FL - Broward School Board struggles with waste, controversy in big-money tech projects By Bill Hirschman, Education Writer

February 19, 2002

In the past decade, construction was the Broward County school district's Achilles' heel. Rampant mismanagement and waste enraged taxpayers, leading them to elect reform-minded School Board members and to defeat a sales tax.

In this decade, board members and administrators are struggling to keep technology -- from classroom computers to automated payroll systems -- from becoming their next multimillion-dollar black eye.

A string of fiascoes -- old ones uncovered by a new technology chief, others occurring on his watch -- have unnerved board members, who are struggling to decipher the district's technology needs, with little help from their staff.

"They treat us like mushrooms; they keep us in the dark," said board member Lois Wexler.

The controversy will resurface at today's board meeting as members question why the staff wants to spend $1.48 million to replace an outdated e-mail system, since the district bought a replacement two years ago for a half-million dollars and never installed it.

"My confidence level is so low right now," said board member Beverly Gallagher. "Something's going on."

Meetings in question

Technology companies have whispered to Gallagher, Wexler and others that the staff is trying to slam past complex purchases with a minimum of oversight, meanwhile steering lucrative contracts to favored vendors.

Superintendent Frank Till and Everett Abney, associate superintendent for technology, not only dispute that, they say they are reforming an antiquated system, discovering and defusing land mines left by the previous administration.

But Till agrees, "We have to have legitimate discussions about where we're going."

The e-mail system is only the latest flare-up. In November, Abney proposed overhauling the entire technology system at a cost between $65 million and $136 million.

Drafted in three months to meet an imminent federal grant deadline, his proposal overwhelmed many of the nine board members.

Many of the board members were furious at being rushed into a use-it-or-lose-it time frame. They nixed three facets and placed the rest on hold.

The delay, they say, reflects a need to act responsibly to regain public confidence before asking for a tax hike to build new schools in a referendum within two years.

Several board members are especially worried about allegations from technology companies that Abney's staff meets in private with favored companies to tailor bid specifications to those firms' products. That freezes out firms that may have cost-saving alternatives.

"The secret meetings are still going on," Wexler said.

Abney adamantly counters, "I have no intent of hiding anything. The real truth is, we talk with a lot of vendors trying to sell their products. My job is to look at the potential of what all of them can do for us."

Feeding suspicion

The allegation isn't new. In late September, the district sought bids for computer networking equipment, records show. Hewlett Packard wrote that only one firm could meet the specifications and that millions of dollars could be saved if the district would consider comparable hardware. That project was canceled, Abney says, because the district had begun rethinking its needs.

All this stokes board members' suspicions. Gallagher was surprised that Abney did not contact her after she questioned his proposal Dec. 4.

Usually, staffers are "in my office before I leave the building. But they're not even trying to change my mind. So that makes my antenna go way up on this one," she said.

Chairman Bob Parks, the board's senior member, says he thinks colleagues are seeing ghosts in the shadows.

"The issue of getting better service has gotten lost. This project has gotten mired in all these innuendoes and this conspiracy theory that's out there," Parks said.

Parks agrees the staff needs to present projects better, to offer several options with pros and cons. And to be more aggressive in educating board members.

Few board members claim the expertise to understand much of the technicalities.

"My forte is construction and boundaries and policies," Gallagher said. "I did not understand [technology] as well, but since December I've been trying to learn."

The most recent flashpoint is today's $1.4 million proposal to replace the e-mail system.

The district's Macintosh computers use Quarterdeck mail software, a system that is no longer made, no longer supported by the manufacturer and loses about 10 percent of the messages sent, Abney said. Its IBM PC computers use Microsoft's Exchange 5.5.

The technology staff wants to replace Quarterdeck and upgrade the PCs with Exchange 2000.

Tech troubles

But Abney's predecessor already had the board approve spending about $500,000 in December 1999 to buy a different software, IBM Lotus Notes, to do the same thing.

But before the system could be installed, Abney pulled the plug and it now sits on a shelf.

Why? With Lotus, everyone would need to learn a new system. With Exchange, the current Exchange users would have to learn only a few new improvements; only the Quarterdeck people would have to learn a new system.

Such decisions worry board members because of the district's history with technology.

In 1996, the board discovered that the district had wasted millions of dollars over the previous decade on telephone lines that were not needed and had been overcharged for computer equipment.

At almost the same time, the board agreed to a quarter-billion-dollar program to upgrade the technology system.

Although Abney was briefly in charge, the project was re-assigned to Director of Technology Joseph Kirkman, who left in 2000 for Baltimore.

Kirkman has been blamed for a litany of problems that the reinstated Abney discovered, including paying IBM $489,054 for maintenance contracts on computers that had been removed nearly two years earlier. IBM repaid the money.

Under Kirkman, the district also bought an $18 million software package to run the personnel system. The troubled phase-in included issuing thousands of erroneous paychecks.

Even more troubling to Wexler is how few teachers have infused computers into their lesson plans -- often because they haven't been taught how.

This was highlighted this month in a study of how much schools use their computers' capacity to transmit data, called bandwidth.

The study tracked the average usage during the day at 73 schools. Only four schools used more than half their bandwidth. Thirty-eight used less than 10 percent. The industry average that no one met is 70 percent, Wexler said.

All this has board members such as Stephanie Kraft struggling.

Five years ago, the staff advised the board to reject buying a fiber-optic network to carry telephone and computer traffic -- a system that would cut operating costs. A similar proposal is now being championed by Abney's staff.

"How do I trust these people?" Kraft asked.

Education Writer Toni Marshall contributed to this report.

Bill Hirschman can be reached at bhirschman@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4513. Copyright © 2002, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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-- Anonymous, February 19, 2002

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FL- Computer mistakenly orders Broward students to summer school

Friday, June 30, 2000 Computer mistakenly orders Broward students to summer school News- Journal wire services

FORT LAUDERDALE - Despite the good grades on their report cards, more than 3,000 Broward County high school students were ordered to summer school because of a computer glitch.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2002