BOE procurement policy heads back to committee

NEW HAVEN — A policy to dictate how and why the Board of Education approves contracts for professional services, in the works for months at the committee level, will return to committees after President Darnell Goldson made lastminute revisions.

Board member Ed Joyner, who took up the initiative for developing the policy, has repeatedly criticized what he sees as the board’s habit of spending money on contracts that don’t address key issues of student learning and are not competitive.

Before Tuesday’s meeting, Joyner had the Connecticut Association for Boards of Education review the policy to ensure it was a coherent and legally sound document. After that review, Joyner and Goldson discussed Goldson’s displeasure with aspects of the policy including language about a “chief procurement officer” — a position that doesn’t exist.

Although both agreed to strike that language from the policy, opting instead for saying a designee of the superintendent would review the professional services budget, Joyner expressed discomfort with revisions Goldson emailed to the board hours before the meeting.

Goldson said he was in Montreal and only began to review the policy Tuesday.

“This amendment is the result of me reviewing it today,” he said.

More controversial to Joyner was Goldson’s recommendation to remove language about conflict of interest.

“We have two codes of conduct,” Goldson said. “I am suggesting; instead of having all of this verbiage in this document under ethics, we highlight the ethics sections we already have, which is covered in this verbiage in this document.”

Goldson said that, the more places where the district lists codes of ethics in policies, the more liability it has for conflicting language if things were the change.

“The more explicit you are in spelling that out on a consistent basis, the more you’re going to improve the culture of an organization so they can’t say, ‘I didn’t know,’” Joyner said.

Before the board began debating, Mayor Toni Harp suggested in a point of order that Goldson hand over control of the meeting to Vice President Yesenia Rivera, as he had made the motion. Goldson requested back a copy of the board’s bylaws he had gifted to new member Larry Conaway, who was sworn in moments earlier, to find support that the president can participate as a full member of the board. He handed over control of the meeting during the discussion to Rivera anyway.

“This was a lastminute written response to this, and my concern was not with the title of chief procurement officer, even though I believe when you spend $30 million or more somebody ought to be in charge of making sure that money is spent,” Joyner said. “I think this community is crying out for fiscal accountability and transparency around who we’re paying money to.”

Uncomfortable with taking any action on the new revisions, the board voted unanimously to table the entire matter and refer it to the governance committee.