Letter to the Editor / Porter contract extension inequities

For the record, I am Capt Ed Davidson, Chairman of the Fla Keys Citizens Coalition, and an attendee of more than 400 school board and audit committee meetings over the past 20 years.  This commentary will use the customarily allotted  5 minutes.

The taxpayers deserve to know clearly that the proposed 3 year extension of Superintendent Porter’s contract perpetuates a number of serious flaws, including some provisions that have already been breached outright by Mr. Porter’s actual behavior, and is thus a really bad deal for the taxpayers.

This contract is in functional fact very much a one-way street, because it imposes significant obligations on the School Board while there is little if any consequence if the Superintendent dishonors the contract, as he already has in a number of respects — and his only punishment is to be a 3 year contract extension and a $45,000 raise!

For starters, this is a 3-yr obligation only to the District, but no real binding obligation upon Mr. Porter, since in plain fact both of the other jobs he already applied for a year before the end of his current contract would have required that he abandon his responsibilities to Monroe County more than 7 months before the expiration of his contract on 31 Jul, no later than the Christmas holidays in the middle of the school year — which would have been two weeks ago, and a month less than the required 90 day advance notice !

Yet there is no penalty at all for such well-defined breaches, but there ought to be because Mr. Porter could just as easily once again apply for other jobs at any time over the next 3 years without any enforceable consequences whatsoever!

A final major and very expensive inconsistency needs to be re-negotiated, as # 8 B requires that “In the event the Superintendent is terminated without cause… the Board agrees to pay the Superintendent a sum equal to twenty (20) weeks of his base salary…” — even though the governing law says not greater than, not equal to, 20 weeks.

The amount should be pro-rated and lessened for less than 20 weeks advance termination, because that’s a $63,461.54 mandatory “golden parachute”no matter how badly he might mis-behave!  Yet if the Superintendent decides to breach his contract and leave 7 months early, as a Christmas present to Fla Keys students, teachers, and parents, with far less than 90 days notice — as he has already tried to do twice — it won’t cost him anything, not a damned nickel.

This is grossly inequitable and unjust, and ought to be re-negotiated:  it should simply cost the Superintendent the same pro-rated amount to leave early as it costs the board to fire him early.

And it’s not like Mr. Porter hasn’t given the Board reason to consider such discipline, which is why — after his 9 month cover-up of the HOB daycare funding scandal — current Board members other than myself recently gave him 27 ratings of less than 3.0 “proficient” out of 5.0, including 19 ratings of less than 2.0 “below standards”, and 8 ratings closer to 1.0 “unsatisfactory” at the very bottom of the barrel!

As subsequent, long-overdue investigations confirmed, Mr. Porter (and CFO Drake, and Principal Henriquez) knew in Jan that $20,739 in daycare funds were missing, but concealed that for 9 months until the School Board read about it in the newspapers in Nov — despite being told twice by the Board Chairman and once by a Board attorney to report the missing funds to the States Attorney.

He not only did not do so, but left the program director in her job for 6 months after she had proven untrustworthy — and I believe the errant book keeper still has a District job 2 yrs later.  Yet Superintendent Porter’s only punishment, other than being docked a week’s pay, is to be awarded a 3 yr contract extension worth a total of $495,000 !!

That won’t make much sense to the taxpayers, and it shouldn’t.  But there is no pressing need to hurry, and there is plenty of time to put some teeth in this contract and cut a far better deal for the taxpayers.

Capt Ed Davidson, taxpayer watchdog, former Dist 3 school board member.

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