Phila. School District wants two fired in procurement probe

The School District of Philadelphia plans to recommend to the School Reform Commission that two executives, suspended during the furor over the Ackerman administration's procurement practices, be terminated, according to district sources and documents.

The two officials are Francis Dougherty, who was a key aide to Deputy Superintendent Leroy D. Nunery II, and John L. Byars, senior vice president of procurement services.

According to a certified letter written to Dougherty, dated March 30, his conduct violated the district's code of ethics and state law.

Specifically, the letter from Estelle D. Matthews, the district's chief talent and development officer, said Dougherty forwarded more than 50 e-mails from his district account to his personal e-mail account. Many of them, Matthews wrote, related to a $7.5 million no-bid emergency contract for surveillance cameras at persistently dangerous schools that was awarded to a small Mount Airy minority contractor.

That firm, IBS Communications Inc., received the work after School Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman, according to district sources, abruptly directed her staff to have IBS replace a firm that had begun preliminary work on the project.

The volume of those e-mails, Matthews wrote, led to the "reasonable conclusion . . . that you wanted the ability to forward them outside the district without detection. These e-mails concerned confidential district matters."

Reached yesterday evening, Dougherty declined to comment.

"Fran is a man of utmost integrity," said his attorney, Lisa A. Mathewson. "We believe he was terminated for protected whistle-blowing activity."

The precise rationale for the pending action against Byars could not be determined Tuesday night, but word had circulated throughout the district during the day that he would not be returning to work.

"He's done," said one district source who had seen a resolution prepared for the School Reform Commission's planning meeting scheduled for Wednesday. "He's on the resolution packet which they're going to be reviewing."

Efforts to reach Byars last night were unsuccessful. Earlier in the day, Byars' attorney, Clifford Haines, said that there had been "no change" in his client's employment status.

It was Byars who had prepared the written justification for the emergency spending on the school surveillance cameras. He served on the board of the Business Center at New Covenant Campus, an incubator for small business on Germantown Avenue, where IBS has headquarters.

A school district representative said last fall that Byars had no direct involvement with IBS and that there were "no improprieties."

The two were recommended for dismissal after the district paid the law firm of Pepper Hamilton L.L.P. $173,000 to conduct an investigation of the award of the contract and the leaking of details about it to the news media.

The full report of the inquiry has not been released, but the district released a statement in March saying "no evidence of wrongdoing" had been found in the award of work to IBS.