Board considers regular RFPs for professional services

Lawyer, architect could be bid out regularly

The North Penn School Board could soon take a new approach to bidding out professional service contracts.

Director of Business Administration Steve Skrocki suggested on Tuesday night the board consider setting a regular interval to seek requests for proposals, instead of doing so around election cycles.

“Some districts have a policy and a guideline where, every so many years — that can be in the policy — every three to five years, that you follow the process of an RFP,” Skrocki said.

“One thing it does, quite honestly, is it strips any politics out of it. It doesn’t matter who’s on the school board: once you reach the three- or five-year timeline, set in our policy, you start the process of the RFP,” he said.

Last fall several thencandidates who have since been elected to the school board pledged during their campaign to review and revisit several consultant contracts, and in their first meeting after being sworn in as board members, authorized fresh RFPs for the district’s legal advisor and architectural consultant.

Staff and the board are still working to narrow down responses to the architect RFP, and the board voted in early March to appoint Kyle Somers of New Britain-based law firm Sweet Stevens to act as solicitor, in a role similar to that Somers had held while working with a different firm prior to 2018.

During the school board’s finance committee meeting Tuesday, Skrocki asked if the board would be interested in setting up a regular rotation to shop for certain services.

“I know some legal firms that welcome the process. It keeps everybody honest, everyone sharpens their pencils, and every three to five years you’re guaranteed to get the best prices for the school district, at that point in time,” Skrocki said.

Professional services that could be bid out on a regular basis for new professional services contracts include the district’s solicitor, architect, insurance broker, and auditor. Board President Tina Stoll said she remembered board Vice President Ed Diasio proposing something similar to a prior board, which was “shot down real quick,” but the proposal drew strong support from the new board

“It’s good: it shows we’re not playing any favorites, or anything like that. It’s good for everybody: it protects us from being accused of favoritism, and maybe gets us a good price,” Stoll said.

Board member Juliane Ramic said she does similar periodic bids for her work in the nonprofit sector, and suggested the RFPs for each of the services be spread out over several years, so only one or two are bid out at a time.

“I’m wondering if the policy staggers it, so from your end it’s not hitting you all at once,” Ramic said.

“We would prefer that,” Skrocki replied.

The full board then indicated their consensus was to support the idea, and Skrocki said he will develop a draft policy setting out terms for bidding out the services regularly, then present it to the board’s Education, Community and Policy committee at a future meeting. That committee next meets at 6:30 p.m. on June 19 and the full school board next meets at 7:30 p.m. on June 12 and 21, all at the district Educational Services Center, 401 E. Hancock St.