Norfolk officials work for firm that receives schools' cash

NORFOLK

Three of Norfolk’s school administrators also work as consultants for the Colorado-based Leadership and Learning Center, an education firm that has received contracts worth about $1.3 million from the division in the past 10 years.

Cathy Lassiter, Norfolk’s middle school executive director, works the side job while four of the nine schools under her supervision struggle for accreditation and two others are among the lowest-performing schools in the state. She also was criticized by an investigative panel earlier this year for improperly handling an inquiry into testing problems at one of the city’s middle schools.

As Ocean View Elementary’s principal, Lauren Campsen approved a contract between her school and the center last year while she was on the center’s payroll as one of its consultants.

The state bars public employees with official procurement responsibilities from awarding contracts to firms for which they work.

Norfolk City Attorney Bernard Pishko said Campsen did not violate Virginia’s Public Procurement Act because she did not have official responsibility for purchasing. He said it was up to the superintendent to decide whether there was an appearance of impropriety in Campsen’s award of a contract to the Learning Center.

Linda O’Konek, Norfolk’s executive director of education accountability, received permission to consult for the center from her former boss, Melinda Boone. Boone is now the superintendent of public schools in Worcester, Mass., which has hired O’Konek as a consultant through the center.

Lassiter earns $109,456 with the Norfolk division; Campsen, $101,351, and O’Konek, $109,456.

School and city officials say none of the three administrators has done anything wrong. All received permission from supervisors to do consulting.

They do the work on their vacation and leave time, the three administrators and school leaders said.

Norfolk School Board Chairman Stephen Tonelson said second jobs are a tradition for many teachers, be it as college lecturers or tutors, among others. Some of the engagements, such as when employees like Lassiter and others speak out of town as consultants, bring the division added prestige, he said.

Like Norfolk, other local divisions generally allow employees to have outside jobs as long as that work doesn’t interfere with school responsibilities or have a negative impact on the division. The divisions say they abide by state laws on conflicts of interest and procurement ethics.

School Board member Jim Driggers said he was “caught by surprise” when he learned that the administrators had a paid relationship with a consulting firm with frequent and current contracts with the division.

“I wouldn’t do it if I were those people,” Driggers said. “There’s nothing I can put my finger on, it’s just the appearance of impropriety.”

School and city officials reviewed the administrators’ moonlighting after The Virginian-Pilot, under the Freedom of Information Act, requested documents on the company’s links with the division.

In a March 4 memo to the School Board about the consultant work, Norfolk Schools Superintendent Stephen Jones absolved O’Konek and Lassiter: “Conflict of interest was not a concern, as the Center had a nine-year relationship with the district, and neither of the two were in a position to influence contracts with the Center in their roles over schools,” Jones wrote.

“If the current board believes this practice to be in contrast to current expectations, I encourage you to review your policy regarding outside work for all employees, and engage with me in discussion about this case in particular.”

The center, led by Douglas Reeves, has worked for only one other local school division, Virginia Beach, and that was about eight years ago when it gave a workshop for principals. But it has had a close and lucrative partnership with the Norfolk division, providing seminars and training in multiple areas, including special education, leadership, math instruction and standards-based improvement of student achievement.

Documents obtained by The Pilot show that from 2001 through March of this year, the center won at least 56 contracts with the Norfolk division worth $1.3 million.

The center is a privately owned business with $11.8 million in annual revenue and 42 employees, according to a 2009 listing by Inc. magazine.

The center calls its consultants professional development associates. The firm’s website (www.leadandlearn.com) notes that such associates must make “a significant investment of their time, intellectual energy and money. … The rewards, both personal and financial, can be substantial for a successful Professional Development Associate.”

Reeves, an education scholar and writer, said in an interview that the center’s part-time consultants work for his firm when they are on vacation from their regular jobs. He said O’Konek and Lassiter are urban education experts with the added cachet of coming from Norfolk, which won the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2005. The highly coveted national honor recognizes top-performing divisions that have closed the achievement gap among minority students.

“Both of them have this track record of having done exceptional things with high-poverty schools,” he said. With the center’s aid and training, Norfolk adopted a policy of identifying which schools had the best student performance and then spreading those schools’ teaching techniques across the district, Reeves said.

Sarah Peoples Perry, a former Ocean View Elementary assistant principal and Campostella Elementary principal, called Reeves extremely helpful in raising her schools’ achievement.

At Ocean View, Reeves helped analyze student performance data and write an accountability plan for staff that Perry said lifted Ocean View into full accreditation.

“His center of leadership and learning was great in the development of a successful school,” said Perry, who now works for the Ministry of Education in the United Arab Emirates.

Perry also said she was dubious about school administrators acting as outside consultants.

“I question how much time or percent of your time you can give to others and to your job,” she said. “How proficient can you be doing this? When your house is falling apart or needing repairs, you should fix this before going to fix another person’s house. Your house should be the model for others.” 

When Lassiter signed a purchasing contract for the division with the Learning Center in 2003, she served as the school system’s senior director for leadership and capacity development. Before that, she worked as a teacher and middle school principal in Norfolk.

The contract she approved between the division and center was for $149,900, according to division documents. In an e-mail, Lassiter said she was acting as a stand-in for the schools’ chief academic officer, who was absent at the time, when she signed the center’s contract.

She said her work for the center started many years after she’d signed the school division contract. She wrote that she does outside work on vacation time but declined to say how much she is paid for consulting.

“I am not now, nor have I ever been, engaged in a conflict of interest regarding my consulting work with the Center,” Lassiter wrote. “The opportunity to work in other districts has enhanced my own professional development, which has enabled me to bring new ideas and best practices to Norfolk public schools.”

Two middle schools have been among at least four Norfolk schools identified since last fall by the city or state as breaching Standards of Learning testing rules.

A panel appointed by division leaders to review testing problems at Lafayette-Winona Middle School reported in March that Lassiter falsely claimed to have conducted an “extensive investigation” into complaints by a teacher who reported the violations to the state and the district.

“She failed to fulfill the prescribed duties of an NPS executive director of middle schools, and she failed to uphold the core values of NPS,” the panel said.

Lassiter’s recent consulting work with the center included a March 7-8 center-organized leadership conference for principals in San Antonio, at which she and Reeves spoke. Admission to the conference was $1,695 per person.

She was scheduled to speak as a center expert this spring and summer at four two-day conferences in California, Illinois, Georgia and Colorado, according to the company’s website.

She is also on the roster of Massachusetts-based AIE Speakers Bureau, which provides keynote speakers for a fee.

AIE’s website lists Lassiter as available for less than $5,000. Her AIE biography cites her role as a current middle schools executive director among her qualifications but doesn’t name Norfolk.

Deborah Walstrom, the founder of Successline Inc., a Suffolk-based educational consulting firm, advises against school employees working for consultants that do business with their school divisions.

“Should we expect our school executives to pay full attention to the work at hand in the district?” she asked.

Tonelson said he believes every school employee gives a 100 percent effort to his or her job with the division.

Like Lassiter, O’Konek said her work with the center helps Norfolk.

“I am able to share with principals and staff of Norfolk Public Schools the skills and knowledge I have gained through my association with the Center at no additional cost to the district,” she wrote in an e-mail.

O’Konek’s work with the center began in 2008. She, too, wrote that she joined the center only after receiving Jones’ consent. The work is done only on vacation time from Norfolk, she said.

O’Konek was hired by the center to design an accountability system for the Worcester, Mass., school division, according to a Feb. 26 article in the local Telegram & Gazette.

O’Konek’s former boss, Melinda Boone, is now Worcester’s school superintendent. In an interview, Boone said she gave O’Konek permission when she was still working in Norfolk to begin working with the center. But Worcester’s current contract is with the center, not O’Konek, Boone said.

The center will get $48,513 for helping the Worcester system develop an accountability system, she said.

Campsen, the Ocean View Elementary principal, said numerous organizations requested that she work for them as a consultant in 2008 after she won nationally recognized achievement awards for her work at the school. She signed a consulting agreement with the center on July 14, 2009, Pishko said.

According to division documents, on Dec. 4, Campsen approved as principal a $3,500 contract between her school and the center for teacher training for her Ocean View staff.

She said the center was paid from an $8,500 grant that Ocean View won for professional development after being recognized as a Virginia Distinguished Title I School.

Rather than ask the district to hire a teacher training consultant, she tapped the grant to cover the contract she signed with the center.

As for her consulting work, she said she has used four vacation days this past winter to run a workshop and coach principals outside of Norfolk.

Steven G. Vegh, (757) 446-2417, steven.vegh@pilotonline.com