Schools Dole Out Almost $4 Million to Consultants : Education: The San Diego Unified School District hires hundreds of outside experts each year. Some defend the practice, while others say it is out of control.

An elementary school shells out $9,400 on consultants to help teachers build “team cohesion.”

A central office administrator spends $14,500 for a consultant to make a video on life at the school district’s outdoor mountain camp for sixth-graders.

The arts coordinator approves $9,999 for a consultant to provide African-American dance at 20 schools for a month.

The personnel department forks over $3,600 for a consultant to tell workers how to coordinate consultants better.

A few thousand dollars here, another couple of thousand there, and before long the San Diego Unified School District is spending a lot of money on consultants.

Last year, district employees spent almost $4 million on hundreds of consultants whose expertise ranged from offering discipline tips for teachers to writing contest applications for individual schools.

Despite the huge amount spent on consultants--the rough equivalent of more than 100 full-time teachers--the district has no consistent policies on when to use a consultant and on how to ensure a fair selection among those available.

Employees often have no clear idea whether there is someone among their 12,000 district colleagues--including almost 8,000 teachers and related personnel--who can offer the same expertise as an outside consultant at far less cost. Only a few departments, such as the Gifted and Talented Education office, maintain lists of in-house expertise.

Further, there are no ways to check that the best person is hired for a needed task or job, and not just a friend or a friend-of-a-friend or simply the first name to come to mind. There are rules, however, that prohibit hiring current or retired district employees, or someone who has a financial relationship with a principal or department head.

While all consultant spending requests for more than $1,000 must come before the school board for approval, trustees receive the weekly hiring lists of those requests between $1,000 and $10,000 only on the day of their meeting.

Until last week, trustees treated the expenditures as routine items without need for discussion, even though week-in and week-out they total in the tens of thousands of dollars. The lists have never been a part of weekly agenda packets made available to the press and public.

“I didn’t realize how out of control all of this is,” said new trustee John De Beck, at whose insistence the lists will no longer be consent items on the agenda. “The public perceives we are wasting money and have no handle on expenditures.”

(Architects for school design and specialists for computer operations are also hired under consultant procedures, but in all cases the business and computer departments put out formal requests for qualifications and conduct detailed interviews of those who respond before making selections. These hires, along with any proposed consultant service costing $10,000 or more, come to the board for approval on separate, more detailed agendas.

(The nearly $4-million total spent on consultants includes some $400,000 for computer consultants but not another $1 million in architectural fees that were paid out of a special, voter-approved construction account.)

De Beck asked Supt. Tom Payzant last month to stiffen consultant hiring policies to require fee schedules and resumes on all potential hires, to have all district employees identify in writing the selection process they used in hiring a consultant, and to insist on evaluations of all services given by a consultant.

Former trustee Jim Roache, now San Diego County sheriff, said board members have no way of knowing how often particular consultants are used because of the way the lists are handed up weekly to trustees with one- or two-line summary descriptions.

“I suspected there were friends or acquaintances of district employees but you could never tell, there were just too many (requests) each week,” Roache said.

School administrators argue that the desired expertise is often not available within the district and that teachers frequently will listen more closely to experts who are from outside San Diego, both points that De Beck, himself a retired San Diego city teacher, disputes.

They also defend expenditures by pointing out that, of the $3.85 million spent on consultants in fiscal year 1989-90, only about 21% came from regular district funds. The rest was spent from various state, federal or private foundation money given to the district, including $1.3 million--or 33.5%--from the Gluck arts education endowment.

Assistant Supt. Beverly Foster spoke glowingly of a consultant hired just last week for $5,000 in foundation money--a move De Beck opposed--to tell teachers and administrators to stay the course, despite looming budget cuts and layoffs, concerning school restructuring and reforms to encourage individual school decision-making.

“Sometimes you have to hear it from the outside,” from a global perspective, Foster insisted. “I could have said the same thing in-house but I don’t know whether it would have been believed as much.”

A principal who asked not to be identified said schools would have believed Foster “if she had made the speech and given the $5,000 to school sites so they can do something about reform.”

The same principal said she and her colleagues often are irritated at the large number of pricey “change agent” consultants that top administrators have brought in to encourage employees to embrace Supt. Tom Payzant’s reforms.

“I think that teachers listen more when their own colleagues model new ideas for them,” the principal said.

Yet principals themselves often use their discretionary funds for educational consultants rather than searching out knowledgeable teachers for whom they would have to pay only the cost of finding a substitute for a couple of days.

Marshall Elementary School teachers, anxious for more information about student discipline, agreed with new principal Richard Cansdale to bring in Lee Cantor & Associates consultants this month for “assertive discipline for teachers” workshops for $3,256.

Cansdale said the consulting firm, which offers assertive discipline programs for bus drivers, parents and administrators, had a good track record in helping teachers at his previous school, Valencia Park.

“It offers a systematic, schoolwide approach. . . . Every classroom now has a poster that states the rules, consequences, and rewards” for student behavior, he said.

But could not Cansdale himself or a district teacher or teachers instruct those at Marshall in the practical how-tos of the discipline program? De Beck said “there are dozens of experts on assertive discipline in this district, the SDTA (teachers union) did workshops on it. . . . There’s an expert on everything in this district.”

Said Cansdale: “It’s an interesting point. Ideally, we would do that through a cadre of teachers” coordinated by the staff development department. “But I don’t really know.”

Dale Vigil, the new assistant superintendent for integration services, last month hired a bilingual teacher from central California for $8,000 to conduct workshops for second-language teachers on the district’s new language arts programs, which emphasizes children’s literature instead of using limited-language reading books.

The woman, a former Arizona teacher-of-the-year, had been a consultant on similar curriculum in the Denver city schools while Vigil was an administrator there.

“She’s a very talented individual whose husband is a professor at UC Santa Cruz” who works on alternative ways of evaluating what students learn, Vigil said.

But Vigil conceded that he did not coordinate the hiring with the Basic Education department. That department decided last year not to hire consultants but instead to train a special cadre of between 40 and 80 district elementary teachers who in turn would model the new language arts for several thousand of their peers, including second-language teachers.

“I agree that we need to coordinate better and that we also have to have better controls to hold schools and consultants accountable so that we get what we pay for,” Vigil said.

There are times when consultants are necessary, even De Beck--himself a part-time consultant to other school districts around the state--agreed. But he wonders about the way in which many of them are selected.

Often, a consultant is hired through what basic education director Kermeen Fristrom said is “an informal network of experts.”

“You’re at a conference and someone mentions that he is a colleague of Dr. Blankety-blank. And a year later, often, Dr. Blankety-blank gets invited for a workshop.”

Fristrom himself, along with a half-dozen of his central office colleagues, has spent time as a consultant to the American School in Karachi, Pakistan, as a result of similar networks. Specialized magazines on staff development maintain speakers bureaus whose lists are combed by school districts for familiar names.

Deputy Supt. Bertha Pendleton recently brought in a principal from the Seattle area for $7,900 to work with 12 San Diego city schools in an effort to help them do better academically with their nonwhite students.

“I do a fair amount of reading and traveling,” Pendleton said. “I have a good sense of who is out there, who is available, who the key names are, and I feel I can be a fairly good judge. . . . This person is outstanding in her field, she has been written up in Educational Week and worked at Harvard on (institutional school) change for a year.”

Assistant Supt. Al Cook needed a fund-raiser last month to finance a hoped-for camp this summer for African-American male students. Cook said he went to public affairs coordinator Phil George for help because he knew nothing of the subject.

“I said I wanted somebody good and somebody reasonable,” Cook said.

George said he knew of a particular woman who had raised funds for the arts and for several local political campaigns, including the recent successful state Assembly race of Mike Gotch. “Because there is no one in the district with the expertise, I suggested to Al someone I happened to know,” George said.

While Cook conceded that there could be other competent fund-raisers in San Diego, he took George’s word for it that the woman’s fee was reasonable--$2,500 plus 10% of proceeds raised--”and so I didn’t go through a process of putting out any bids and seeing who might be cheaper.”

But Carol Leighty did put out requests for interested filmmakers when she decided to make a video to show sixth-graders what they will encounter at her integration camp on Palomar Mountain--a week that for many will be their first time away from home.

“I felt $10,000 (later raised to $14,500) is a lot of money and didn’t just want some Joe Blow,” Leighty said. “So even though the person (eventually selected) came well-recommended, I wanted to see what others felt they could do.

“In general, I don’t feel that people outside the district have more expertise than within. . . . I always put my finger to my cheek and say, ‘Don’t I know someone within?’ In this case, I didn’t (know people) so I wanted to be very careful.”

Basic arts coordinator Kay Wagner has been accused good-naturedly of running an “employment program for starving artists” because for the past three years she has dispensed almost $3 million of grant money to local artists to work in schools----artists who normally find full-time work in their field difficult to come by.

“I don’t think my artists should be called consultants,” Wagner said, “when I compare how consultants are used in other departments. I am hiring people to work directly with kids, to bring something to them and to their neighborhoods, not hiring various experts to advise me on programs.”

But Wagner said she relies on intuition at times in choosing among those artists available. Last summer, she paid $9,999 to Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson, the cultural affairs officer at the Educational Cultural Complex for the San Diego Community College District, for a one-month jazz and dance festival to include schools operating on year-round summer schedules.

“So many people want money,” Wagner sighed, “and while this was a large chunk, the proposal was originally for $25,000 and I do feel it was legitimate.

“No one else had come to me on this, and while I’m not sure it was the wisest choice, I think we did get an awful lot of kids to the festival, and exposed to the performances in schools.”