Remember Frank Spinelli? You know, the CSFO that Dr. Wardynski “brought” with him to Huntsville from Aurora, Colorado at a cost of $130,000 a year? Remember the night that Dr. Wardynski made a point of saying he was ignoring any rumors about sexual harassment that involve “strong leaders” such as Mr. Spinelli?

Do you remember that Dr. Robinson told us that Mr. Spinelli “has authority for certain expenditures” which include the hiring of the LEANFrog auditors who were supposedly at the time finding that there was “significant opportunity for fraud” in the district?

How about the time when Mr. Spinelli claimed that there were “no documents responsive to your request” concerning $28,790.00 of district funding that had been paid to LEANFrog over four months spanning 2011/2012? Clearly the “significant opportunity for fraud” in the district didn’t include spending nearly $30 grand without any paperwork of any kind.

Still don’t remember who we’re talking about? Well then what about last October when Mr. Spinelli offered his resignation and then, the same night, his consulting company was hired at a rate of $175 an hour?

That was quite a raise for Mr. Spinelli who, according to Dr. Wardynski, had family concerns that he needed to take care of in New York.

State Code Violations

At least it was until Mr. Culbreath, the new District Five board member started asking questions of the Alabama Ethics Commission about the legality of paying Mr. Spinelli as a consultant to his former employer within two years of his employment. Alabama Code Section 36-25-13, “Actions of Former Public Officials or Public Employees Prohibited for Two Years After Departure” is fairly clear when it says in paragraph (a):

No public official shall serve for a fee as a lobbyist or otherwise represent clients, including his or her employer before the board, agency, commission, department, or legislative body, of which he or she is a former member for a period of two years after he or she leaves such membership. For the purposes of this subsection, such prohibition shall not include a former member of the Alabama judiciary who as an attorney represents a client in a legal, non-lobbying capacity.

Thanks to the questions Mr. Culbreath asked back in October 2012, Mr. Spinelli’s contract as a consultant with the board was ended. In Mrs. McCaulley’s words, the board “severed all ties.”

Except they didn’t.

The Tie That Binds

I was watching, as always, to see if the four-year contract that had been approved in September 20th Temporary Agreements (four years doesn’t seem too temporary to me, but whatever) would be formally rescinded. Strangely enough, it never was. My thinking at the time was, “well, maybe they’re just running behind.”

But then, Mr. Spinelli showed up for the January 8th board meeting. Now, there’s no rule that says that he can’t attend a public board meeting, but since he so often seemed to be somewhat put out by having to attend the meetings when he was employed by the district, it seemed strange that he would choose to attend a meeting without being paid to be there.

Maybe he was just going to dinner afterwords with Wardynski and Aaron King, who was there to tell us how great Wardynski’s Digital Initiative was at Huntsville Middle School? Who knows. It seemed like old home week once the meeting adjourned.

Except maybe he was being paid to be there after all.

Spinelli and LEANFrog

You remember the LEANFrog contract that paid Mr. Headrick $28,790.00 in funds, without any documentation whatsoever? (Of course you do, I just reminded you.) Well, that number has dramatically increased since February 2012. You see, since November 2011 until October 2012, LEANFrog has been paid $715,308.59 according to the district’s check registers.

Nearly three quarters of a million dollars in one year paid to LEANFrog to find “significant opportunity for fraud.”

And now it seems that Mr. Spinelli, whose own company’s hiring was deemed unethical and illegal, has now returned to Huntsville City Schools as a LEANFrog consultant.

Yep, the company to which Mr. Spinelli oversaw the payment of $715,308.59 for the period of one year has now hired Mr. Spinelli to work with Huntsville City Schools.

Reportedly, Mr. Spinelli currently holds a five-year contract with LEANFrog to work with the district. I don’t have any word at the moment on what kind of salary he’s pulling in. Anyone wanna bet it’s around $175 an hour?

Is it illegal for LEANFrog to have hired Spinelli? Well, I’m not a lawyer and I don’t play one on TV, but I can, you know, read. And when I read the code cited above, it seems to me that if it was illegal to hire Spinelli’s company as a consultant firm, it’s also illegal for LEANFrog to hire him as well.

But let’s assume that the board actually did their due diligence. (Nope can’t type it without laughing either.)

Let’s assume that it is completely legal for Spinelli to work for a company that he basically hired to work for the district.

Unanswered Questions

This turn of events raises several interesting questions.

1. How can it be ethical for a company to hire the person who gave them such a lucrative contract? I know this happens all the time in Washington, but this is Huntsville. I’d like to believe we have slightly higher standards than our legislators. (Nope, couldn’t type that without laughing either.)
2. Why is a company like LEANFrog, who makes their living on their reputation, so willing to throw their reputation out the window like this?
3. Why does Spinelli, who voluntarily resigned his position, want to be a district employee again so badly? (I never got the impression that he actually liked living in Huntsville.)
4. Why is Mike Culbreath, the one ray of light on this school board, suddenly so silent on the rehiring of the employee he single-handedly kicked out just three months ago? (So much for being “worth watching.”)
5. (And this is the big one.) Why is Wardynski so dead set, so willing to violate state code, state ethics laws, and simple common sense, so committed to having Frank Spinelli on his payroll? Surely there are other qualified certified accountants in this town, state and nation who don’t bring with them all this baggage?

If nothing else, this should give you insight into how Dr. Wardynski operates. When he doesn’t get what he wants the first time, he keeps pushing, cajoling, and manipulating until things go his way.

Common sense be damned. Education be damned. Teachers be damned. Students and parents be damned. Whole neighborhoods be damned. Ethics and the Alabama State Code be damned.

He reminds me of a two year old who didn’t get the cookie that his mommy took away from him: he cries, screams, kicks, and finally climbs up the cabinet knocking the cookie jar over, ruining the cookies for everyone just because he didn’t get his way.

I really wish we were dealing with a rational adult in the position of superintendent. Heck, I’d even settle for a teenager.

Welcome back, Mr. Spinelli. It hardly seems you were gone.

The post Frank Spinelli Returns to HCS via LEANFrog appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Yes, I am a something of a broken record, asking the same questions over and over. But occasionally the Huntsville City School’s district leaders say something new that changes the playing field.

On March 22, Frank Spinelli, the CSFO of Huntsville City Schools, and Dr. Wardynski’s personal friend whom he brought with him from Aurora, Colorado last August, finally decided to respond to a request that I had been making since March 7th.

Specifically, I was requesting from him a copy of the initial LEAN Frog contract for an audit that was conducted from October 2011 through February 2012. This was the audit that Wardynski claimed proved that he was a strong leader and everyone who opposed his ideas were just whiners.

This was the audit that was supposed to change everything.

Except, all it really did was allow Wardynski to redirect attention away from himself and his decision and point the finger at others.

Case in point.

You would think that asking for a copy of a contract would be a simple thing to do. After all, the second contract with LEAN Frog that was approved on February 25th is readily available online. In case you don’t want to download it, that contract was for $152,761 and is scheduled to be completed by September 25th.

A third contract with LEAN Frog was approved tonight to revamp the Human Resources department. I suspect that that contract will be posted on the district eBoards site tomorrow. We’ll have to wait until then to find out how much that contract was for, though, since there was no discussion of the costs of any of the approved contracts during the board meeting tonight.

Nope, the only person who discussed money tonight was me in reference to the first LEAN Frog agreement that covered services from October 2011 through February 2012.

According to the District’s Check Registers, the district paid Mr. Headrick of LEAN Frog a total of $28,790.00 during those five months.

Here’s a listing of the checks if you wish to look for yourself:

• November 2011: ;$2,890.00 (Pg. 20)
• December 2011: $5,760.00 (Pg. 25)
• January 2012: $5,760.00 (Pg. 3)
• January 2012: $5,380.00 (Pg. 9)
• January 2012: $6,480.00 (Pg. 16)
• February 2012: $2,520.00 (Pg. 10)

Since this is about 5 times less than the contract they’ve already published, you would think that they would be happy to share it with the public as required by Board Policy 102-1 Access to Information.

But no.

Spinelli decided instead to stonewall. It wasn’t until I sent my request concerning this contract to both him and the entire board of education that he decided to respond.

Here’s the text of an email that I received from Mr. Spinelli on March 22, 2012 at 6:23pm. This email was sent from Frank Spinelli (frank.spinelli@hsv-k12.org) to myself, every member of the board of education, Dr. Wardynski and J. R. Brooks, the school board attorney.

Mr. Spinelli wrote:

Mr. Winn, the district does not have any documents responsive to your request.

Also, the district had been advised by the school board’s attorney that Alabama bid law does not require bids in this type of contract, Ala. Code Sec. 16-13B-2(a)(2).

Frank

That’s right. Mr. Spinelli was telling me that the very audit that unearthed all the “incompetence” that Dr. Wardynski liked to nearly brag about, was paid for without a contract of any kind.

And evidently, there were no “documents responsive to your request” to be had covering the writing of nearly $30,000 of district checks.

Surely this is a mistake, right? Surely Mr. Spinelli is not saying that he wrote six district checks over a period of four months without a contract approving the expenditures of those funds, right?

Now, the second part of Mr. Spinelli’s email concerning Alabama’s bid law was in reference to my request to receive evidence that the bid law was followed in this contract. Unfortunately the Alabama State Code that Mr. Spinelli referenced in his response to me does not exist.

There is no code section 16-13B-2(a)(2). This is, however, an Alabama code section 16-13B-2(b)(2) which states:

Purchases made by individual schools of the county or municipal public school systems from moneys other than those raised by taxation or received through appropriations from state or county sources.

Thus, Mr. Spinelli seems to be trying to tell me that the funds that were used to pay for the first LEAN Frog audit were not actually public funds. (I don’t know this for certain because Spinelli is refusing to answer my questions yet again.)

He does not say where the money came from to pay Mr. Headrick, but I have an idea about that. Back in July 2011, Dr. Wardynski told a group of Special Education parents that he would be “getting an audit” that he would use to evaluate the special education department with. The implication was that this audit would be paid for by The Board Foundation that had “trained” him in how to be a superintendent.

I am convinced that The Broad Foundation paid for the LEAN Frog audit, and if that does indeed turn out to be the case, the “findings” of that audit should be examined quite closely. For as seen during the give and take between Wardynski and Bryon Headrick on February 16th, the LEAN Frog report was couched in such a way to make Wardynski look as good as possible as a “strong leader.”

Doing so would certainly be worth $28,790 to a man like Eli Broad who is worth hundreds of millions, wouldn’t it?

So with all this in mind, I decided to ask the board about these things tonight:

On February 25th, I began asking Dr. Robinson for a copy of the contract for the services that Mr. Headrick of LEAN Frog offered to the district from October 2011 through February 2012. Since his audit was ushering in, in Dr. Robinson’s words, the removal of “business practices that permitted fraud and negligence,” I was curious how much this new culture was costing us.

In accordance with Huntsville City School Board Policy 102-1 Access to Information, I wrote Mr. Marc Seldon to ask for a copy of the contract with LEAN Frog that allowed the district to pay him $28,790.00 from October 2011 to February 2012.

Mr. Seldon, before being placed on administrative leave, directed me to Mr. Spinelli.

On March 7th, I wrote Mr. Spinelli asking for a copy of the October to February LEAN Frog contract.

Mr. Spinelli finally responded on March 22nd to say, and I quote:

“The district does not have any documents responsive to your request.”

I wrote back to ask him how the district was able to write checks totaling $28,790 to LEAN Frog without producing “any documents responsive to my request?”

He has not responded to my questions.

And so, I’m here tonight to ask the board as I have already asked in emails that have been sent to you, how can nearly $30,000 in checks be written on the district’s checking account to a vendor without a contract?

How does this total absence of checks and balances insure, Dr. Robinson, that we are indeed changing our “business practices that permitted fraud and negligence?”

Did the funding for the October – February LEAN Frog contract come from the Broad Foundation?

As Sue Peters of Seattle asks, Why should Mr. Eli Broad have more say in my children’s schools than I do?

And finally, per Dr. Robinson’s suggestion for the kinds of questions she thinks I should be asking, “What is the impact these actions are going to have on the education of our children?”

Having a district that spends nearly $30,000 without any documentation seems to be bad for our children, don’t you think?

I, of course, received no response to these questions.

That’s right. There were no cries of outrage that I would make such ridiculous accusations. There was no denial. There was no explanation offered of any kind other than Dr. Robinson’s frustrated stares. I guess that she didn’t really want me to ask “what impact these actions are going to have on the education of our children,” after all.

What exactly is Wardynski and the board trying to hide? What could they be afraid of? Why aren’t they required to follow their own policies regarding releasing public information to the public?

It would be nice if some of the news organizations who were present tonight could ask this question. Wardynski and the board have taken to ignoring me of late.

Maybe someday we’ll get the truth.

The post No Documents Responsive to Your Request appeared first on Geek Palaver.

As jaded as I like to think I am about the school board, and the senior administration of our district, I have to say, there are times when they still manage to shock me. Last night was just such a night.

As I mentioned in my last post, I had asked Dr. Robinson for an explanation of a few of the recent actions (or lack of actions) on the part of the board.

Specifically, I wanted to know:

• When did the board approve the contract with Mr. Headrick and LEAN Frog to conduct the audit that was completed with a reporting of his findings on February 16th?
• How much did the audit cost?
• Why is the company that conducted the audit now being hired to recommend changes to the business practices of the district based upon the findings of the audit?
• Was this contract with LEAN Frog executed in accordance with the bid law?

Interestingly enough, LEAN Frog was specifically hired (at some undetermined point, but probably around October) to review the business practices of the district.

One significant part of the findings that Mr. Headrick presented to the board on February 16th had to do with the Procurement Department. This department is responsible for overseeing the “Bid Invitation/Analysis Process,” “Purchase Orders,” and “Inventory Control.”

As I pointed out, I had no recollection of the board actually approving the hiring of Mr. Headrick and LEAN Frog Consulting. A subsequent review of the minutes of the meetings since that time confirmed my recollection as correct. Since through January the district has paid Mr. Headrick, $26,270, I was surprised that I could not find any record of the board approving his contract for those services conducted from October 2011 through February 16, 2012.

Yesterday at 9:31:48 PM CST, Dr. Robinson responded to my questions with the following email:

As necessary to ensure the integrity of district financial and business activities, and to ensure to their conformity to statute, and regulation, the CFO engages auditors and other experts to review transactions, policies, and regulatory guidance and to render opinions. In audit functions, discretion in the use of external auditors is particularly important when fraud or abuse are suspected as was the case in the present situation. Therefore, in such cases public BOE (Board of Education) discussion is inappropriate.

Funds expended for Leanfrog we disbursed from the board approved budget and the CFO has authority for certain budgeted expenditures.

Also note that Lean Frog has moved beyond an audit function to the creation of processes and operating procedures and thus their services have been engaged via BOE action.

Jennie Robinson, PhD.

Lets unpack this response just a bit.

It’s Not the CFO’s Job

First, Dr. Robinson seems to be quoting a specific policy statement in her opening comment. I’ve asked her where that policy can be found, but she hasn’t responded yet. Since I’ve never been good at waiting, I went online to review the policies myself.

Guess what, that is not a Huntsville City Schools policy. In fact, nearly the only comment that the Policy Manual makes on audits is found in Procedure 100-1P “Functions of the Board of Education” Paragraph C, on page 2 of that procedure entitled Audit states:

The accounts of the Huntsville City Schools shall be audited annually by a certified public accountant selected by the Board of Education. Reports of such audits shall be delivered to the Board of Education, the superintendent of schools, and others as the Board may direct. (Emphasis Added)

So you see, it is not the job of the CFO to “engage auditors and other experts to review transactions, policies, and regulatory guidance and to render opinions” as Dr. Robinson claimed. It is instead the job of the Board of Education to select the auditor to be used.

This kinda makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean if an audit is going to be conducted of the business practices of the district, the Chief School Financial Officer also needs to be audited, doesn’t he?

Who Is The Discretion For?

Second, Dr. Robinson claims that, “In audit functions, discretion in the use of external auditors is particularly important when fraud or abuse are suspected as was the case in the present situation. Therefore, in such cases public BOE discussion is inappropriate.”

Who is the discretion necessary for? Should we keep the audit quiet from the public? If so, then why did Dr. Wardynski, in one of his first meetings with the public on July 25, 2011 tell a group of Special Education parents that he would soon be conducting a full audit of the Special Education and other Departments in the central office.

Discretion wasn’t necessary for the public.

How about the people being audited? Well, we certainly don’t want them to know they’re being audited. But, of course, the first people in the district to know that they were being audited were the directors and their directorships. Mr. Headrick stated that he began the audit by “conducting interviews” with the directors.

It’s kinda hard to conduct an audit interview without the person being interviewed knowing that an audit is going on, isn’t it? I began hearing from multiple district personnel that LEAN Frog was conducting an audit beginning in November 2011.

Discretion wasn’t necessary for the district personnel.

So, who exactly was the discretion for? Perhaps the discretion was for the board as they seemed to be the only group in the city who didn’t know it was happening.

CFO Has Authority For Certain Expenditures

The next second of her response contains the true kickers. Dr. Robinson stated that, “Funds expended for Leanfrog we disbursed from the board approved budget and the CFO has authority for certain budgeted expenditures.”

Dr. Robinson seems to be claiming that Mr. Frank Spinelli has the authority to expend district funds, accepting of bids, and contracting with vendors all without any board or public oversight. As I mentioned on Saturday, through January, the district has paid LEAN Frog $26,270.00. As the report to the board did not take place until February, once the check register is published for that month, I’m sure we’ll find that the $26,270.00 has increased to nearly $30,000.

So, according to Dr. Robinson, Mr. Spinelli, has the authority to commit and expend $30,000 in public funds without any oversight.

You’ll note, as I did, that there was no discussion of the questions concerning the bid law. While there are perhaps hundreds of Lean Six Sigma consultants in the country, and surely dozens of them in Huntsville (as this is a standard evaluation for military contractors), did Mr. Spinelli issue a call for bids?

I have no idea.

Significant Opportunity For Fraud

Mr. Headrick stated in his presentation on February 16th that the current business practices and System-Wide Issues/Opportunities for Huntsville City Schools presented:

Significant opportunity for fraud, waste and abuse and legal liabilities associated with non-compliance to state and federal law.

It’s a shame that Mr. Headrick wasn’t tasked to audit the means and methods that were used to actually hire him. Perhaps then his findings wouldn’t be tainted by the superintendent having refused to bring a recommendation to the board to hire him as is required by board policy and state law.

As it stands, the audit that will be used on Thursday night, March 1st to fire up to one hundred directors, coordinators, principals and teachers, and staff should itself be considered in non-compliance. Thus every single one of the district employees who are fired tomorrow night should challenge their dismissal in a court of law.

Wardynski’s going to be known as the best friend to lawyers in this town as he’ll not have doubled legal fees but rather quadrupled them.

Is it possible that there were some legal violations found by Mr. Headrick? Yes, there are. Three of the five board members who are allowing Mr. Spinelli to expend district funds without oversight likely did the same thing five years ago. And anyone found breaking the law should be punished.

If this contract was not approved by the board, and it doesn’t appear that it was, the money should be refunded, the findings should be dismissed, and those violating standard practices should be fired.

However, Dr. Robinson, the ends never justify the means.

Since Mr. King has been advertising positions for the district on his Facebook wall since January 2nd, he can just add a few more positions to his list.

Tomorrow night’s board meeting is the culmination of a witch hunt that is being used to cover up current violations. It’s time that we the public take back our school system.

The post Significant Opportunity For Fraud appeared first on Geek Palaver.