BUFFALO SCHOOLS
Board ends contract with ResulTech
After two years of controversy and criticism, the Buffalo Board of Education has terminated a contract with a Maryland firm that helped operate the city’s troubled alternative school.
In a unanimous vote earlier this week, the board agreed to pay ResulTech $278,334 — equivalent to two months severance pay — to end a contract that was supposed to run through June. If the contract remained in effect through June, it would have cost the district an additional $556,668.
The deal with ResulTech originally was touted as a way to provide at-risk students a personalized, technology-driven education at Academy School 44, 1369 Broadway.
Instead, it was deemed a failure by the Buffalo Teachers Federation and five board members who have been trying to end the program since May. The state Education Department last July issued a highly critical report on the Academy School, which was crafted largely around the ResulTech contract.
Ferry District Board Member Pamela D. Perry-Cahill and North District Board Member Catherine Nugent Panepinto welcomed the board action, but said Superintendent James A. Williams should have responded to calls to terminate the contract months earlier.
“I view it as a total mistake,” said Cahill, a leader of the effort to drop ResulTech. “It should have never, ever happened. It was a disservice to our students.”
The school district spent almost $6 million on contracts with ResulTech and got little in return, said West District Board Member Ralph Hernandez. “The bad news is that it took nearly three years and $6 million to reach that conclusion,” he said. “Good riddance. It’s over and done with.”
During a closed-door executive session on Dec. 10, the board directed district administrators to negotiate an end to the contract.
On Wednesday, Michael J. Looby, the board attorney, presented a plan that terminated the deal effective on Friday, provided $278,334 in “severance payment,” avoided potentially costly lawsuits and satisfied the board’s “overriding goal” of quickly closing out the deal with ResulTech.
The settlement, which was approved unanimously, also includes “a standard mutual nondisparagement provision” that Looby said prevents the parties from criticizing each other.
After the vote Wednesday night and before the start of classes Thursday morning, ResulTech removed laptop computers assigned to students at Academy School, as well as projectors and the school’s wireless network, said Sylvia Wallace, an Academy School science teacher and BTF delegate.
She said teachers are angry about being left with “almost nothing” in the way of technology and getting no advance notice of the contract termination. But they are even more angry, she said, about the larger failure of the ResulTech program.
The Academy School, for students in grades seven through 12, opened in 2006 to assist at-risk youngsters and reduce violence in other city schools. But a state report last July said the school had a serious problem with student attendance, failed to meet standards on instructional time, lacked supplies and equipment and assigned teachers to subjects they were not certified to teach.
Will Keresztes, associate superintendent of educational services, said the school will be restocked with computers by early next month. In addition, he said, plans will be made over winter break to operate the school without ResulTech and to advance efforts that are already under way to adopt a more conventional classroom approach.
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