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The debate in recent weeks over whether Portland Public Schools should proceed with a contract with Texas-based construction firm Procedeo turned from fierce to ugly at a Tuesday night Portland School Board meeting.
Ultimately, the School Board approved the contract—which will pay Procedeo up to $61.5 million for five years of work overseeing program management services for the 2024 school construction bond. The board passed the contract by a 5–2 vote, with board members Stephanie Engelsman and Virginia La Forte voting no. (Ian Ritorto, the board’s student representative, also voted no.)
But the path to get to that vote was rocky and emotional—both a School Board member and a Procedeo employee shed tears—and exposed deepening fissures between School Board members and their philosophies on governance.
The days leading up to the vote had already been heated on social media, after School Board members debated about if they’d had enough time to read the 67-page contract and about whether Facebook was the appropriate forum for debate. Some came into the meeting concerned about costs, while others came in concerned that delays on approving the contract would further lengthen delays on three high school modernizations and the Center for Black Student Excellence.
In her pitch to board members over why the district should adopt a contract with Procedeo, PPS Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong shared how the contract would help give students safer buildings. She described how, in her 15 months on the job, the district has faced lengthy delays and cost overruns on its projects. Those delays, she said, that have been caused by inconsistent coordination between multiple firms and internal teams, and which have been worsened by leadership and structural challenges.
“Simply put, when accountability is spread too thin, progress slows too much,” she said. “As superintendent, I am and I should be held to a high degree by the amount of incompetence I allow overtime.”
The start to the fix, she said, is to bring in a firm that can find a different way to execute projects on time and on budget. A nationwide search led the district to Procedeo, she says, which since August has had a branch in Portland and will be held to its promises to deliver projects for the district.
In the contract, Procedeo has a minimum compensation of about $55 million, minus the actual costs to the district of any PPS personnel or contractors “principally dedicated to the projects.” It is entitled to up to $6.5 million total in incentive fees for delivering high school projects and the Center for Black Student Excellence on time, and retaining key personnel on the program and projects through their duration. (“It’s virtual mathematical impossibility for Procedeo to be paid $61 million because those are our employees who are included in that as well,” said Sharon Toncray, the district’s chief legal officer.)
Another detail that became clear last night: if unsuccessful, the district can sever Procedeo’s contract with a 30-day notice.
But immediately after the pitch, La Forte moved to postpone the vote, arguing that the board should receive a full comparative cost analysis for the work Procedeo would be doing and answer public records requests about the contract, seemingly in reference to some earlier public comment from Office of School Modernization employee Keisha Locklear, who had written on social media that the district was overspending on Procedeo and out of line with industry standards. “My concerns right now are coming down to transparency and cost,” La Forte said.
Apart from Engelsman, who seconded La Forte’s motion to postpone, other board members weren’t sold, especially after Armstrong mentioned that a current contract with Procedeo for interim leadership of the Office of School Modernization would extend through Dec. 10 and then potentially hinder progress if there was no other firm in the role.
Locklear herself told board members on Tuesday night that the math on the deal was “wild” and that the $6 million bonus seemed “highly irregular.” And she mentioned that pausing projects in OSM without the contract would be a “leadership choice,” not a natural consequence.
“We need to be more efficient, more effective. I one million percent agree,” she said. “It doesn’t cost $60 million to do that.”
Tensions between Procedeo and OSM seemed to reach a breaking point on Tuesday night, too. Sarah Norman, the Procedeo employee who has stood in as the interim director for OSM, choked up while delivering her own remarks. “What we do is important to our students and our community,” she said through some tears. “Change is hard. The last couple of weeks have been hard. I am appreciative of the staff that is here that I’ve had the pleasure of working with for three months.”
The mood grew heated after Engelsman asked for the conversation to be moved later into the night. The board room was filled with a majority-Black audience there to support the next agenda item, approval of a building purchase for the Center for Black Student Excellence. She argued that the consideration of the Procedeo item when there was a room full of people “makes us feel pressured and unable to have a long conversation.”
“It’s an insult to the people in this room to assume that they don’t have a vested interest in this conversation,” said School Board member Rashelle Chase-Miller. “This is pretty classic paternalism, I would say, for an audience that’s here to talk about the Center for Black Student Excellence, which is impacted by the vote that we make tonight, to decide for them that they don’t need to be in the room for this conversation.”
The conversation continued to spiral as La Forte and Engelsman argued that the public had not had the time to digest the information being presented. Who “the public” was became a point of tension in the meeting, after La Forte and Engelsman argued that the crowd was “not the public.” It was an apparent reference to the swarm of social media outcry on the contract, and how that perspective was not represented in the board room. But the delivery of those comments left the board room in further disarray.
“A lot of times people reference the loudest voices in the room as not always being the only voices in the room, and I think that’s particularly important tonight because you are not the public,” Engelsman told the majority-Black crowd, to jeers. “The point is that the people in the room today are not our only public.”
She continued: “All of us have been hearing from the public who are not here tonight who have concerns and to suggest that just because they’re not here tonight that their concerns are not legitimate and that they’re not the public takes away the fact that those voices are also legitimate as well.”
By that point, the longstanding divide between two factions of the board—one that values a close relationship with Armstrong and staff, and another that likes to ask detailed questions—looked more like an open wound.
School Board member Patte Sullivan said she could “read it and read it,” in reference to the contract, “and it really wouldn’t make much sense to me.”
“I think that’s probably what it is like for everybody. And we’ve got people with knowledge and obviously passion to get things done. And law degrees and contractors, I’m sure,” Sullivan said. “Why can’t we believe them? Why are we so unwilling to believe the people that I have put my trust in?”
In contrast, Engelsman had given the contract a granular read, and began listing a long string of questions. Board Chair Eddie Wang asked her to only ask questions that would be relevant to her vote. “All of them affect my vote,” she said back. After listing about five more questions, Chase-Miller stepped in to protest. “This is grandstanding,” she said of the questions. “Why do you need to know this?”
Wang cut the conversation off there, moving to a vote on the contract. He said he was uncomfortable because the board is not meant to discuss personnel issues and that it’s not the board’s purview to “figure out how to build a high school.”
Engelsman disputed that she was asking questions about the report. There were five yes votes and two no votes. “I don’t have enough information, but I have been blocked from getting information, so I’m voting no,” Engelsman said.
All but one other board member voted yes.
Brian Johnson, the president of Procedeo, told WW following the vote that the firm was looking forward to earning the trust of the district. “We have a culture of trust and transparency,” he said.
“There’s been a struggle with the OSM staff, with so many programs happening at one time, and they haven’t had the proper leadership,” he said. “That’s where we come into place. We can give them the proper leadership and prop up the proper processes and procedures in order to make sure they’re successful and can make decisions.”
