Lessons in Finance
As usual, news from the Kansas City, Missouri, school district has little to do with education. The latest political mud has been flying around the unaccredited district since October 1, when Superintendent Bernard Taylor hired Linwood Tauheed to be his chief of staff. That’s because Tauheed — and school board members Lee Barnes Jr. and Michael Byrd — are members of the Kansas City chapter of the National Black United Front, a group critics accuse of racism because of its unapologetic support of African-centered education.
Tauheed’s hiring happened so quickly that it raised allegations of backroom brokering by Tauheed’s friends Barnes and Byrd. Some observers saw that hiring as the first shot in the Black United Front’s double-barreled attempt to seize control of the district. Three days after he was hired, Tauheed proposed a new precinct map that favored Byrd’s chances of winning in next April’s school board election.
Board member Elma Warrick has been among the loudest to criticize Tauheed’s hiring — a development that might seem surprising. Just six months ago, Warrick was allied with Black United Front members Barnes and Byrd on the drive to remove Superintendent Benjamin Demps — an action that helped lead U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple to call for an investigation of patronage and micromanagement by board members.
Warrick’s criticisms of Tauheed, she says, are not political but merely a product of her unbiased devotion to civic duty. “I believe that we are mandated as elected officials to abide by statute and govern by policy,” she said at a recent board meeting. “In my term on this board, I have been consistent in raising the issues of policy, process and procedure.”
But in the district’s conflict du jour, Warrick’s grandstanding might be a subterfuge for her own backroom dealing to steer district money to her friends and professional associates.
The circumstances surrounding Tauheed’s hiring were indeed curious.
Tauheed had long sought a job with the district. Before Demps became superintendent in August 1999, Tauheed had applied to be the district’s director of information technology; he was interviewed for the job but didn’t get it. He applied for and was interviewed to fill the then-open superintendent position. Tauheed was passed over again. Because he believed himself more qualified for the IT job than the person who was eventually hired, he filed a racial discrimination complaint. After an investigation by city officials, Tauheed dropped the matter rather than taking it to court.
Taylor says he tapped Tauheed — who is nearing completion of a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City — because of his diverse skills and training. “People see economics and they think money,” Tauheed says. “But the focus of my studies has been on systems of people and how they interact with one another to get the best performance.” Before enrolling in graduate school, Tauheed owned and operated a computer software and systems company which, at its peak, employed thirty people and grossed nearly $2 million a year.
“Linwood definitely has the analytic skills; he has the knowledge of information systems and information science and the verbal and writing skills I was looking for,” Taylor says.
Tauheed has been involved with the district as a volunteer for years — first as a parent and then as a member of the Black United Front, working on the group’s burgeoning African-centered education program. Earlier this year, Taylor and Tauheed worked together on a task force the Demps administration had formed to find ways to improve King middle and Southeast high schools, two African-centered schools that would later be deemed academically deficient by the state. Taylor says his work with Tauheed on this task force influenced his hiring decision.
But opposition arose behind the scenes almost as soon as Taylor began negotiating with Tauheed. “He is a member of a militant group that, for the most part, looks at a separatist approach to operation in the community, and you’ve got to think that someone’s personal views certainly will influence the way that they carry out their responsibilities,” says Warrick. “[The Black United Front] does not present itself as an organization of inclusiveness. So I would be somewhat troubled by what the greater community — and that is all races — would consider as their message.”
The group was founded in October 1981, after a couple of activists noted with dismay that numerous African-American grassroots organizations were drawing from the same small pool of motivated individuals, who were beginning to feel burned out attending so many meetings. So the activists contacted officials at the National Black United Front, which had formed a year earlier in Calumet, Illinois, and formed their own group to pool resources and coordinate efforts.
Over the years, the Black United Front has been involved in numerous community initiatives. It has helped make the city’s annual Kwaanza festivities a can’t-miss event in the African-American community. Members received national attention for helping sustain positive momentum generated by Louis Farrakahn’s Million Man March on Washington, D.C., in 1995.
From the start, however, the Black United Front has been focused on education. Three of its founders — Ajamu Webster, William Grace and Leon Dixon — were involved with the W. E. B. DuBois Learning Center, a tutoring facility at Cleveland and Swope Parkway founded in 1973. The center has contracted with the school district for nearly nine years. Last fiscal year the center provided $155,000 worth of culturally based tutoring services; on October 16 the school board approved a $150,000 contract.
In the early ’90s heyday of the desegregation case, as nearly $2 billion flowed into the school district to lure white students away from suburban schools, members of the Black United Front sensed a growing feeling of alienation in the African-American community. They believed the programs created by the money uplifted European culture and history at the expense of African Americans, who by that time had become the majority in the district. So the Black United Front pushed for multicultural curricula.
Its focus evolved to embrace African-centered education. The organization faced resistance — especially from white desegregation attorney Arthur Benson — but the group eventually succeeded in establishing an African-centered tract in the district, which now operates three African-centered schools: Chick and Ladd elementaries and Southeast high school. (King middle school recently returned to its traditional neighborhood focus; plans are in the works to establish an African-centered program at another school, most likely Southeast middle school.)
The schools were born out of political maneuvering by the Black United Front — which circulated petitions, staged demonstrations and, ultimately, sent one of its own to the school board. Marilyn Simmons was the first Black United Front member to join the board. (She was appointed in 1996 and served until 1998.) Barnes won his seat in 1998. Last fall, the board appointed Byrd (who had served as campaign treasurer for both Simmons and Barnes) to represent the district’s mostly white southwest corridor.
Among the area businesses that have made campaign contributions to Black United Front candidates, seven have contracts with the district — including W. E. B. DuBois Learning Center; Millennium Resources, which last fiscal year received more than $3 million to provide food service in the schools; and a company called Newspaper Electronics, which billed the district $2.5 million for computer goods and services during the same period. These businesses are minority-owned; Barnes and the Black United Front don’t hide their support of the district’s efforts to do business in the African-American community.
Barnes and Newspaper Electronics owner Kelvin Perry are friends. Perry shares office space in a building on Swope Parkway that is owned by the Black United Front’s Webster (from whom Barnes bought a house), and Barnes sometimes works out of Webster’s office.
In October 2000, officials at Missouri Information Solutions filed a lawsuit accusing Barnes of participating in “clandestine deliberations and horse trading” to reject that company’s low bid and award a $3.5 million computer contract to Newspaper Electronics. A Jackson County court eventually threw out the case, but the rebidding process delayed computer deliveries to classrooms.
With the hiring of fellow Black United Front member Linwood Tauheed, Barnes once again faces accusations of patronage. So does his colleague Byrd. Both deny it. “We were just overjoyed that [Taylor] would select someone who we know is eminently qualified, a man of integrity who can do the job,” says Webster, president of the Black United Front. “But did we make that happen? No. Dr. Taylor made that happen.”
After he got the job, Tauheed stopped short of calling the patronage allegations racist but sarcastically noted to The Kansas City Call that “black people aren’t supposed to know one another.”
Yet there’s something suspicious about the way it all came together. On the first day of school this year, August 27, Barnes and Taylor toured King and Southeast schools together. Near the beginning of September, Tauheed began negotiating with Taylor for a job. The title — “administration operations officer” — was new, a position not included in a central-office revamping the school board had approved last summer. Its salary was set at $89,963. District officials advertised the job in the Kansas City Star on September 23, but Taylor hired Tauheed only a week later.
Tauheed is, for all practical purposes, Taylor’s second in command.
When he hired Tauheed, the superintendent told board members that the new administrator’s main job would be overseeing the district’s newest education reform initiative, the Entrepreneurial Model Schools Program. That assignment is the key to the current conflict. Board member Elma Warrick emphatically supports the program — it benefits her friends and associates — and perceives Tauheed as a threat to it.
On the surface, the Entrepreneurial Model Schools Program seems like a winner. It allows school communities to forge their own paths by shifting authority away from the district’s central office to the schools themselves. To do this, principals recruit leaders from their surrounding communities to serve on advisory councils that help craft plans for success at the schools. Nearly $1 million in start-up funds backs this first-year phase; though the program begins with ten pilot schools this year, it could eventually be rolled out districtwide. Principals, especially those at successful schools like Chick and McCoy elementaries, are excited about the prospect. McCoy’s Jo Lynn Nemeth says that if her school is chosen as one of the program’s pilots, she’ll use the resources to beef up her English-as-a-second-language program, a need unique to her school.
But the program also looks like a free license for patronage. For example, it allows schools to hire people who “do not possess the necessary certifications for teaching or administrative positions.” Schools can freely spend the money on contracts and service agreements with vendors throughout the community.
This is a potentially dangerous power to give to principals, who, as minimayors with constituencies of students, families, teachers and administrative staff, are the foundation of the district’s political structure. Principals can increase their clout by doing favors for people — hiring friends and family, for example.
Tauheed first criticized the plan at a closed-door meeting of community leaders brought together this summer by Mayor Kay Barnes and Urban League president Gwendolyn Grant. The conference was an attempt to unify the city’s fractured power structures after two months of intense controversy capped years of discord in the district.
Tauheed recalls asking how the schools would handle their authority to award contracts and what oversight and guidance they would receive from the central office. “The philosophy that was being pushed,” he says, “was what could be called a laissez-faire model. That is, you simply let people do whatever they want to do. Turn authority over to the schools and let them do whatever they want to do.”
The Entrepreneurial Model Schools Program’s $1 million in start-up funding ended up being complemented by a $160,000 contract the district signed with the Urban League on August 21.
Board member Elma Warrick, who has boisterously protested Tauheed’s hire, has direct professional and social ties to the Urban League, a nonprofit organization formed locally in 1936 to help better the lives of African-Americans.
Warrick directs and draws a $55,000 salary from the Family Resource Center, a social services organization founded in 1996 as an affiliate of the Urban League to offer job training, financial management, child care and other services to families. During its first couple of years, the center operated under the Urban League’s financial umbrella, sharing the larger organization’s nonprofit tax-exempt designation.
The center now has its own nonprofit license, but Warrick says her organization continues to receive assistance from the Urban League on “financial management issues.” In fact, the Urban League does all of the center’s bookkeeping, and the center’s tax forms list the Urban League’s address and phone number as its own.
Warrick is close friends with the Urban League’s president, Gwendolyn Grant, who is the “Chairperson Emeritus” on the Family Resource Center’s board of directors. Grant is also sister to notorious district meddler Clinton Adams, whom Warrick also counts as a friend (see “Adams Family,” page 19).
Because of these connections, Warrick says, she recused herself from voting on the no-bid service contract the Urban League recently signed with the district.
But some sources say she helped write the Entrepreneurial Model Schools Program, which is complemented by the Urban League’s six-figure contract.
Side by side, the entrepreneurial schools plan and the Urban League’s contract appear to be interlocking pieces in an expensive and easily abused restructuring of the troubled district.
The Entrepreneurial Model Schools Program calls on schools to create advisory committees to help shape their goals and direction; the Urban League contract proposes to teach school principals how to “identify, recruit and develop a small team of corporate and community leaders to serve as a ‘kitchen cabinet’ advisory group … to help the principals in areas of strategic planning, goal setting and resource development.” While the plan Warrick supports shifts authority away from the central office to the schools themselves, the contract signed with the Urban League offers training on “site-based management” (educator jargon for giving schools more control).
Throughout the early summer, Superintendent Taylor attended numerous meetings at the Urban League’s offices to discuss the Urban League’s contract. But sources on various sides of the district’s many political divides say that’s not all that happened. Ajamu Webster, president of the Black United Front, later asked Warrick at a school board meeting if she had formed “a kitchen cabinet committee which included persons like Clinton Adams to influence and to threaten the superintendent.”
“I was not a part of a kitchen cabinet advisory committee,” Warrick tells the Pitch.
Grant, Adams’ sister, also denies the accusation. “There’s been no coercion on anyone’s part to make the superintendent do anything or to influence him to do anything he did not want to do,” she says.
“I met with a number of individuals on a number of different occasions,” Taylor says. “I can recall no specific meeting with Mr. Adams.” Asked if Warrick was in attendance and if she tried to influence and threaten him, Taylor says, “I have no comment on that.” Asked whether he could specifically deny it, he gives the same answer.
But later in the summer, at another meeting of the mayor’s collaborative, a source familiar with the district says “a real power pressure play took place between Benson, Clinton Adams and Gwen Grant and Elma Warrick wanting to have Dr. Taylor commit right there on the spot that he was going to take their model of entrepreneurial schools to the board.”
Warrick and Grant deny this. Adams won’t return the Pitch‘s phone calls. But the Reverend Nelson “Fuzzy” Thompson, who attended the meeting, acknowledges that Adams, Warrick and Benson “expressed some concern that the superintendent hadn’t moved forward with the plan. They seemed anxious. They wanted there to be more movement on that project, and they were questioning him about it.”
Although the Urban League is not the only vendor that can provide the kind of principal training the Entrepreneurial Model Schools program calls for, that training contract was not opened up to competing bidders. When the Urban League’s contract was presented to the school board — at an August 21 meeting Warrick did not attend — board member Patricia Kurtz complained about this obvious breech of board policy (Kansas City Strip, August 29). District administrators defended the no-bid contract, saying it was the continuation of a contract the Urban League had signed with the district under the Demps administration.
But that was not true. Under Demps, the Urban League’s contract was for $18,000 and underwrote only “basic leadership training” for would-be principals.
Since then, explanations from 1211 McGee have been more precise. Officials there say the contract was the result of negotiations that began under the Demps administration — which is true. Cheri Shannon, associate superintendent under Demps, says she was impressed with the Urban League’s work with prospective principals. Shannon and Grant had begun discussing the possibility of the district’s working with the Urban League to train existing principals, but a contract was never a foregone conclusion. Shannon says the Urban League was actually in competition with an educational training institution based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which had already been contracted by the district.
Eventually, on September 17, Taylor presented the entrepreneurial schools proposal — supplemented by the Urban League’s contract — for board approval. The board’s education subcommittee was the first to consider it. White committee members Duane Kelly and Patricia Kurtz opposed the plan; the Black United Front’s Byrd supported it. The discussion, particularly between Kurtz and Taylor, was heated. At one point, Kelly asked Taylor, “What does ‘entrepreneurial’ mean?” Kurtz scoffed, “It means making money.”
Both Kurtz and Kelly insinuated that they’d heard Taylor had not written the plan alone. Taylor flatly denied the allegation. “I wrote it!” he barked back at Kurtz. But later, the two board members — both of whom have been associated with the district for years and have highly placed information sources — told the Pitch they’d heard the plan was coauthored by Adams, Benson and Warrick. Benson admits he helped. “[Taylor] asked me to write a draft, so I did,” he says. Benson also conferred with the Urban League’s Grant several times in early summer to discuss, according to Benson’s legal bills, “reforming KCMSD education.”
Warrick denies that she helped write the plan but makes no secret of her support for it. When the plan reached the full board for approval on September 18, Warrick met Kurtz’s criticisms with a stern lecture. “I am very surprised to hear what I have just heard,” she said. “We have often been reminded by [Kurtz] on how the board’s responsibility is to describe the ends. In other words, the policy is our responsibility. We let the superintendent know what it is our expectations are in results, and then it’s he — or she — who makes decisions on how those expectations are met.” As she continued, her voice rose. “We do not — nor is there a responsibility to — administratively nitpick or try to micromanage the process of how the job gets done!”
Once the Urban League’s no-bid $160,000 contract and the $1 million pilot program it subsidizes were signed, Taylor moved closer to hiring the Black United Front’s Tauheed. The result is that the man who openly criticized the costly, loophole-laden proposal is now in charge of it.
Tauheed tells the Pitch that, while he’ll consider continuing to use the Urban League to provide training for the new program, there is no guarantee the organization will always get a contract. “They’re going to have to compete,” he says. (Just two months into the year-long service agreement, the Urban League has already billed the district $67,000.)
While Taylor was still negotiating Tauheed’s hire, sources say, Warrick’s camp fought it hard behind the scenes. Warrick pressured Taylor not to hire Tauheed; Adams vowed to “take down” the superintendent if he followed through. And district general counsel Kathy Walter-Mack, who is connected to both Adams and Warrick, threatened to quit. Board member Michael Byrd recalls Taylor’s asking him at the time, “Why would so many people be so upset about me hiring Linwood?”
Once Tauheed was officially hired, the conflict exploded onto the nightly news. White desegregation attorney Benson fired off a letter in protest, citing Tauheed’s lack of experience and making accusations about his political beliefs. “There’s little doubt he’s a black separatist,” Benson tells the Pitch. Warrick echoed his remarks at the next board meeting. Suddenly the Black United Front was cast as the sole provider of patronage in the Kansas City school district. While Benson’s attack was predictable, Warrick’s drew immediate ire.
“Personally, I’m very disappointed in Elma,” says the Reverend “Fuzzy” Thompson, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I just think that’s totally unfair and unfounded. I’ve worked with [the Black United Front] for twenty years, ever since they’ve been in existence. I know them all personally, and they are top-notch people. They’ve done a lot for this city and a lot for the metropolitan area. Their record is above reproach. They’re not separatists.”
Webster, president of the Black United Front, verbally attacked Warrick at the October 16 board meeting, asking questions loaded with allegations of patronage and micromanagement. Afterward, Warrick addressed the unreceptive crowd in a low, dramatic voice: “I was called and told that all of the issues that are being discussed in the newspaper, quite frankly, is black folks’ business. You know, in the 21st century, I think we can no longer adhere to the notion that it’s only black folks’ business. It is the business of this entire community, and it is therefore critical that we do nothing that will polarize and divide a community that should stand united in providing quality education for all our children.”
Warrick had apparently learned her lesson from having to apologize in May for calling state legislators “rural, racist rednecks.”
But two days later, even The Call, which rarely publicizes divisiveness in the black community it serves, weighed in with a scathing front-page story under the headline “Individuals Call for Elma Warrick’s Resignation: Patrons ‘Spank’ Board Member.” State Representative Sharon Sanders Brooks, whose alliances are clear (Tauheed served as her campaign treasurer and is her boyfriend), was quoted in the article’s conclusion.
The Call reported that Brooks “referred to Proverbs 10:18, 19.” The paper printed the cited scripture in bold italics: “He that hideth hatred with lying lips, and he that uttereth a slander, is a fool. In the multitude of words, there wanteth not sin: but he that refraineth his lips is wise.”
Since then, Benson and Warrick have focused their attacks on Tauheed’s hiring; U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple granted Benson authority to investigate the matter, though Whipple’s own appointed investigator is also exploring this and other allegations of patronage at an average cost of $1,000 a day.
Questions surrounding Tauheed’s hiring remain. Black United Front-affiliated school board member Michael Byrd believes that those who question Tauheed’s hiring have a deeper motive. “I think you have to look at who is getting upset,” he says, “and what’s at stake for them.”
