By JOHN HOFHEIMER
Leader senior staff writer
After a contentious debate toward the end of January’s Pulaski County Special School District Board meeting Wednesday night, the board approved 4-2 a rewritten portion of Superintendent Charles Hopson’s contract that left his compensation unchanged, but reworked it in a way intended to satisfy concerns of the state Bureau of Legislative Audit.
Board president Bill Vasquez, and Tom Stuthard, both Jackson-ville representatives, voted against the measure.
“If we’re going to open the contract, there’s a couple of other areas I’d like to change as well,” Vasquez said.
With a disdainful tone, Vasquez read aloud the revised portion of the contract under consideration.
“Mr. president, the way you are portraying this is very unfair,” said board member Sandra Sawyer. “We owe him the respect of the office. Maybe we should have Jay (Billingsly) read it; you’re being very disrespectful. Jay, will you read it?”
It was Billingsly—the board’s attorney—along with Hopson’s agent, who agreed upon and wrote the language of the proposed change.
Calling for a voice vote, Vasquez “heard” a majority of “no” votes on the changes to Hopson’s contract, but a roll call vote called for by board member and parliamentarian Mildred Tatum showed that Vasquez “heard” wrong.
Because the legislative auditors expressed some concern over the amount of out-of-state travel that board members took, and also because the district is “broke,” according to Vasquez, they scrutinized the trips Hopson proposed for the next couple of months, turning thumbs down on several.
On three voice votes—two regarding trips, the other regarding Hopson’s contract—Vasquez, who voted against them, ruled that they failed to pass. But those three were found to have passed when roll call votes were taken.
SOMETHING GREAT
During the board comments portion of the meeting, Vasquez called for a 3 percent cut in district spending, saying the savings could secure $260 million in bonds for badly needed capital improvements.
“The reason I voted against (the out-of-state travel) is that we are broke,” Vasquez said.
“The charter schools are surviving on $6,000 a student (state aid), with no overhead and they are out-performing us. They make a profit and we run on $15,000 to $16,000 a head,” and are in fiscal trouble, he said.
“We have a chance to be part of something great,” Vasquez said, referring in part to the district’s outreach into the communities to find a way to repair old schools and build new ones.
“It’s going to be exciting. Hang on to your hats. We’re going to take care of business in an aggressive manner,” he said.
Likening the district’s progress to a rowboat, Vasquez said if there is a bad oar, the boat rows in a circle, and said people could be the well-rowed boat, the bad oar or the anchor.
Operations director Col. Derek Scott has been attending meetings with school patrons in the Jacksonville, Robinson and College Station areas so far in efforts to find a way to consolidate some schools and leverage the savings to pay off new bonds. He says every $1 million saved can leverage about $15 million in construction bonds.
ON DEMAND ORDERING
In less contentious parts of the meeting, the board and administration seemed to be moving forward in a cooperative manner on a number of issues aimed at righting the listing school district.
Scott told the board “we are in the process of modernizing our inventory, clearing out the warehouse and going more to an on-demand ordering process.”
He said it was cheaper and faster for a school to call an office store to have some paper delivered than it was for the district to pay employees to pick up large amounts, store it in the warehouse, load it up later and take it to a school that had requested it.
“It’s cheaper to buy from a vendor, then have it drop shipped and delivered on demand,” he said. “Then it’s a two-day instead of a four and five day process.”
The district heard a report from Brenda Bowles, director of pupil equity, and discovered that before- and after-school programs are being administered unequally in the district and voted to suspend receiving payments from the administrator of the DREAM program until they looked into it further.
The DREAM administrator, Jody Abernathy, is Bowles’ daughter.
Vasquez said it appeared to him that DREAM has paid or is liable to pay the district $18,000 in transportation reimbursement and $52,000 in costs of feeding those pre-schoolers, even though they all qualify for free and reduced lunches.
Board member Gwen Williams said that at Harris Elementary School, bungling by past administration had all but shut down some of those programs. “I’ve got kids sitting at home that need to be in school,” she said.
MESSED UP PROGRAM
“I find that disturbing,” Vasquez said. “Somewhere this whole program is messed up. We need to be paying for the program and the transportation.”
“We need to clear the books on that $18,000. She can’t make payroll because of what we’ve done,” Williams said. “She got City Year and Home Depot to renovate the playground. She bought the school playground equipment and had it installed—to be treated that way, I have a problem with that.”
Vasquez asked Hopson to look into the matter.
“We need to move forward on that,” said Hopson. Students (in DREAM, Head Start, and 21st Century programs) are coming from the same pool and getting different treatment.”
“I move we suspend her payments until further investigation,” Williams said. “She has a real high success rate of her students.”
COMPUTER SAVINGS
Chief technology officer Derek Brown recommended and the board unanimously approved entering into a new computer- lease program with the intention of eventually placing at least five computers in each classroom.
The board approved about $370,000 to lease computers at about $600 each—$200 less than they were paying previously for comparable computers.
“We have 6,700 computers…district-wide. We’re starting with the primary classrooms, then we’ll start with electrical drops and Internet in the secondary, with a completion date of 2012.”
He said information-technology, combined with other resources, would pay for the computers.
The board also authorized, on Brown’s recommendation, replacement of telephones throughout the district, switching to wireless phones and beginning with the central office.
The phones—one in each classroom—will double as intercoms and are also a safety factor, he said.
The initial authorization was for $275,000, including handsets, hardware, soft wares, licensing and labor.
The district’s 39 schools have 39 different setups, he said, spread among three carriers.” The phone system for the whole district is 20 years old.
AIR QUALITY
Marty Nix, president of the Pulaski Association of Classroom Teachers, reported that she had attended a symposium on indoor air quality and that the union wants to work with the administration to clean up the air in the rooms.
She said it was responsible for asthma attacks and unhealthy not only for the students but also the teachers.
“Let’s come up with an indoor air-quality plan for the district,” she said.
Pulaski Association of Support Staff president Emery Chesterfield said he appreciated the good working relationship he and his union have with human resources executive director Paul Brewer, working out the final terms of the PASS contract.
“This is the way it should be,” Chesterfield said.
Hopson had asked the board for more vacation days for his director of operations. Stuthard said, “Scott no doubt is doing a heck of a job,” but it would violate the board policy.
“We have employees who are corporate and we had to make concessions,” said Hopson. “He had other options. We wouldn’t have him here (without the additional vacation).”
“This affects his cabinet members,” said Vasquez. “We need a separate policy for them. I would like to systematically address this and table” agenda items affected.
The board rehired Billingsly and Beckett as its attorneys for the balance of the school year, while it proceeds in interviewing lawyers for in-house council.
The board also approved the first reading of a revision of the district’s budget policy to allow for starting the budgeting process in April so that it would be in place for the following year.
