Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration is feuding with the state’s top education agency over the awarding of dozens of small state contracts, Education Week reports, in what some see as spillover from a broader fight over the Common Core standards.
The state’s interim director of the office of procurement, Paul A. Holmes, this week fired off to Louisiana Education Superintendent John White a letter implying that the department of education’s decision to grant 66 small contracts valued at $1,500 to $2,000 each was flouting the legal process.
“Artificially dividing contracts to avoid the bid process is a violation of procurement law,” Holmes wrote. “To ensure that these contracts do not circumvent bid laws, we are requesting copies of all 66 contracts for review.”
A list of the awards was attached to the letter. A lawyer for White’s agency issued a terse response, stating that the small contracts were for payments to individual educators for “discrete pieces of work.”
“I understand that you are new to your position, but the the insinuation that these small individual contracts were ‘artificially divided’ to ‘avoid the bid process’ is false, baseless, and without merit,” wrote Joan E. Hunt, the department of education’s executive counsel, who described the accusations as “ludicrous.”
A spokesman for the education department tells Education Week that the contracts paid teachers for designing sample lesson and unit plans, for professional development sessions and for sample test questions. Read the full story.
