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Reply to "New curriculum selection process delayed— new RFP must be issues now"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/potential-conflict-of-interest-derails-curriculum-rollout-in-md-school-system/2018/05/25/d28c96c2-5e9f-11e8-9ee3-49d6d4814c4c_story.html?utm_term=.1e96b4f5ab8c

WP’s article on the Discovery issue [/quote]
No. Titling this a “potential conflict of interest” instead of a conflict of interest is the first clue that this article is a soft marshallow instead of dispassionate reporting. How Discovery or Lang or Fliakas can claim that all this just caught them by surprise (oh my!) and that as soon as they “realized” they rushed to report it is flatly unbelievable. If you are involved in public procurement, you just don’t go around marketing yourself to private vendors and then get religion the day you get a job offer. You just don’t do that and call it ethical. Lang may be a very personable guy, but this isn’t ethical behavior. There are plenty of personable and friendly people who lack ethical judgement. Dixon is right. There should be some very clear laws about this in MCPS.[/quote]

[b]MCPS already has very well-defined conflict of interest rules.[/b] The very first part of these rules says, very specifically, that employees are supposed to know these rules! For these two veteran staffers to suggest that they were somehow unaware of the ethical thin ice on which they were treading is simply, and literally, unbelievable.

Besides being recused from the now-delayed bidding process, did these guys face ANY consequences for their costly “mistake”? The story doesn’t answer that. In fact, the story mentions nothing about an actual investigation into this and the elected school board is AWOL. MCPS eats up about half of the county budget. It’s time for an independent Inspector General to have some oversight. Clearly, MCPS can’t police itself and the BOE either doesn’t care or lacks the capacity to really ride herd. I’m also starting to get a sinking feeling about Smith. He may be in way over his head and he doesn’t exactly have a squeaky clean history from his previous superintendent job.[/quote]

Could you please post a quote or link?
Also, what do you mean about Smith’s history? Pulling the RFP seemed like a tough but honest call, although I do worry that Central Office seems to be trying rather hard to protect Discovery Ed.[/quote]

Article from Southern Md. News (www.somdnews.com) dated Friday, March 14, 2014.

“Dr. Smith has created a major hole in the Calvert County community by his manipulation of weak minded board of education members back in 2010 that allowed him and his top staff to give him the ability to cash in leave and also have the school system pay his 403B and health benefits for life.”

And, BTW, when he relocated to MCPS, the system paid for his move. Then Smith found that his new digs were too small for his family. So, he moved again. And the system paid for that move too. He’s also brought along, as staff and consultants, some former staffers from his old jobs, at some pretty hefty salaries.
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