No-Bid Contract Questioned

Can a class run by an outside contractor finally get a dozen girls to start behaving?

Hillhouse High School is willing to pay more than $420 a day to find out.

Principal Glen Worthy presented that idea to the Board of Education Finance & Operations Committee at its biweekly meeting Monday afternoon on Meadow Street. He proposed contracting with Integrated Wellness Group (IWG), a Westville psychology practice, to set up a group class on ​“social-emotional learning and conflict resolution.”

Worthy said the contract will target 12 girls who’ve been fighting, both within the schools and on social media. The contract says the class will focus on emotional self-regulation, social skills and responsible decision-making, so the participants learn ​“to de-escalate and self soothe when angry.” Students will be assigned ​“homework, handouts and activities to increase the skills learned in each group class.” By the end, the girls who pass the class will be ​“certified as peer leaders” who can teach their classmates about ​“coping strategies,” it adds.

Integrated Wellness Group said the girls need all the support they could get.

“These are girls who have had a pattern of behavior, who’ve been suspended for the last two years. They’re at very high risk, not just your typical students who have truancy or other issues,” said Kyisha Velasquez, IWG’s associate director of community programs and operations, who will be running the class. ​“We’re going to engage them from the beginning, teach them social-emotional learning skills and make sure we support them inside and outside of school.”

The class for will cost $19,000 for two months, running up to Nov. 5, 2018.

Worthy said that IWG had set the price it wanted. He said he hadn’t run their figures by anyone else, but he believed the fees are cheaper than what most contractors would have wanted. ​“You look at most consultants, they get $1,500 a day,” he said.

Worthy told the finance committee that the cost could be covered by state funds that turnaround schools receive, known as a School Improvement Grant.

Since that figure is just short of the Board of Education’s $20,000 threshold for review, the contract would be approved automatically without further review. (Superintendent Carol Birks, who’s supposed to make the final decision on minor contracts, wasn’t present.)

But after hearing the pitch, at least one board member said she hs ​“reservations.”

The committee agreed to move the contract forward to the full board for a vote, as long as IWG confirmed that it is not already serving the girls as clients in what they said would be ​“double dipping.”

Hiring Choices

Tamiko Jackson-McArthur, a pediatrician who serves as the school board’s secretary, asked at the meeting how this class fits into the rest of the high school’s support system.

“Does Hillhouse have mental-health providers — social workers, counselors and what have you — in-house?” she asked. ​“Are they doing these types of services?”

Worthy said that his current employees just don’t have capacity. The social workers, for example, were too overwhelmed with their caseload of special education students to take on that task.

Had Worthy thought about using the flexible pot of state money to build that capacity, hiring another employee who could serve more than a dozen students? Especially just months Hillhouse’s assistant principal had resigned, two counselors had been transferred to other schools and one counselor had been laid off?

He said that a contractor could connect with the girls outside of the constraints of the school setting.

“We tried a lot of interventions with these young ladies. I remember we tried counselors and social workers. We had mentors come in, and it just didn’t work. So I went to Integrated Wellness and explained to them that this is what I’m facing: We have a group of girls that we can’t reach,” he said. ​“It’s not much in the school day; it’s more what happens in the community that goes back into the school. That was my concern.”

Evaluating this contract, Jackson-McArthur said she isn’t convinced that IWG’s class will reach enough students to be worth the cost.

“I didn’t think they touched enough lives. I think there are more students that could benefit from the type of service,” she said after the meeting. ​“I wanted to know if what we’re getting was going to hit what the issues are. We have kids that are so complicated socially and emotionally, having a class like that, is that enough? What else do they have?”

Relationships and Results

Within the past year, as the board reevaluated its procurement process, especially for contractors who are selected without a competitive bidding process, Integrated Wellness Group has been the target of scrutiny. Some board members have criticized the group for not documenting the results of how it has spent public money. .

But Worthy said he trusts IWG to provide the services these girls need.

“I kind of have a relationship with them,” he said. ​“I’ve seen the work they do with high-risk students, and so I felt comfortable going with them.”

In November 2015, as director of the Adult Education Program, Worthy signed a $27,000 contract with Integrated Wellness Group to provide ​“mental health consultations and clinical services” at $150 an hour.

The following year, after he took over at Hillhouse High School, Worthy contracted with IWG’s therapists to run a ​“community-based reading support” program, using $52,400 in leftover federal Title I money for poor students.

For that program, four days a week, IWG brought 10 Hillhouse students together for an hour after school. The therapists offered a snack, ​“digital reading time” and social-emotional support, according to the contract. Students were expected to show up twice a week ​“for maximum benefit.” That contract paid IWG $2,100 per student, with about 25 students expected to cycle through during the seven-month agreement.

At the time, Worthy’s deal with Integrated Wellness Group wasn’t unusual.

In fact, just before Garth Harries’s departed in November 2016, the Board of Education drew on five funding sources — federal IDEA money for disabled students, federal Head Start money for pre-kindergarten, a state McKinney-Vento grant for homeless students, a state Alliance District grant for under-performing districts, and a state after-school fund — to pay IWG for school business.

In total that school year, the Board of Education gave Integrated Wellness Group $590,000 in contracts, including Worthy’s reading program. That fall, the Board of Education amended its biggest contract with IWG twice, adding more funding sources to a ballooning contract on Sept. 19, 2016, and Oct. 17, 2016 — just days after Harries began negotiating his exit but before he officially left.

During recent contract renewals, IWG has provided information only about how many students it’s seen, not whether their grades or behavior has improved.

Ed Joyner, one of the board’s two elected members, has used the company as an example to argue that all the district’s contractors should be held to more rigorous evaluations.

“What were the treatment goals? How do you identify the efficacy of the program? ​‘Lots of progress’ is not a psychometric term. We need data to indicate effectiveness and figure out whether competitors might do a better job,” Joyner said at a school board meeting this winter. ​“If we’re spending lots of money and we don’t have the evidence that we’re helping them get better in whatever goal they set, that’s a disservice to the community, a waste of taxpayer money and an undermining of the reputation of the district.”

Youth Stat Expansion

Jackson-McArthur brought up another question at Monday’s meeting after Worthy confirmed that all the girls are involved in Youth Stat, the Harp administration’s signature social-emotional program aimed at reaching at-risk students.

Aren’t these the same students that program had claimed to be serving? Jackson-McArthur asked.

Since 2014, YouthStat officials said the program was putting students in danger of dropping out back on track by connecting them with extra support from teachers and administrators, social workers and counselors, therapists and mentors.

In fact, Integrated Wellness Group was paid $200,000 last school year to refer students in crisis to mental-health providers and to hook them up with military veterans as role models.

That left Jackson-McArthur wondering what was different about these students.

“If these girls are at the highest risk, you’re telling me that they don’t have any outside interventions from any other mental-health providers?” she asked. ​“None of them are patients of Integrated Wellness? Will there be any other billing for these students’ interventions? If these children are at that high risk, what else is going to happen?”

Velazquez said she didn’t know who’d been selected for the class, but she committed to making sure that they weren’t already IWG’s clients. She said that the class would result in recommendations for further supports, checking in especially on girls who might have been put in touch with a clinician but hadn’t gone back.

“Especially if they have a high-risk, they’re very dismissive to any support. They don’t trust anybody,” she said. ​“A goal of mine is to really build a relationship with them so that they can engage with other services.”

After the meeting, Worthy explained that he needs more intensive mental-health treatment than what Youth Stat currently offers.

“Youth Stat has been very productive at Hillhouse, from before I even got there,” Worthy said. ​“But we need someone to be there constantly with these girls, someone to be there every single day meeting with these girls. They need something that intense.”

Jason Bartlett, the head of the city’s Youth Services Department who helped put the initiative together, said that it makes sense for Hillhouse to bring IWG into the schools for a daily program.

Through the existing Rapid Access to Therapy program, students can meet with an IWG therapist up to three times. But ​“that’s just to figure out what the issue is,” Bartlett explained. ​“Then, what they’re supposed to do is enroll them as clients or make a referral.

“They don’t do ongoing counseling in the school because you can’t bill insurance for that,” he went on. ​“We pay to make the connection, then hopefully the clinician makes a relationship and builds enough trust to see them as as a client, or if that’s not appropriate, then they send them to Clifford-Beers Clinic or a different kind of psychiatrist. Rapid Access is not intended to be an ongoing thing.”

Bartlett, who hadn’t heard about the IWG pilot, called Worthy’s proposal was an ​“interesting idea” to take what normally happens after-school through Youth Stat and fit it between the bells. He considered it to be an ​“expansion” of the partnerships that Harp’s administration had originally set up, where ​“different schools feel that they want to take a piece of what we do to another level.”

“If the money’s out there, then they can give that higher dosage,” he said.

Bartlett added that he’s focused on bringing the Youth Stat model to middle schools. He said he believes that work at an earlier age can help get ahead of the need for intensive mental-health services later on, as they’re currently trying to carry out with the Freshman Project, which helps students transition into high school.