The Scandal Behind The Effort

Right Photo

Ad promoting the NBC 5 Series on its

investigation toward DCS.

I admit to NOT following the story behind Dallas County Schools that much originally.  As I said, most of my effort following it all came when its existence to continue it was on the ballot this November.  Don Huffines, who is also my state senator representing me (and I participated in his campaign I admit)  authored the actual bill to get rid off it.  I spend much of this weekend trying to catch up on what exactly happened here after attending DISD's Board Briefing this past Thursday.  The reason is why would DISD somehow have to assume upwards of perhaps $90-100 million in debt to get access to DCS' assets?

Clearly the station that took the lead in breaking the story behind the scandals (and to a degree caused its demise) was NBC Channel 5.   While other stations had talked about Dallas County Schools and safety concerns for years, they are the best resource (link to their series) to get more specific information to find out why DCS went into financial turmoil and thus got voted out of existence.  

How did DCS get into such bad shape financially?  Its own board of trustees didn't know about supposedly until last February.  It had $40 million less than it anticipated.

The closest thing I have found to an origin story of what caused this scandal, its dissolution, and now DISD's effort to create a transportation department is here.  Somehow at one point, former DCS Superintendent Rick Sorells and the head of a company called Force Multipler Solutions, Robert Leonard had known each other closely for years. 

The floor plan of the apartments in New Orleans that then DCS Superintendent Rick Sorrells and Force Multipler Solutions Robert Leonard had shared.

So close they shared a luxury suite of apartments in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  Leonard's company paid at least for the water bill on those apartments according documents found by Channel 5.  Meanwhile, Force Multiplier Solutions was awarded $70 million in contracts essentially for school bus camera equipment dating back to 2012.   Apparently (not mentioned in this specific story) one of DCS' former board presidents, Larry Duncan, was given gifts and donations from this same company.  I will mention this in another post.  

The four major service centers of Dallas County Schools. 

DISD was to acquire them to run its own transportation

department currently.

To honor all these contracts, I'm assuming that DCS had to then find shady ways to get funding just to stay alive from leases on buses to its service centers.  A separate Channel 5 story talks about DCS in one instance back in 2015 got $25 million in cash by leasing its four major bus service centers for over $47 million.  A question I like to ask here is: "How much of that lease was paid for so far and will DISD have to take that entire obligation?"    This was briefly mentioned, but not fully explained in last Thursday's board briefing.  This here can be talked about in another post altogether.