RomaRoz
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| 44e29 Ju10 20, 2007 8:36 p10 School for profit |
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Fort Worth school district ethics expert Rufino Mendoza sent acting Superintendent Joe Ross a strongly worded memo alleging that one of the districts most highly touted and powerful employees had committed a serious conflict-of-interest violation.
Marsha Sonnenberg had been in charge of reading and language arts acquisitions for Fort Worth schools since 1998. In the memo, Mendoza wrote that Sonnenberg had recommended that the district buy a reading program produced by a company for which she was a consultant. This is in direct violation of Board Policy that bars any employee with influence over contracts and payments from accepting any benefit from companies or people doing business with the district.
Sonnenberg did not deny doing work for the company called Sopris West Educational Services, which was trying to sell the district its $87,000 reading program for middle-school special education students. According to Mendoza, she admitted that she had played a role in the development of the curriculum, called Language. But she told Mendoza she had not been compensated for what she said were suggestions on how to improve the product.
Sonnenberg resigned her $97,900-a-year position at the end of the school term. The Fort Worth district didn’t buy the Sopris program.
The reading administrator had recommended that the district spend another $84,000 on a curriculum called Passport, also for middle-school special education classes. That one is put together by a company called Voyager Expanded Learning a company whose contracts with the Fort Worth district alone jumped from $100,300 to more than $620,000 in one year, under Sonnenberg’s direction. And if Sopris has a few friends in somewhat lofty places, it’s not a patch on Voyager, the brainchild of Randy Best, Dallas entrepreneur and big-money backer of George Bush.
She lists among her reading-research mentors Reid Lyon and Doug Carnine, both of whom wound up in Washington, D.C., as advisors to Bush and his now-controversial No Child Left Behind act. Lyon and Sonnenberg are believers in phonics and made that method the cornerstone of Bush’s reading initiative.
The Dallas entrepreneur contributed more than $45,000 to Bush’s gubernatorial campaign, according to a report by Texans for public justice. At about the same time, the report said, Bush endorsed spending $25 million in state funds on after-school programs. :icon_ani_heh: |
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