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Archive for the ‘Transparency’ Category

Troy Hebert resurfaces as Jindal bag man in successful effort to defeat Rep. John Schroder’s whistleblower protection bill

Posted in ATC, Ethics, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, State Agencies, Transparency on May 29, 2013| 15 Comments »

Bobby Jindal as a reform governor in favor of transparency, accountability, integrity, honesty, and ethics, is a joke. A cruel joke.

There, we’ve said it. The man is a chameleon. If you threw him into a big box of crayons, he would explode from system overload.

He says he is for transparency but then he hides behind the deliberative process that he pushed through the legislature shortly after taking office.

Apparently, he also is now hiding behind Troy Hebert, director of the Alcohol and Tobacco Control Agency.

Jindal claims he will not tolerate any compromise of ethics.

To put it bluntly, he lies.

Take House Bill 387 by Rep. John Schroder (R-Covington) for example.

It passed the House unanimously, 100-0 with five members not voting.

On Wednesday, the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee unceremoniously deferred the bill without objection and with virtually no discussion.

All HB 387 would have done was protect state whistleblowers from reprisals.

The bill said, in part:

• Any public employee who provides information to a legislator or to a legislative committee upon request of a legislator or legislative committee shall be free from discipline, reprisal or threats of discipline or reprisal by the public employer for providing such information;

• No public employee with authority to hire, fire, or discipline employees, supervisor, agency head, nor any elected official shall subject to reprisal or threaten to subject to reprisal any public employee because of the employee’s disclosure of information to a legislator or legislative committee upon request of a legislator or legislative committee;

• If any public employee is suspended, demoted, dismissed, or threatened with suspension, demotion, or dismissal as an act of reprisal in violation of this Section, such employee shall report such action to the Board (of Governmental Ethics);

• An employee who is wrongfully suspended, demoted, or dismissed shall be entitled to reinstatement of his employment and entitled to receive any lost income and benefits for the period of any suspension, demotion, or dismissal;

The bill also provided for punishment of any supervisor who attempted to discipline, demote or fire a whistleblower.

The Jindal administration had opposed the bill as being “too broad,” claiming it could create “unintended consequences” that would inhibit the ability of agency leaders to manage their departments.

The bill was introduced after some state officials who disagreed with the Jindal administration lost their positions (“teagued”) and lawmakers subsequently experienced difficulty in obtaining information from agencies.

Perhaps it was “unintended consequences” that Jindal feared last year when he vetoed Senate Bill 629 by Sen. Ronnie Johns (R-Lake Charles).

SB 629, for those of you who don’t remember, would have provided “’transparency’ reporting to the legislature by the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) concerning the Louisiana Medicaid Bayou Health program and the Louisiana Behavioral Health Partnership and Coordinated System of Care programs.”

SB 629 was approved unanimously in the House, by a 102-0 vote with three absences. Then it went to the Senate where is was again approved unanimously, 38-0 with one absence.

Jindal promptly vetoed the bill.

Fast forward six months and the FBI issues a subpoena for all records in the possession of the Division of Administration relative to the $184 million CNSI contract with DHH.

Bruce Greenstein, who was DHH secretary at the time the contract was awarded, had once worked for CNSI and it was learned that he had tweaked the bid requirements in order that CNSI might qualify as a bidder on the contract.

Embarrassed, Jindal cancelled the CNSI contract and Greenstein resigned.

In an unrelated incident, Greenstein eliminated the position of internal auditor at DHH and some months later, a DHH employee was arrested for embezzling funds from the agency. With no internal auditor, how was it that the employee was discovered?

A private investigator.

That’s right, a private investigator. That’s indictment enough of this administration, but to allow the continued intimidation of state employees who know of illegal or unethical activity is to encourage the continued abuse of power by supervisory personnel even as the state treasury is looted.

But Jindal vetoed SB 629 as being unnecessary, perhaps even burdensome.

So now, the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, at the urging of Hebert, deferred without objection HB 387.

Sen. Bob Kostelka (R-Monroe), who sits on the committee, said Hebert had contacted every member of the committee to convey the message that the administration was opposed to the bill.

So why is Hebert carrying the water for Jindal? He has enough troubles running his own agency.

Who knows? Perhaps he fancies himself as Jindal’s heir apparent. He has about as much chance of achieving that objective as Jindal has of becoming president.

Kostelka described Schroder as “pissed” at the Senate committee’s deferral of his bill. “I see what’s happening here,” he was quoted by Kostelka as saying as he got up from the witness table to exit the committee room.

So now Jindal has won his version of transparency, accountability, integrity, honesty, and ethics. State employees may now continue to fear leaking information to legislators or the media. Only the bravest will dare come forward now and then only with total confidence that their names will never be divulged—a standing guarantee from LouisianaVoice.

Kostelka said he did not object to the motion by Shreveport Democrat Greg Tarver to defer the bill “because I saw the handwriting on the wall. The governor had gotten to the committee members through Hebert.”

Here are the other Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee members and their email addresses:

• Jody Amedee (R-Gonzales, chairman): amedeej@legis.la.gov

• Mike Walsworth (R-West Monroe, vice-chairman): walsworthm@legis.la.gov

• Jack Donahue (R-Mandeville): donahuej@legis.la.gov

• Jean-Paul Morrell (D-New Orleans): morrelljp@legis.la.gov

• Ed Murray (D-New Orleans): murraye@legis.la.gov

• Jonathan Perry (R-Kaplan): perryj@legis.la.gov

• Neil Riser (R-Columbia): risern@legis.la.gov

• Greg Tarver (D-Shreveport): tarverg@legis.la.gov

If you are predisposed to do so, shoot them an email and ask 1): what they’re trying to hide; 2): why they knuckle under to a lame duck, dishonest, self-absorbed, politically ambitious excuse of a governor, and 3): if they always check their manhood at the door.

The time is long past for the electorate of this state to stand together and call an end to politicians pimping out the state’s resources and contracts to political cronies and campaign contributors.

The only reason to send errand boys like Troy Hebert to massage legislators is to ensure that state government works only for the perpetuation of political corruption and not for the benefit of the governed.

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Only silence from House and Senate Education committees as fraudulent Course Choice registrations spread like kudzu

Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Transparency on May 23, 2013| 19 Comments »

The reports of fraudulent registration of students for courses in the Louisiana Department of Education’s (DOE) Course Choice program continue to filter in with more reported signups and solicitations in East Baton Rouge, Calcasieu and Claiborne parishes.

And while State Superintendent of Education John White is certainly culpable in the whole sordid mess, it is significant that only one of 28 legislators who are members of either the Senate or House Education Committees took the opportunity to address two emerging education issues when asked to do so by LouisianaVoice.

We sent emails to each member of the two committees (along with a select few other legislators). We identified ourselves at the outset and said that we had been writing about the leaking of teacher evaluation data by White, which would seem to be in clear violation of Act 54 of the 2010 Legislature.

We also said we were continuing work on the developing story about 1100 students in Caddo and Webster (a story that has since grown to include the parishes of East Baton Rouge, Calcasieu, Claiborne and Bossier) who were signed up for courses by Course Choice providers without either the knowledge or consent of the students signed up or their parents.

Course Choice providers like Fast Start and FastPath are paid one-half of their tuition, which ranges from $700 to $1250 per course, up front with the remaining one-half being paid upon the student’s completion of the course. Course Choice providers are given wide latitude in deciding whether or not a student completes his or her course.

We posed the question of whether or not an investigation should be conducted into how FastPath and Smart Start received students’ names and other personal information in order to sign them up for the courses.

One member, Rep. Rob Shadoin (R-Ruston), responded to our inquiry, saying, “I do not know enough details on these matters to give you a comment. I have general knowledge of what you speak but no specifics. I’m sorry I ain’t much help to you on the subject.”

Might we suggest, Mr. Shadoin, that as a member of the House Education Committee you might wish to bring yourself up to speed on education issues such as these—or resign from the committee?

But at least Shadoin did respond, such as it was.

That was a little better than the deafening silence from the all but one of the other members of the two committees.

State Rep. John Bel Edwards (D-Amite) said of the leaking of evaluation data on three Caddo Parish teachers to State Rep. Alan Seabaugh by White, “It would seem that whoever disclosed the information in the DOE in blatant disregard for the statutory protections affording teachers the right to keep certain specific evaluation information from public view is just the latest indication, among many, that those folks (in DOE) have no respect for the rule of law.”

Edwards also was critical of the Course Choice registrations. “The roll-out of Course Choice is proving to be every bit as scandalous and controversial as the roll-out of vouchers: unfit providers offering inferior educational opportunities while aggressively seeking to profit at taxpayer expense and while mal-educating our children and deceiving their parents.”

Here are the responses of the members of the House Education Committee:

• Stephen Carter (R-Baton Rouge), Chairman: Silence;

• Patrick Jefferson (D-Homer), Vice Chairman: Silence;

• Wesley Bishop (D-New Orleans): Silence;

• Christopher Broadwater (R-Hammond): Silence;

• Henry Burns (R-Haughton): Silence—in fact, deleted our email without reading it;

• Thomas Carmody (R-Shreveport): Silence;

• Simone Champagne (R-Erath): Silence;

• Cameron Henry (R-Metairie): Silence;

• Paul Hollis (R-Covington): Silence;

• Barry Ivey (R-Baton Rouge): Silence;

• Nancy Landry (R-Lafayette): Silence (Readers may remember Landry as the member who attempted to ram through a rule that teachers testifying before the committee in 2012 should be compelled to say whether or not they were on annual or sick leave);

• Edward Price (D-Gonzales): Silence;

• Jerome “Dee” Richard (I-Thibodaux): responded he would have a statement, but never sent it;

• Pat Smith (D-Baton Rouge): Silence;

• Jeff Thompson (R-Bossier City): Silence);

• Alfred Williams (D-Baton Rouge): Silence;

• Ex Officio member House Speaker Chuck Kleckley (R-Lake Charles): Silence;

• Ex Officio member Walt Leger (D-New Orleans): Silence.

Senate Education Committee members and their responses:

• Conrad Appel (R-Metairie), Chairman: Silence;

• Eric LaFleur (D-Ville Platte), Vice Chairman: Silence;

• Dan Claitor (R-Baton Rouge): Silence;

• Jack Donahue (R-Mandeville): Silence;

• Elbert Guillory (D-Opelousas): Silence;

• Mike Walsworth (R-West Monroe—still trying to learn if humans can be grown from high school lab cultures): Silence;

• Mack “Bodi” White (R-Baton Rouge—obviously too busy trying to get his breakaway school zone in South Baton Rouge approved): Silence;

• Interim member Page Cortez (R-Lafayette): Silence.

Nine House Education Committee members—Carter, Ivey, Smith, Alfred Williams, Jefferson, Henry Burns, Carmody, Jeff Thompson and Kleckley— and two Senators—Claitor and White—represent parishes into which these Course Choice providers have already moved to begin registering students and yet they still choose to remain silent on the issue.

Yes, it’s easy to point the finger at the snow cone stand mentality of DOE management by White and Course Choice ramrod Lefty Lefkowith but by their overwhelming silence in this matter, these committee members are every bit as complicit as anyone in the Claiborne Building.

It’s as if these people live in a vacuum. Take the computer-generated response we received from Sen. Neil Riser (R-Columbia):

“Thank you for contacting Senator Riser regarding your thoughts and concerns. He appreciates hearing from you. He will keep this in mind as they go thru the legislative process.”

Now that’s taking an issue head-on.

Meanwhile, Course Choice peddlers have moved into East Baton Rouge and Calcasieu to sign up students. Two in Calcasieu have been rejected thus far; one was a student signed up for two courses deemed inappropriate for the student’s grade level and another student registered for five courses (at $700 to $1250 each—half up front, remember) was not enrolled at the school the student said he/she was.

Course Choice representatives have begun canvassing neighborhoods in Homer in Claiborne Parish to sign up students and offering them free iPads.

Caddo, Bossier, Webster and Claiborne are all contiguous parishes in northwest Louisiana.

Claiborne Parish school officials have issued public announcements that the local school board has no connection to the Course Choice representatives.

Meanwhile, from the House and Senate Education Committees, to borrow a line from Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence:

Silence Like a Cancer Grows.

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Rep. Richard has money-saving bill: cut state spending on professional, personal, consulting contracts by 10 percent

Posted in Budget, Contract, Contracts, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Revenue, State Agencies, Transparency, Waste on May 23, 2013| 23 Comments »

State Rep. Jerome “Dee” Richard believes he may have found a way in which to cut into the state budget deficit to the tune of about half-a-billion dollars.

HB-73 by Richard would require a 10 percent reduction in the total dollar amount for professional, personal and consulting service contracts under the jurisdiction of the Office of Contractual Review (OCR) for Fiscal Year 2013-14.

The proposed law also would require the OCR to submit reports on the status of the implementation of the law to the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget on Oct. 1, 2013, Jan., April 1 and July 1 of 2014.
It also would require that the OCR director to submit a monthly report to the House Appropriations Committee summarizing all contracts and dollar values awarded the previous month.

The Legislative Fiscal Office (LFO) said the annual report of the OCR released in January of this year showed there were 2,284 professional, personal and consulting contracts with the state with a combined contract value of approximately $5.28 billion.

The LFO said the bill would result in an “indeterminable decrease” in overall state expenditures in FY-14. “To the extent this bill would have been enacted during the 2012 regular legislative session, the projected 10 percent reduction in the value of OCR approved professional, personal and consulting services contracts for FY-13 would have equated to approximately $528 million less,” the LFO’s fiscal notes said.

Richard’s bill would allow exceptions but only if certain conditions were met, namely:

• There were no state employees available or capable of performing the needed work;

• Required services are not available as a product of a prior or existing contract;

• There be a written plan to monitor and evaluate performance of the contract;

• The proposed contract would be determined to be a priority expenditure by the Commissioner of Administration.

Such a reduction, should it be approved and implemented, would help close a gaping budget hole of hundreds of millions of dollars for the state.

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, Notable Quotables, Public Records, Transparency on May 20, 2013| 6 Comments »

“We have received 52 enrollment requests since the inception of Course Choice. Of the 52 requests, 42 have been from the Bossier Technical Center.”

—Spokesperson for Bossier Parish School Board, commenting on 52 attempted registrations for Course Choice courses by providers FastPath and Smart Start. He said there are no students at Bossier Technical Center.

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More sordid details emerging in apparent fraudulent Course Choice registrations in three northwest Louisiana parishes

Posted in BESE, Education, Ethics, Public Records, Transparency on May 20, 2013| 28 Comments »

It’s not always writer’s block when you have trouble putting your thoughts into something resembling comprehensible form.

In the case of the Louisiana Department of Education’s (DOE) Course Choice program, the players are so intertwined as to be considered downright incestuous.

It’s not enough that the State Supreme Court has ruled that Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) funds cannot be used to pay the tuition for Course Choice. Superintendent of Education John White has given every indication that he fully intends to plunge ahead with Course Choice and vouchers.

The depth of the apparent fraud is already emerging, even before Course Choice is really up and running, at a staggering rate sufficient to alert every investigative agency in Baton Rouge, from the local district attorney to state Attorney General and Legislative Auditor’s office to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

So where are they?

No, it’s not writer’s block. This convoluted mess called Course Choice can best be described as a cluster fart (okay, we cleaned that up a bit).

We just posted a story last week about FastPath, that Austin, Texas, firm headed by Rod Paige, former Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. FastPath, it has been learned, signed up 1100 students from Caddo and Webster parishes for Course Choice courses without the knowledge or consent of the students or their parents.

One of those registering for courses in Webster Parish was a parent and “at least one was a Severe Profound child,” said a spokesperson for the Webster School Board. “The recruiters went down the street knocking on doors,” he said.

Some of the courses for students allegedly signed up for in Webster included math courses entitled Single Variable Equations, Two Variable Equations, Number Line Inequalities, Applied Linear Equations 1 and 2, Quadratic Formula, Quadratic X-Intercepts, Trinomial Factoring and Graphs to Linear Inequalities.

Now, LouisianaVoice has learned that another 64 were signed up for course choice courses in Bossier Parish. Fifty-two of those were signed up by FastPath and Smart Start but a few others were signed up by other providers approved by DOE, namely K-12, Inc., Advanced Academics, APEX Learning and Education Solutions.

Smart Start is the company that we reported last week was running ads in Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Central Louisiana for sales reps to earn up to $75,000 within six months by signing up students for course choice courses.

The ads have since been taken down but we subsequently learned that FastPath was running a similar ad for sales reps for the Monroe area.

All 64 applications were rejected by Bossier Parish. Of the 34 signed by Smart Start, all attempted to register for Precision Math and Reading Acceleration courses. One student who was not even enrolled in a Bossier Parish school attempted to register for two courses. The student identified his/her school as the Life Skills Center as the school he/she is presently attending. The Life Skills Center is closed.

Two students, a brother and sister from another parish attempted to register for four courses through Haughton High School.

One first grade student had someone attempt to register her in two courses—high school Latin and high school English. Her legal guardian did not enroll her through Course Choice and has no consistent computer access.

Another student attempted to register for two courses considered “academically inappropriate,” according to a Bossier Parish spokesperson.

Following our initial story last week, David Callaway, chief compliance officer for FastPath sent us an email that said everything was on the up and up with his company.

But judging from the track record of its CEO, Rod Paige, no one should be surprised if things aren’t completely on the level. While he was serving as Secretary of Education under the younger Bush, a major scandal erupted when it was learned that while he headed up the Houston Independent School District, the fifth largest district in the nation, the district falsified its dropout statistics.

In his response, Callaway said, “We have a strict protocol that all of our representatives follow, and they are paid a flat hourly rate for their work ($16 per hour, according to FastPath’s ad). As part of this protocol, parents are ALWAYS present during enrollment. All or our representatives wear identifying badges and we take immediate action to address all legitimate concerns. Parents enroll in significant numbers because our program works. Over 95 percent of parents report an increase in their child’s grades in multiple subjects.”

We fired off a second email asking him to quantify his 95 percent claim via a written document. We have not heard back from him.

“Before a student’s enrollment is completed,” he said, “it is approved by a guidance counselor to ensure it is academically appropriate.”

The Bossier Parish spokesperson, however, said the only way the local school board becomes aware of enrollees is by logging onto the DOE dashboard through the Course Choice website. For all intents and purposes, the local guidance counselors are out of the loop on Course Choice registrations until well after the fact.

Callaway said FastPath does not receive full tuition from the state for students “unless our program results in significant gains on the LEAP/iLEAP.”

The actual agreement between FastPath and DOE, however, is not quite that strict. FastPath, as with all course choice providers, charges $700 to $1250 in tuition and like all providers, receives 50 percent of that ($350 to $625) up front. Only 10 percent of the final 50 percent (or 5 percent of the overall tuition) is contingent upon students’ showing only an increase, not a “significant” increase. Thus, if a FastPath student failed to show gains, FastPath would lose only $62.50 of a total tuition of $1250 or $35 of a $700 tuition.

Some penalty.

Now here’s where it begins to get a bit muddled and we’re probably going to have to develop an organizational, or flow chart to illustrate just how tight this little cadre really is.

First, we should point out that FastPath has two sister companies, Tutors with Computers and Read and Succeed, both of which have numerous complaints registered against them for deceptive practices.

That, however, has not deterred one Eric Nadelstern, Ed.D., from offering ringing endorsements of both companies. Nadelstern has been called “The great apologist for everything Joel Klein did for a decade.”

Nadelstern was Klein’s Deputy Chancellor for Academics in New York and was John White’s boss there.

Oddly enough, he appears on the web pages of both Tutors with Computers and Read and Succeed with identical blurbs with only the company’s name changed: “(Name of company) delivers outstanding products and services that effectively raise reading and math proficiency,” his endorsements say.

The DOE official responsible for coordinating all the course choice programs is one David “Lefty” Lefkowith, the frequent flyer who commutes to and from his home in Los Angeles for a $146,000 per year salary.

Travel records released to LouisianaVoice as part of the settlement terms of our recent public records lawsuit against DOE reveal that Lefty was reimbursed $860 for traveling to Austin, Texas, on Feb. 17-18 to meet with officers of Agilix Labs regarding Course Choice registration.

So just who is Agilix Labs? It’s a company that thus far has managed to fly under our radar but which we now know has a contract with DOE to help develop its Course Choice platform. We’ve not been able to determine the amount of that contract but we have made a public records request for the document.

Agilix announced in a Feb. 27 news release that it had created “one of the first educational applications to tap into the emerging InBloom data standard (IBDS).”

The news released continued by saying, IBDS was designed by its creators at Shared Learning Cooperative (SLC) to standardize access to myriad disparate forms of student, school, course and other educational data across platforms. Supported with $100 million from the Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and others, InBloom supports data needs of states, districts, nonprofits and corporations promoting personalized learning.”

What?

“We had to look at the issue of how to interface with all these systems to provide the broadest possible access to our customers,” said Agilix CEO Curt Allen. “After much analysis, we settled on adopting the rapidly emerging InBloom standard. That choice means that any school district or state that supports IBDS can leverage Agilix Honeycomb technology.

“John White, Superintendent of Louisiana schools, says, ‘By connecting to IBDS, Agilix opens a lot of doors for our Course Choice product not only for registration but also for detailed analysis of student performance. We expect this will assist greatly in tracking and reporting results of Course Choice adoption to state authorities,’” the news release said.

So there you have it. The circle is complete. After all the guarantees that data provided to InBloom would not be shared, we have Agilix, contracted by the state, saying otherwise.

We have White’s former boss endorsing two shady companies affiliated with a course choice provider (FastPath) from the same city as Agilix (Austin) that is signing up students in three northwest Louisiana parishes without the knowledge or consent of the students or parents.

And Agilix is joined at the hip with InBloom to whom White was going to provide sensitive personal data on some 700,000 Louisiana school students to “park” the information in its “data garage.” White has since said he cancelled the agreement with InBloom but in response to our public records request has denied the existence of any document verifying any such cancellation. Nor has he ever produced a contract or memorandum of understanding with InBloom to provide the data in the first place.

And coordinating the entire Course Choice racket is a nomad who jets in from Los Angeles for a four-day work week before heading back to the West Coast every Thursday—a nomad with his own questionable past of working with the now defunct Enron and the Jeb Bush administration in Florida in an unsuccessful effort to corner the market on drinking water there.

What could possibly go wrong here?

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