Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools superintendent resigns amid contract controversy
The superintendent of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools resigned Thursday, the second central-office resignation since the district canceled a controversial consulting contract.
Superintendent Pam Baldwin will remain on medical leave until April 26 and will return to work until her resignation becomes effective June 30, school board Chair Mary Ann Wolf said at the start of Thursday’s school board meeting.
Baldwin will receive a $106,099.98. severance payment, equal to six months of her salary.
Patrick Abele, assistant superintendent for support services, has been acting superintendent while Baldwin has been on leave.
In a statement, Baldwin said she was looking forward to returning to work for a few months before leaving.
“I wish our school system continued success and most importantly, I wish the children of our community every accomplishment and all of the blessings they work so hard for every day, now and forever,” she said. “These young people are who give me hope for a just, equitable, and kind world. It has been my honor to serve them.”
Parents and others have called for the school board to hold Baldwin accountable, following news of a now-canceled $767,070 professional development contract with consultant Education Elements.
The work was aimed at advancing equity training for staff and personalized learning for students, with an eye on closing the district’s racial and ethnic achievement gap. School board members have said the work will continue even though the district ended the contract in January.
Documents show the Education Elements payments appeared to have been structured to avoid the district’s requirement that the school board approve all contracts valued at $90,000 or more.
Jennifer Bennett, assistant superintendent of business and finance, resigned amid the controversy, effective April 30.
At a March 5 school board meeting, Victoria Creamer, a district parent and former Ephesus Elementary School principal, accused Baldwin of malpractice.
“Since your arrival, you have behaved unethically, mistreated people and you have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Creamer, who left the district in February 2018..
“Many employees, parents and community members have reached out to you on multiple occasions to report various issues and ask for help,” Creamer told the board. “They have emailed you, they have listed concerns on their HR exit paperwork. They told you that due to Dr. Baldwin’s direct supervision of HR, they feared retaliation. ... Yet you have continued your public support of Dr. Baldwin on social media, you have suppressed public comment at board meetings, and you renewed her contract without transparency.”
Superintendent evaluation, contracts
Baldwin was hired in December 2017 at $195,000 a year. Her three-year contract also included district-related travel and cell phone reimbursements.
She previously was superintendent of the Asheville City Schools, assistant superintendent of the Scotland County Schools, and director of teaching and learning for Currituck County Schools.
In June 2018, Baldwin had a six-month evaluation that extended her contract to June 30, 2022. She got a $16,000 raise, to $211,000.
Baldwin’s contract was amended again in May 2019, roughly one month before the Education Elements contract was signed.
The extension through June 30, 2023, would have given Baldwin the same percentage salary increase as teachers got from the state’s 2019-20 budget. However, the state budget impasse delayed that 3.9% increase, which would have given Baldwin an extra $8,229 a year.
Despite a district policy that says the public should get a summary of the superintendent’s annual evaluation, district spokesman Jeff Nash said none exists for Baldwin.
Education Elements contract
District emails show Jack Hoke, executive director of the N.C. School Superintendents’ Association, introduced Baldwin to Education Elements partner Jason Bedford in a Feb. 4, 2019, group email.
Baldwin and Lee Williams, the district’s executive director of equity and inclusion, met with Bedford in late February around the time that Bennett was hired.
In a March email, Bedford recommended to Baldwin that a few district officials attend at no cost the National Academy for Personalized Learning in April, hosted by the Education Elements. Baldwin forwarded the invitation to assistant superintendent for instructional services Jessica O’Donovan on March 5 and encouraged her to share it.
“I hope that there is an idea or resource that will be useful for you ... in the next week or two,” Bedford said. “As I continue to think about if and how Education Elements could support your work in CHCCS I have organized my thoughts to the graphic below and shared out a few ideas for each phase. As always, I appreciate feedback.”
Nash has not yet provided information about district expenses for travel since Jan. 1, 2019.
O’Donovan, in a May 7 email, told Bedford that she is “comfortable moving forward” and that Baldwin wants him to make a presentation to the leadership team. Bedford emailed O’Donovan after a May 28 meeting to say that Education Elements would try to accommodate the district’s “compressed timelines” for launching the work.
Bedford gave O’Donovan a two-page summary of the work and the costs in a May 30 email. Baldwin emailed Bedford on June 7 following his meeting with district officials to say she wants “to talk through the stages and how we might be invoiced.”
She and Bennett also plan to meet with Bedford on June 12, Baldwin said, “to be sure we have all that we need to proceed.”
Payments, work begin
Filip Kesler, Education Elements senior director of BizDev & BizOps, emailed a draft agreement to Bennett on June 13 and then an updated agreement June 24 for her signature. She replied that she would meet June 26 with Baldwin to finalize the contract.
In a June 26 email, Bennett told Bedford the district needed Education Elements to modify the contract “since if we include the whole potential payment value then we have to take this to the Board since (it would be) over our $90K threshold.”
On June 28, Bennett asked for 10 separate invoices, because she could not sign a contract for two years of work. Kesler sent her 10 separate statements of work; Bennett signed seven of them and the master services agreement.
On Oct. 31, Bennett noted in an email to Baldwin and O’Donovan that Education Elements is “just sending invoices to me and I’m paying them just so you are aware. Let me know if you ever have a need for me to NOT pay.”
The district’s accounts payable staff typically pays invoices, under the finance officer’s supervision and approval, Nash said in a March 30 email.
Wolf has said the school board did not learn about the contract’s details until it appeared on a Nov. 21 meeting agenda, but district emails show school board member Joal Broun knew there were questions about the contract as early as Oct. 29 when a parent, John Montavon, emailed her to ask about it.
Broun forwarded the email to Baldwin, who asked Nash to respond to Montavon’s records request on Oct. 31. Additional emails show district officials responding to a records request about Education Elements on Nov. 21, but it is not clear whether that request was from Montavon or another person.
She did not ask about the contract after getting Montavon’s email, Broun said in a phone call Friday morning.
“I always forward the public records requests to the superintendent, so I just treated it like a standard request and forwarded it onward. I didn’t know what it was,” Broun said. “Normally, I figured that they would provide the answer, and we would get a copy, so I didn’t think it was out of the normal for contracts that we normally do.”
Board discussion, contract ends
On Nov. 21, the school board held a closed meeting to discuss the contract. Board member Amy Fowler told The News & Observer that her contract questions were met with confusion.
“I was just wondering why we were taking on this big endeavor and not finding out about it until several months after it had started,” she said, “because our whole push as a board and with most things that we do is a really long process of trying to get stakeholder input from the community and parents and teachers and students before embarking on transformational changes like this.”
Baldwin emailed Bedford on Dec. 2, asking him to suspend the work, because the contract did not follow a state law requiring a pre-audit certification statement and violated a district policy requiring the board to approve contracts worth over $90,000.
The confusion, Wolf said, seems to stem from a question of whether the contract was a cumulative agreement, which doesn’t require board approval, or a one-time payment.
The administration saw the contract as cumulative, based on the statements of work issued each time a payment was due, she said. Each payment was below the $90,000 threshold requiring board approval.
The district officially ended the contract in January, after paying Education Elements over $342,000, or roughly 42% of the two-year contract amount.
The school board has since discussed revising its contract policy, launching an external review into what happened, and drafting a new whistleblower policy. A discussion of that work scheduled for March 19 was postponed to an as-yet unscheduled, future meeting.
This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 8:09 PM.
