WJCC Awards $69K Contract for Strategic Plan Consultant

By Amber Lester Kennedy Wednesday, September 21, 2011

The Williamsburg-James City County School Board has unanimously approved a $69,000 contract for a strategic plan consultant.

The approval is the first step in what Superintendent Steven Constantino called a “call to action to this community which engages all who hope to have a voice in our schools.” He pushed the board to hire an outside consultant because he hopes it will remove the perception of bias from the school board and administration.

The division put out a request for proposals on June 27, and received five proposals by the deadline of July 29. An evaluation committee of two school board members, Constantino, a community member and Assistant Superintendent for Administrative Services Scott Burckbuchler reviewed the proposals and invited three firms to present their proposal during interviews. Public Consulting Group (PCG), a Boston-based firm, was chosen based on its performance against the team’s evaluation criteria of experience, capacity to execute, approach and price.

WJCC has outlined its major objectives for the strategic planning process as:

• A strengths-based approach to needs assessment, data gathering and goal construction
• A process and plan to engage employees, students, families, as well as community-at-large to identify opportunities and provide input into goals that will move the division toward the vision of being the premier school division in Virginia
• A process and plan to collect and distill information gleaned from internal and external constituencies
• A process and plan to create final strategic goal statements, objectives and metrics.

The division has asked that the plan be ready for implementation for the 2012-13 school year. “It’s an aggressive timeline,” Constantino said.

Speaking passionately prior to the vote, Constantino said the ultimate plan must be accepted by everyone. “Building a plan is only the initial step,” he said. “We must ensure the vision and plan we create garners the support of everyone in our educational community, because it will take each and every one of us to move it forward.”

But the consultant firm already has at least two detractors — school board candidates Richard Locke and Patrick Sensiba, who both spoke against the awarding of the contract during the citizen comment period.

Locke said he was concerned about retaining the services of a consultant, saying the board’s previous consultants have delivered bad results in several instances, including the 2010 redistricting of elementary and middle schools. “I’m a little disturbed it appears we don’t have the in-house talent to create a plan,” he said. He went on to express concern that the process would be guided by a steering committee. “Who's going to manage this project? Who are we going to reward if it goes well and who are we going to fire if it doesn’t?”

In a presentation later, Constantino responded, “I thought it was obvious...that would be me.”

Sensiba also pointed out that school divisions have successfully created strategic plans without consultants, pointing to Maryland’s Montgomery County school system, widely regarded as one of the best in the country. Constantino said Montgomery County’s strategic planning process has been used as a model for many strategic plans, but pointed out the school division (the largest in Maryland) has more resources at its disposal.

Sensiba cited an article published in Nashville’s “The City Paper” that said PCG faced heavy criticism when a Google search engine was able to crawl an insecure PCG server containing the personal information of more than 18,000 students and 6,000 parents in Tennessee. In another instance, the New York Daily News reported New York City’s school board delayed a vote last month that would have awarded an $18 million contract to PCG. That vote was delayed because critics said the firm’s work would have duplicated functions already assigned to an existing program, the Daily News reported.

Constantino said the school division did its due diligence by completing background checks on PCG and also speaking with superintendents with divisions that have hired PCG in the past. He was also impressed with PCG because they not only responded to the items requested in the RFP, but would also make suggestions that perhaps the division didn’t request. He said PCG will not write the strategic plan, but help facilitate and guide the process. If the plan fails, he said, he is prepared to take the blame. “I’ll accept the responsibility,” he said. “Hopefully I’ll have a little help, but ultimately, I get where the buck stops.”