Gagnon, Grana, Nelson, Daura, Gulino, & Mongon--Advocating for ALL

Each week the Advocating for ALL slate running for the Sparta Board of Education in November will highlight an important issue currently facing our district. Our goal is to provide insight on matters we find important and showcase the quality of work we’d bring to the board by bringing the focus back to education. We believe we can achieve this by advocating for every student, every staff member, every administrator, and every parent alike.

In 2018 the Sparta school district contracted with the NJ School Board Association (NJSBA) to conduct a five-year strategic plan, known as Vision 2025, at a total cost of $4,000 to guide the district through a key domain focus through the year 2025. However, in 2021, the Board of Education inexplicably voted to have a new three-year plan conducted by an outside vendor at a cost of $35,000 for the first year alone. For comparison, the NJSBA plan cost the district $800 per year, while the new plan was priced at $35,000 for year one.

Controversy surrounds whether there was a need for the new plan at the time, provided that the district had only just implemented the Vision 2025 plan. According to documents found on the district website, the reason for the new strategic plan was to “assess district needs post-pandemic” and “align district goals with new leadership objectives.” Without a clear understanding and/or agreement from the public on whether an entirely new plan was needed to meet these goals, the BOE went forward with obtaining pricing.

The bid process was mismanaged from the beginning. It does not appear that a scope of work was created, and the formal RFP procedure was not followed. One bid with alleged nepotistic ties was obtained by our former interim BA, Ron Smith, rather than the customary three bids typically obtained. Although requested, the selected firm - MJO Enterprises - did not provide samples of previous work or references. A district of this size requires a qualified and experienced firm that has previously completed strategic plans, ideally for districts similar in size, performance, and demographics to Sparta, however, it was never confirmed if MJO Enterprises possessed any of these credentials.

The physical proposal, which was neither dated nor submitted on letterhead, was for “Board Retreats and Development of a 3-year strategic plan.” Only the first-year cost of $35,000 was listed, and pricing for years two and three were not included in the proposal. This exclusion kept the pricing under the bid threshold as noted by Mr. Smith’s QPA certification, thereby avoiding having to adhere to the competitive bidding process.Timelines, deadlines, deliverables, and the full fee schedule were either vague or non-existent. There was no mention of vendor references or previous strategic plans completed by the MJO Enterprise team. According to the proposal, work was to begin in July of 2021. Despite the inadequacies of both the vendor and the proposal, the BOE approved the $35,000 bid and entered Phase 1 of Year 1 in the Fall of 2021. There were no change orders submitted for the phases/tiered pricing nor the delayed timeline. It is unclear if a contract was signed.

With regards to the deliverable from MJO Enterprises, the publicly released “Strategic Plan/Overview of Data and Initial Recommendations and Analysis for the Board of Education” is rife with typos, fragmented sentences, format inconsistencies, and insufficiently explained statements and data. The report is hard to follow and confusing.

A sampling of observations:

• There are at least three quoted comments listed as being both from the “Principals, Vice-Principals, and Directors” focus group AND the “Sparta Community Forum” which is clearly a mistake. Quotes such as “Parents have no common sense”, “We need to take care of the teachers.”, and “Sparta is politicized.” are noted verbatim in the notes of both forums. Despite several requests to clarify who made these comments, the typo still remains and the community does not know which forum birthed these comments.
• The testing data examined in the plan is from 2014-2019, the bulk of which would have been examined and addressed in the Vision 2025 plan. Without a substantial amount of new testing data, the idea that a new plan was needed at this time remains questionable. Furthermore the overlap in plans means the district paid for two plans during some of the same years.
• There are committee document revision notes attached to the end of the plan that are presumably not supposed to be included in the final draft of the document. Furthermore, the errors mentioned in the notes were never corrected in the released document.
• The report is developed by an educational team for a school district, yet the table of contents is abandoned mid-report, the data is fragmented, there are significant typos throughout, information ends mid-sentence, and the word document format is disjointed. Statistics and data are listed in paragraph form rather than charts and graphs.

In short, it is believed that the selected vendor did not possess the credentials or experience to conduct this project for a district the size and scope of Sparta. There should have been additional bids brought to the Board from highly qualified vendors. The Strategic Plan -as provided by MJO Enterprises and released to the public- is poorly written and unacceptable in its current draft. Most importantly, the information is incomplete and does not sufficiently meet the expectations of why the district engaged into a new strategic plan in the first place. There is no assessment or recommendations on our district needs post-pandemic, and any attempt to align district goals with new leadership objectives is not fully examined nor explained in the report.

This subpar report cost the district $12,000, and it is recommended at this time that the Sparta Board of Education and Business Administrator:

• send the Strategic Overview back to MJO Enterprises for immediate correction and re-release;
• cease any plans to move forward with future phases of a strategic plan;
• breach the contract with MJO Enterprises for any future strategic planning.

When our current BOE spends their time dealing with issues that are not in their purview, such as pre-approved library books, overruling Superintendent recommendations, and mandated state standards, they spend less time on the issues that are truly their responsibility, like ensuring that a new strategic plan was actually needed, pushing for pre-vetted, comprehensive proposals from our BA to guarantee the right contractor is hired, demanding high quality results and deliverables, and protecting the taxpayer dollar.

Each candidate on the Advocate for All BOE slate intends to utilize her skill set to ensure function, fiscal responsibility, and integrity are restored to the BOE.

I personally bring 20 years of multi-million-dollar budget development and oversight, operational and project management, and municipality and public bidding process experience to the table. If elected, I look forward to bringing my expertise to the Sparta Board of Education.

I thank you for your time and consideration.

-Dana Gulino, #5 (single year term)

Advocating for All
Gagnon, Grana, Nelson/ Daura, Gulino, Mongon