Pinellas Counties) took on an enormously broad role with everyone from the district's CFO, CIO, COO, the director of safety and security, the head human resources, and the director of business systems reporting to him. He too, despite many years in administration, lacked the experience for such a broad job description as well as ERP implementation.

The plan was to use modules from Oracle’s PeopleSoft product platform to integrate all of the district’s business systems at once. Rather than hire a company to manage the integration, however, the district hired Ciber Inc., an IT consulting firm, to build the system with the intent to use district personnel to manage its integration. The only problem was that the district had zero employees who had the experience and relevant skill sets to manage such a complicated affair.

What followed was an endless slew of change orders, delays, cost overruns, and personnel changes at Ciber, culminating with the company’s bankruptcy in the middle of the project. Ciber’s assets were eventually purchased by HTC Global Services, who continued with a whole new team. The project, which had swelled to 28 modules, many of which Hopes said this week were of no use to the district whatsoever, was a mess. To make matters worse, much of it couldn’t move forward because the company was awaiting the district’s responses on more than 70 issues. Eventually, the board was told that all of the pieces were in place and voted for a budget increase of around 50 percent in July.

Last October, the board approved yet another change order, this time for more than $4.2 million to cover additional delays. The total costs have been reported as $19.3 million, but once staff time is fully accounted for that number will likely be in the ballpark of $22 million–and just because it’s live doesn’t mean the story is over. Sources in the district say that there has been a lot of evening and weekend overtime after the go-live date of July 1.

With classes about to start, the real integration will begin, and there will be but an interim superintendent supported by exactly zero deputy superintendents when it does. Greene, who’d spent the past year pushing for a massive school property tax increase that would net the district another $33-35 million annually for the next four years, shocked the board when she accepted a job in Duval County and left at the end of June, also with two years left on her contract.

The board inserted the district’s other deputy superintendent, Cynthia Saunders, who was one of many administrators Greene brought down from Marion County, as interim superintendent when she left. The Herald Tribune reported this week that Greene wants to hire Saunders to fill an assistant superintendent position in her new district. Another top administrator was said to have interviewed in Duval on Friday. Greene received upward of $100k in additional compensation as superintendent of the much bigger district, and it stands to reason that a departure for Saunders would also be lucrative, while affording her the chance to jettison the current mess in Manatee.

Should Saunders leave, the board could beg Susan Agruso, the widely-respected chair of the board's audit committee who was a superintendent in Long Island for six years, to helm the interim post, though it took no less than three interim superintendents to keep the ship afloat in the time between McGonegal’s resignation and Mills’ arrival. Indeed it would have likely taken four, had Mills not agreed to start earlier than originally scheduled when the final interim told the board he’d had his fill.

So, here we are in another fine mess, having recently approved a 15-year extension of the optional half-cent sales tax, as well as an extra mill of property taxes, which will combine to give the school district nearly $70 million in additional revenue each year, yet it’s again become crystal clear that we lack the sort administrative competence within the district to hope for much more than something that falls between mediocrity and disaster, and seems far more likely to lean toward the latter.

Three seats are up for grabs in this month’s school board elections for spots on a board that is already heavy on members who don’t have an ideal grasp on complex fiscal matters. The two who have far and away the most, Hopes and investment banker John Colon, both face challenges. Hopes' unique background and skill set on this issue alone make him one of the few people anywhere who even know what questions to ask, let alone how to evaluate the answers when it comes to the ERP. It’d be a shame if voters don’t give him a full term to dig into the fiasco, as well as the district’s many other fiscal woes.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how culpable Ciranna winds up being, or if there’s anyone up the ladder (past or present) who’s shown to have known about whatever shenanigans may have occurred. As for the community, we get yet another chance to wake up and watch what’s being done with our tax dollars, then wonder when we’ll finally get fed up enough to stop opening the spigot wider every time the district puts its hand out and tells us it’s for the kids.

The business of providing public education is all about teachers and classrooms in terms of the product being produced. However, this fiasco once again demonstrates that its logistical implementation is no longer the relatively-simple matter it once was in the low-tech days of yore. Today’s public education is an enormously complex enterprise, requiring uniquely-talented individuals from a much broader realm–and that goes for school boards as much as superintendents and top-level administrators.

If all it took to do it well were the elevation of educators (by educators) through the ranks, aided by other educators who are elected to the boards because they too understand the plight of a classroom teacher and what needs to be done, we’d have solved this puzzle a long, long time ago and without flushing giant piles of taxpayer money down the proverbial toilet. Being someone who "deeply cares about students" or "wants to support the teachers" isn’t always enough. It’s also important to note that such characteristics aren’t only demonstrated by having spent one’s life in a classroom.

This is a story of tens of millions of your tax dollars being managed by people without the requisite skill sets and professional experiences to effectively do so and seemingly getting rooked by vendors who knew a mark when they saw one. It's a story of highly-paid administrators choosing to elevate those who told them what they wanted to hear and dismiss those who told it to them as it really was, creating (or I should say reviving) a culture in which those in the top ranks knew that they were not competing in a meritocracy and either got on board or went away. In Manatee County, it's a story older than most of the buildings but so long as voters continue to accept it, it’s the story that will stand.