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As a public official, there are several things you would prefer not to read in an audit of a $61 million public contract. But at the very top of the list is the critique that the contractor wasn’t needed to begin with. That’s where Portland Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong and the Portland School Board find themselves following an external audit of a contract with Texas-based firm Procedeo to manage the bond-funded rebuilds of three high schools and the Grice Adair Center. A draft of PPS’s external bond audit, first reported Sept. 14 at wweek.com, also noted that Procedeo advised PPS to gut its in-house school modernization office, removing many of the people capable of delivering those big projects. That part’s not great either! Here’s what our readers had to say:
Eric Happel, via Facebook: “Why we sent our Oregon tax dollars to Texas was already an issue. Now the fox is watching the hen house. How can we expect the board, that fast tracked the approval, to now make sure they don’t cheat? Oh and side note—we are building three news high schools to create more capacity than PPS will ever need…hello??? Anyone home?”
GreenCedar, via Reddit: “So given that the audit found that the Office of School Modernization did a reasonable job of managing past bonds, why was the new PPS superintendent so adamant about misleading the School Board, laying off half of the office’s staff, and directing that work to a hand-picked out-of-state contractor? Did she not like whoever was running the office? Was she friends with the contractor? Seems questionable.”
Emma Khalil, via Facebook: “This feels especially concerning in the context of rightsizing!! Families are being told there is tremendous urgency to close and consolidate schools while we’re still asking for the underlying data, assumptions, alternatives, and actual savings (and being told closing schools doesn’t save money). An audit finding that PPS overstated urgency, provided incomplete or inaccurate context, and the board failed to adequately scrutinize a major decision should be a serious warning as we head into school closures.”
Pot Lady, via wweek.com: “If you (like me) have a problem with how PPS is handling this situation and you don’t trust the PPS Board to do anything about it, I recommend writing to the Oregon Secretary of State Audits Division.”
notPabst404, via Reddit: “Once again, PPS should be merged into the city as a department with professional administration overseen by the mayor and City Council.
“The Portland area has too many levels of government, and it is time to start modernizing.”
Common Sense, via wweek.com: “If anyone is surprised by this, they must have just moved to the area, or they’ve been cryogenically frozen for decades and were just thawed. Portland Public Schools has to be, truly has to be, in the top five worst-run public schools systems in the country. It’s as if there’s a black hole within PPS where money disappears into.”
Working_Tomorrow9846, via Reddit: “Well, they’re doing a bang-up job imo. Things went great with the [Cleveland High School] move to Marshall managed by Procedeo!
“No renovation work was done until the summer so staff had no access to the building until August; none of the furniture at the old campus moved to the new building and staff were promised there would be ample furniture (spoiler alert: There wasn’t) that was of good quality (spoiler alert: It was the scraps of what was left from Grant, et al.); the building was (and is) still a construction zone when the school year began to the point where roof coating chemicals were being applied during classes last week without the air intakes being properly covered and a stop-work order having to be issued by admin anddddd the list goes on.
“Oh and from the sound of it some staff had paint oversprayed on their cars from painting during the school day, so that should cost a few dollars.”
Mayor_Of_Sassyland, via Reddit: “OK, OK, but *apart* from the waste, fraud, abuse, self-dealing, bad decision-making, bias, favoritism, insufficient oversight, egregious overpayments, and a total general lack of urgency or accountability, what have the Romans ever done for us has PPS done that’s really all that bad?”
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Email: amesh@wweek.com
