nothin No-Bid Contracts Clear Committee | New Haven Independent

No-Bid Contracts Clear Committee

Integrated Wellness Group

Psychologist Maysa Akbar.

A Board of Education committee gave the green light to a no-bid $200,000 contract added to its agenda at the last minute, in a process that may have violated legal rules for public notification.

The recommendation to send to the full board the contract with Integrated Wellness Group (IWG) was approved Tuesday afternoon at the board’s Finance & Operations Committee meeting at 54 Meadow St. The committee caught up on more than a million dollars’ worth of backlogged business postponed since the holidays, including a new contract for a neighborhood agency to which two board members have ties.

District officials say that IWG, a for-profit, black female-owned therapy practice on Fitch Street, has come to play a needed leading role in the school system’s efforts to meet students’ social-emotional needs. The latest contract renews two services IWG has provided in the past: Rapid Access to Treatment, which involves evaluating mental health needs to write referrals, and Veterans Empowering Teens Through Support (VETTS), which connects students with mentors from the armed services.

Black and Brown folks, especially those who have experienced Urban Trauma, are less likely to seek or have access to treatment,” said Maysa Akbar, IWG’s founder. It takes a great deal of trust, compassion, and understanding to combat the stereotypes associated with seeking mental health treatment.”

Founded in 2007, IWG had done that type of work inside city schools since Oct. 2014, earning praise from the mayor and other officials for the firm’s work and Akbar’s expertise. In the last six months, though, contracts with IWG had lapsed.

In preparing the new contract, district staffers extended IWG an offer to resume its work immediately, without soliciting any other bids or submitting last year’s outcome reports. The new contract, finalized by staff more than a week ago, was tacked on as a last-minute addendum on Tuesday. Gemma Joseph Lumpkin, the school system’s Youth, Family and Community Engagement chief, said that the staff submitted the request without seeking bids first because of Akbar’s long record of quality work. She noted that a second contract advanced at the meeting for similar behavioral health work, through the Alive! Program, also was submitted without competing bids for similar reasons.

Altogether the committee in fact voted for four different contracts included in a last-minute addendum: for IWG and Alive!‘s therapists, literary support services for New Haven Reads and a street outreach worker for New Haven Family Alliance. They also accepted a $502,000 state grant.

The addendum was essentially state funded items that we wanted to move to get programs going,” said Will Clark, the district’s chief operating officer.

That addendum might have violated Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The final agenda for any regular meeting — even by a committee — must be posted a full 24 hours ahead of time. New business can still be added, if two-thirds of the members present vote to do so.

That didn’t happen on Tuesday. The addendum was posted online earlier that day, long after the 4 p.m. deadline on Friday when it should have gone up (adding an extra day because of the Martin Luther King holiday). And the committee co-chairs didn’t take a formal vote to waive the FOIA’s notice requirements.

It’s a technicality, but that would be a problem if someone filed a complaint,” said Thomas Hennick, the FOI Commission’s public education officer.

Tapped Often For City Work

Clark blamed this month’s snowstorm for the late addition to agenda. But Tuesday’s meeting wasn’t the first time that IWG’s contracts suddenly appeared on the Finance Committee agenda.

In 2016, that happened at least three times. On March 7, then-Committee Co-Chairs Darnell Goldson and Mike Nast, agreed to hike Akbar’s rate for the VETTS program by $50 an hour and assign her another 1,000 more hours, totaling a $50,000 change. On May 16, they bumped the hours for her rapid-access therapy, another $40,000 change. And on June 20, they assigned her a yearlong contract to do four more programs for $300,000.

After Goldson stepped down, one more last-minute addendum for IWG popped up on Aug. 21, 2017, when Frank Redente, chairing the committee alone, voted to up IWG’s funding by another $15,652.

Akbar, who’s also an assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center, developed close political ties with Mayor Toni Harp and Rev. Boise Kimber in recent years. Those connections first became public in April 2016, when in the midst of picking up board business, Akbar appeared at a forum to discuss the benefits of Kimber’s idea for a charter school solely for boys of color.

Akbar also got help from City Hall. According to 2016 budget documents provided to the alders, the Youth Services Department (run by Jason Bartlett, the mayor’s liaison to the Board of Education) paid IWG $4,000 to offer summer jobs and $47,262 to continue the VETTS program. The IWG funding represented Bartlett’s fourth biggest payout to a service provider in 2016.

In September 2017, Harp and Kimber both blurbed Akbar’s new book, Urban Trauma: A Legacy of Racism.

The next month, the mayor added Akbar to the search committee for the city’s next school superintendent. Two weeks later, Akbar hosted a fundraiser at her home for the mayor’s reelection campaign.

In November, during a forum for the three superintendent finalists, IWG also got a shout-out from Carol Birks, the mayor’s pick for the superintendent job. Birks (who has since been hired) highlighted IWG’s therapy practice as an example of a community partnership she plans to expand as superintendent.

Joseph Lumpkin described VETTS as an intensive, short-term program for vulnerable” students. The eventual goal is to transition those students away from VETTS to other less costly supports,” like a street outreach worker, a community mentor or a school employee.

We identified them through some work they’d previously done, through our early days with YouthStat and through some community work they’ve done for the City of New Haven. They’ve worked very well for us,” Joseph-Lumpkin said. This is a continuation of work that they’ve done.”

Did those prior contract go out to bid? No,” she said. They’ve done great work in the past, had a great reputation working with high-needs students, and that was important to us in our decision-making.”

Culturally Sensitive, Competent”

Christopher Peak Photo

Finance Committee meeting Tuesday night.

Akbar said she’s proud of the business she’s built over the last decade. We are very proud to be small-business pillar in New Haven providing jobs for over 30 staff, most who live and work right in this beautiful city,” she wrote in an email on Tuesday night. Providing culturally sensitive, culturally appropriate and culturally competent mental health care is the cornerstone of all our programs.”

Despite the budget constraints, she said IWG’s team has still been involved with public-school students.

Given the budget crisis in Connecticut, everyone has has been affected including the school system,” she stated. To the best of our capacity we have tried to support students and families, despite budgetary constraints, and we have worked closely and thoughtfully with the administration to make sure that they do not go without needed supports.”

Akbar also provided documents demonstrating IWG’s impact.

In the 2016 – 17 school year, 192 students were sent to IWG’s mental-health consultations. Of those, 75 students left with referrals to outside clinicians; 30 students continued to follow-up with IWG for long-term help. Eighteen students didn’t complete a session.

The same year, 160 students were sent to the VETTS program. Thirty-four of those declined help or stopped going because they got locked up or ran away from home. Of the 126 remaining students, only 17 were re-arrested, three-quarters of them after VETTS’s contracted services ended.

In an email Tuesday night, Akbar said that the mentorship program is not-for-profit. But filings with the Internal Revenue Service track no program expenditures on VETTS since 2015, when Akbar was receiving six-figure school contracts.

Dual Roles

Jamell Cotto.

Overall, Tuesday night, the committee voted to recommend approval of $1,422,461 in contracts as well as receipts of $1,557,812 from six grants. The expenditures primarily would go toward toward advertising for magnet schools, three behavioral-intervention programs, seven after-school activities and three teacher trainings. Except for $22,200 that came out of the general fund, all the contracts were paid with state and federal grant money.

All the contracts and grants still need to be approved by the full board, when one board member said he’ll have to recuse himself because of a conflict of interest. Denise Duclos, the director of school readiness programs, asked for permission to reshuffle the city’s day-care spots, sending more kids to the two not-for-profit organizations that have employed Board of Ed member Jamell Cotto over the past year.

Fourteen day-care contracts, worth $5,952,688 altogether, were originally approved back in June 2017. But six months later, the distribution of seats hadn’t matched demand. Numbers lagged at Nathan Hale Pre‑K, the Zigler Center and the YMCA. So, Duclos proposed shifting the unfilled seats over to the Connecticut Children’s Museum, Leila Day Nurseries, Catholic Charities, where Cotto used to work, and Farnam Community, where he’s now employed.

The reshuffling should keep unused funds from rolling back to Hartford, Duclos explained to the committee.

The move includes a $31,248 contract adjustment for Farnam, where Cotto currently works as executive director. Cotto didn’t mention that dual role while he participated in discussion over the committee’s approval at Tuesday’s meeting. He later said he did abstain from voting on the matter, although that wasn’t clear.

The meeting marked school board members’ first official gathering since the Independent reported on potential conflicts of interest in the business transactions between board member Darnell Goldson’s employer and a school contractor.

Even though parents have questioned perceived improprieties, the Board of Education continues to operate without rules for avoiding conflicts of interest. There’s only one sentence about corruption in its 521-page policy manual, which says board members shouldn’t use their position to secure or attempt to secure personal profit or gain.” That line gives board members little guidance on when exactly to recuse themselves from important votes, like at the Finance & Operations Committee that regularly add up to seven-figure sums.

During the discussion, Cotto spoke up in favor of approving the new payments to the group of providers.

I mean, we all know, according to the last Reading Commission report, there’s 4,500 school-readiness kids disconnected from any program,” Cotto said. That’s a generation. We shouldn’t be giving those spots back. We need that.”

Absolutely,” said fellow committee Co-Chair Frank Redente. Very, very good.”

Redente, too, once worked as Farnam Community’s operations director. He’s still listed as a Farnam employee on the not-for-profit’s website, his LinkedIn and his school board biography. He spoke at fundraising event for the organization in December. But Cotto has said that Redente retired before joining the board.

Without mentioning their ties, whether past or present, Cotto and Redente both signaled their approval for Duclos’s plan, sending it, with their recommendation, to the full board for a final vote.

Asked afterwards if that constituted a conflict of interest, Cotto noted to the Independent he hadn’t cast a vote. Frank’s allowed to vote on that,” he explained. I’m not.” He added that he’d absolutely” be recusing himself at the board meeting.

Other Deals

The Finance & Operations Committee also voted to recommend approval Tuesday night of:

  • Advertisements by Area Cooperative Educational Services for magnet schools: $255,000.
  • Training in the Comer model from Yale University: $225,000.
  • Behavioral interventions from Foundation for the Arts and Trauma at four schools: $200,000.
  • Career-readiness workshops by Justice Education Center and Change the Play at Hillhouse: $110,000.
  • Training by Great Schools Partnership on project-based learning at HSC: $94,000.
  • A street outreach worker from New Haven Family Alliance for YouthStat students: $85,000.
  • Literacy support from New Haven Reads at 20 schools: $55,000.
  • Guidance from Columbia’s Teacher’s College on STEM curriculum at four magnet schools: $46,800.
  • Dental screenings from the Connecticut Department of Public Health: $30,000.
  • A consultation on socioeconomic desegregation: $30,000.
  • Out-of-scope construction work by Fusco Corporation at ESUMS: $28,816.
  • Social workers at St. Francis & St. Rose of Lima School: $22,680.
  • Three after-school programs at West Rock Academy: $20,290.
  • An aide for a blind student: $15,300.
  • A French-speaking intern from the University of Bridgeport for ESUMS: $7,500.
  • An audit by ReVision Learning Partnerships of select teacher evaluations: $6,900.
  • Extra state money for Lulac Head Start: $1,083.

The district also cut back on the contract for the reading software Lexia Learning System by four months, saving $33,920. And it renegotiated rates for the college-planning software Naviance, saving $5,950.

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