At whose bidding has the Hickman Mills school board been operating?

Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich is expected to make a trip to Kansas City on March 4 to announce the results of an extensive and potentially explosive audit by his office into the Hickman Mills C-1 School District. What started as a routine matter has turned into one of the longest and most detailed efforts carried out by the Missouri State Auditor’s Office.

In early February, Hickman Mills school-board members were shown a draft of the audit, and those familiar with its findings say it uncovered financial irregularities in the district’s business office, including a series of no-bid contracts and questionable expenditures. Some of those contracts appear to have connections to the East Side political club Freedom Inc.

Hickman Mills insiders say the audit’s implications could have an impact on the April 8 Board of Education elections, in which 10 candidates are vying for three open seats. One incumbent in the race is Breman Anderson Jr., who was ousted just a few months into his Hickman Mills’ school-board presidency not long after a chaotic April 18, 2013, board meeting.

It was in that meeting that the district’s longtime attorney, Chris Gahagan, was suddenly fired and replaced by lawyers from the Husch Blackwell law firm. Board members who opposed Gahagan’s dismissal contend that the move violated Missouri’s open meetings law by discussing Gahagan’s firing in a closed session. They contend that, because Gahagan is a private-practice lawyer who contracted with the district and was not an employee, the closed session violated the law. (Gahagan was brought back as the district’s attorney later that year.)

One of the lawyers who replaced Gahagan was Donna Wilson Peters, whose primary legal expertise is real-estate development. She previously served on the board of Freedom Inc., for which Anderson has been a member.

Freedom Inc. has long been a fixture in Kansas City, Missouri, school-district politics, endorsing and raising money for school-board candidates. Founded in 1962 by prominent Kansas City black activist Leon Jordan, the club proved itself over time to be a political force in the black community, supporting candidates for school board, City Council, Statehouse and the Jackson County Legislature.

However, in recent years, Freedom Inc.’s influence within the Kansas City, Missouri, school district has waned, and the club appears to be attempting to exert its influence in south Kansas City, including in Hickman Mills, a district with provisional accreditation that scored lower than the fledgling Kansas City Public Schools on the latest Missouri School Improvement Program evaluation.

Last year was the first time that the club publicly involved itself in a Hickman Mills election, throwing its support behind two candidates: Byron Townsend and Shawn Kirkwood. Once elected, Townsend and Kirkwood for a time formed a majority on the seven-member board with Anderson and Darrell Curls (uncle to Freedom Inc. leader and Missouri state Sen. S. Kiki Curls).

And once again, Freedom Inc. figures to be a force in the April school-board election.

Gayle Holliday, a member of Freedom Inc.’s leadership team, says the club has yet to screen or endorse any of the candidates vying for seats on the Hickman Mills board. However, at least one candidate, Carol Graves, is a Freedom Inc. member.

Former board president Anderson maintains close ties to Freedom Inc.’s attorney, Clinton Adams. A board member who asked not to be named says of Anderson: “He is his boy. He does what he [Adams] tells him.”

While Holliday downplays her organization’s involvement in the Hickman Mills district, others remain suspicious of the club’s presence.

Freedom Inc.’s past influence over the school district has led at least one candidate to enter the race.

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“The current board members who seem to be affiliated with Freedom have personal agendas,” says Sandy Sexton, a Ruskin High School graduate and an office manager for the Ruskin Heights Homes Association, who is running for the board. “Some of those have to do with not necessarily educating children but controlling the business aspect of things.”

Holliday contends that Freedom Inc.’s membership is composed largely of elected officials, not local business owners. But some companies that have received no-bid contracts from the Hickman Mills board have connections to the political club.

Last year, the board suddenly dismissed its longtime insurance broker, Charlesworth & Associates, and replaced it with the McDaniel Hazley Group without a competitive bid. Former Kansas City Councilman Charles Hazley was a key partner in the company and a member of Freedom Inc.’s three-person leadership committee (along with Holliday and Sen. Curls) until his death late last year.

Anderson tells The Pitch that the McDaniel Hazley Group was brought in because board members were concerned that the district’s insurance policies were not financially realistic. He acknowledges that there was no competitive bidding for the contract, but he sees no problem with it.

“I don’t think it needed to be bid,” Anderson says. “It was a change of broker. It was not a bid issue. I think it comes up next year to be bid.”

The district had put its insurance-brokerage business out to bid in the past, but Charlesworth & Associates was the one chosen for nearly two decades.

The board’s policy is to competitively bid any contract exceeding $5,000. While state law does not require a school district to bid most contracts (construction projects and certain banking services are the exceptions), it is considered good business practice to bid large contracts, both to save taxpayer money and to avoid cronyism.

The state audit is expected to show that the school board routinely waived that policy.

Anderson tells The Pitch that during the 2011–12 school year alone, the year before he became board president, the board awarded $2.3 million in contracts without competitive bids. (The district disputes some of that figure.)

Missouri state Rep. Bonnaye Mims served as board president from 2008 to 2012. Freedom Inc. endorsed Mims, who still serves on the board, in her Statehouse campaign. Mims now appears to be distancing herself from the club.

The practice of awarding no-bid contracts continued after Anderson first became board president in 2012.

The Pitch filed open-records requests with the Hickman Mills School District for contracts and bid documents associated with Gallagher Benefit Services, the Holman Schiavone law firm and the McDaniel Hazley Group. None of those contracts were competitively bid, even though each exceeded the $5,000 threshold.

The board can waive the bidding of contracts if it believes that no other company can reasonably provide those services. That doesn’t appear to be the case with some of the no-bid contracts awarded by the Hickman Mills district.

The board hired Gallagher Benefit Services with what was supposed to have been a flat-fee $30,000 no-bid contract to search for a replacement for superintendent Marjorie Williams, who retired in 2012 after more than 20 years of working in the district. Gallagher Benefit Services found current superintendent Dennis Carpenter, but not before the company’s contract was increased to a $36,400 payout.

Finding headhunters, especially those specializing in school-district personnel, isn’t difficult. The Missouri School Board Association conducts superintendent searches. For a district of Hickman Mills’ size, the MSBA would do a search in return for 8 percent of the new superintendent’s salary. Carpenter makes $180,000, so MSBA’s search would have cost $14,400.

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The Gallagher contract wasn’t the only no-bid payout related to Williams’ retirement.

The district hired the Holman Schiavone law firm to handle legal matters arising from an investigation into how much accrued sick time and leave were supposed to be paid to Williams. The former superintendent claimed that the district owed her about $200,000. Holman Schiavone lawyer Amy Maloney, a former assistant to U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, whose congressional races have been supported by Freedom Inc., was tasked with reviewing the district’s calculations.

The district ended up paying Williams $72,262 but balked at the rest of the $121,896 balance. In May 2013, Williams sued the school district in federal court to recoup her outstanding benefits. The case was later settled. Through her attorney, Williams declined to comment for this story.

Another financial oddity within Hickman Mills’ books: Multiple payouts were made to the Urban Summit of Greater Kansas City, a weekly gathering of African-American community leaders founded by Bishop James Tindall.

The district paid $2,000 for the organization’s Youth Summit, a free event. Sources familiar with the state’s audit of Hickman Mills say the district failed to present auditors with any documentation of district officials attending the summit.

Anderson claims, however, that roughly 200 students, plus some district staffers, were in attendance. He describes the payment to the Urban Summit as a “small contribution.”

As for the lack of documentation: “I’m sure we could have done better,” Anderson says.

Clinton Adams is co-chairman of the Urban Summit. Adams, a politically active lawyer with a reputation for meddling in Kansas City, Missouri, school-district affairs, has represented Hickman Mills students and staffers in legal grievances against the district. He also serves as Anderson’s personal attorney, all of which seems to add up to an intractable conflict of interest. Adams did not return calls seeking comment for this story.

Anderson bristles at questions about the district’s payments to the Urban Summit and its ties to Adams.

“If that is what this is leaning toward, you need to let that go,” Anderson says. “Now that is a stretch.”

Debbie Aiman, a Hickman Mills school-board member from 2008 to 2010 and a candidate in last year’s election, tells The Pitch that she was invited to a meeting with Adams and Anderson early in her 2013 campaign. During the meeting, she says, they made her an offer: Agree to be a yes man to Anderson on the board, and Adams and Anderson would help her get elected.

“I said, ‘You know me better than that,’ ” Aiman tells The Pitch.

Not long after, residents in Hickman Mills began receiving mailers from an unregistered political action committee that amounted to hit pieces on Aiman and longtime Hickman Mills board member George Flesher. One piece claimed that Aiman was fired as a teacher from Hickman Mills and charged that she lived with her boyfriend outside the district’s boundaries in Cass County.

The campaign literature supported Freedom Inc.’s candidates, Kirkwood and Townsend, who told the Jackson County Advocate that they weren’t involved with the attack advertising.

Aiman is among the 10 candidates running in the April 8 election.

“I don’t care who gets on the board, as long as it’s not Breman’s group,” she says.

Anderson briefly enjoyed a majority voting bloc after the 2013 elections. But it wasn’t a harmonious term with other board members.

Anderson wrote a letter dated May 15, 2013, to Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster complaining about board member Eric Lowe, an assistant attorney general under Koster.

Anderson wrote that he spoke for the entire board when he accused Lowe of holding unannounced meetings with other members to drum up votes on contentious matters facing the district. He also accused Lowe of unspecified illegal cash contributions and campaign-literature violations. Anderson added that Lowe used his position in the Attorney General’s Office in order to influence other board members.

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Board member Dan Osman found out about Anderson’s letter and sent a rebuke of his own to Anderson, calling the accusations “preposterously unsubstantiated.”

That dust-up appeared to set the stage for a vote, about two weeks later, in which a majority of the board voted to remove Anderson as president and replace him with Lowe. Kirkwood, previously aligned with Anderson, seemed to switch positions by voting with the 4–3 majority.

Osman, who became board vice president at that time, says he had grown tired of Anderson’s behavior as president.

“There were a number of issues,” Osman says, “everything from basic rudeness to the administration and staff members to contracts that we saw that were questionable and paperwork that I specifically requested that I couldn’t get my hands on.”

Anderson not only lost the board presidency but also was kicked out of an office in the district’s southeast Kansas City administrative headquarters, at 9000 Old Santa Fe Road. School board members don’t typically maintain a physical presence on district property.

Anderson now says he’s sanguine about the coup, adding that he was relieved to no longer carry out “the very time-consuming, challenging endeavor” of being board president. He says he’s pleased with the audit, even though some of it may tarnish his reputation.

Auditors, according to those familiar with their work, zeroed in on board members’ trips to training conferences paid for by the district.

One such excursion was a 2013 trip to San Diego for the National School Boards Association conference. Anderson went on the trip, along with board members Lowe, Osman and Curls. The trip cost the district about $26,000. While other members attended several sessions, Anderson showed up to only a few.

Anderson says he was sick and also had to tend to district matters while in San Diego.

But those district matters didn’t seem to involve the other board members who attended several sessions.

Tending to too many district matters may have earned Anderson a larger slate of opponents in the upcoming election.

“I will say this: If Breman didn’t pull the stuff he tried to pull last April, I don’t think we would have 10 people running,” says Karry Palmer, who is among the 10 candidates seeking a seat on the Hickman Mills board.

Palmer remains suspicious of what he views as Freedom Inc.’s growing influence in district affairs.

“I see what they did with Kansas City, Missouri [school district], in the ’90s,” Palmer says, “and they’re trying to do the same thing with Hickman Mills.”

UPDATE: Missouri audit takes Hickman Mills School District to task.