Back on November 24th I reported that one of the firms that had been at the center of the spending frenzy by former gypsy superintendent Romain Dallemand called Progressive Consulting were misrepresenting their credentials. This is an extremely serious violation when you are doing business with a governmental entity like a school district and could have some serious repercussions if it can be demonstrated that these credentials were used to help secure government contracts. Further legal difficulties could also be expected from the SEI and Carnegie-Mellon.
Notice the words “The Only Capabilities Maturity Model Integrated Certified Company in Macon, GA followed by the logo of the Software Engineering institute and Carnegie Mellon.” 
Now please take note of their revised website below. Those words and the logo have been removed.
Quite a big change. No mention of Carnegie Mellon, the Software Engineering Institute, or their certifications. Additionally, pages within the website that made reference to those entities and certifications have been removed entirely. People that follow this blog will also know that Progressive Consulting built the Macon-Bibb EOC website. Their website went down for several weeks after this article called Macon Bibb EOC Heating Assistance Leaving Truly Needy in Cold received some national media attention.
The ties with the Bibb BOE and Progressive Consulting go all the way back to 1990. In fact Progressive’s very first contract was with the Bibb board of education. I am not insinuating that Isaac Culver is not a qualified consultant or doesn’t know his stuff. From my research he has some impressive accomplishments. But I think once he decided to try and flog useless dumb terminals he stepped out of his comfort zone or wheelhouse.
Progressive should have stuck with programming, databases, and the software side and avoided hardware sales and installations which is a completely different animal. They were a small and specialized software business and should have stuck to what they knew but I suspect greed got the better of them. Their choice at all seems highly suspicious since they were a reference for Tom Tourand for his job in the BOE. One of Tourand’s references on his employment application was Isaac J. Culver III, the president and CEO of Progressive Consulting.
Both Romain Dallemand and Tom Tourand both seemed anxious to spend money like it was burning a hole in their pocket. Both men had little understanding of what a large school district actually required and this was a recipe for disaster when you allow two luddites to spend millions on technology purchases. I find it hard to believe that Progressive Consulting would have been selected had this gone to a bidding process with due diligence and more scrutiny or with a competent IT person.
According to a report by the Macon Telegraph with a Georgia PSC Report
Just weeks after Tourand’s appointment, Dallemand signed a contract with Progressive Consulting to provide “technical project management services and E-Rate construction projects” for the school system, without board approval, the report said. Progressive would provide network engineering support for the system’s Technology Department.
The board had authorized Dallemand to negotiate a technology contract with Progressive, but the contract should have come back to the board for final approval, the report said. In time, the school system paid Progressive about $1.3 million for technology consulting work.
One name stood out on Progressive’s bid proposal, the report noted: Allen Stephen, the president of CompTech Computer Technologies Inc., a minority-owned company based in Dayton, Ohio.
Progressive Consulting later brought CompTech into the huge technology project. The PSC report contains a letter from Stephen vouching for Progressive’s program management on a “disaster recovery system” that Stephen said had helped his company during a severe storm.
The PSC report also revealed that the Bibb County school district said it “uncovered evidence of collusion” involving Culver, Stephen and a Bibb County school employee whose name was redacted from the report. The report included a copy of an email from Culver to CompTech, which read: “This is a template for your invoice to BCSD. The pricing includes 10% on each unit sale for CompTech. … Just have your guys prepare the attached on your invoice and submit to (name redacted). It needs to be done pretty quickly so he can get a PO# generated today. Thanks, Isaac”
Is the infamous BOE5 now reduced to the BOE3?
For those of you unfamiliar with the term BOE5 it refers to a cabal that included Wanda West, Tom Hudson, Susan Middleton, Ella Carter and Tommy Barnes. With eight total Board of Education seats 5 was a supermajority. Nearly all of the votes for Dallemand’s lunacy received a rubber-stamp 5-3 vote. They continued to vote for Dallemand’s proposals long after evidence and common sense dictated they take a pause, For that reason they became known as the BOE5. The fact that the Bibb BOE is one of the very few in not the only BOE’s in the state with an even and not odd number is a whole other can of worms and I hope they can reduce their number to 7 or even 5. Of the original BOE5 only 3 now remain: West, Hudson, and Carter.
In an earlier article I also asked if Tom Hudson, who is a current BOE member, has ever received any payments from this company. Tom Hudson was appointed by Jack Ellis to two terms on Transit Authority Board. Hudson seems to be a perpetual thorn in the side to the other board members and often is the sole vote in opposition to otherwise unanimous votes. He also was frequently at loggerheads and got into heated verbal exchanges with Dr. Steve Smith the former interim superintendent. Dr. Steve Smith had this to say about Tom Hudson.
I don’t understand how he can complain about overspending about ($21,000) and sit there while my predecessor abused board policy nine times without (Hudson) questioning it,” Smith said after the committee meetings. “I was creating fairness and equity in the school system so that everybody was treated fairly.”
There have likely been numerous qualified candidates for superintendent that Hudson objected to for specious reasons. I am confident Hudson is the the main reason we still have not hired a permanent replacement. Hudson is only interested in replacing Dallemand with another Dallemand 2.0 who promises miracles and checks the right boxes.
The fact that to this very day he continues to defend Dallemand should tell the people of Bibb County all they need to know about Mr. Hudson. He doesn’t care about students or schools only his agenda. He excels at accusations and bellicose bloviating but is not interested in being anything more than an unapologetic obstructionist and a distraction.
Poor Ella Carter at this point is a shadow of her former self. She has destroyed what was once a very stellar reputation as a teacher and I fear due to her advanced age is rather easily manipulated and certainly easily agitated. She is stubborn and will not deviate from her position regardless of what the evidence or common sense shows.
She should have retired gracefully years ago and appears a bit dazed and confused at times. Her ridiculous outburst in the video below blaming people that disagree with her as being racist was beyond the pale. She has no evidence only beliefs and a suspicion. For her to call other board members racists was an intellectually lazy and dishonest pursuit that will only cause more tension and is used for people who have lost the debate and are looking for a nuclear option for their hail mary.
This is not about racism, it is about her incompetence and her acquiescence that allowed Dallemand to waste $52 million under her watch. She along with her four former allies must accept responsibility. I hold Susan Middleton who was white to the same standard and find her equally culpable. Bringing out the race card was sign of desperation and shows that she is grasping at straws and unwilling to simply apologize for the part she played as a Dallemand puppet.She had every opportunity to ask questions after so many red flags but did nothing.
There are certainly quite a lot of nebulous “Educational Consulting” companies in and around Macon that have managed to win various contracts with the Bibb BOE. They receive substantial amounts of money from the districts. I hope the Board under Dr. Dillard will now take a long and hard look at all of these disbursements and make sure it is money well-spent and not wasted.
Consider this notification that I am aware of numerous questionable disbursements to shadowy groups, individuals, and companies and am now giving the new BOE ample time to clean house. The BOE needs to make sure no groups are receiving payments while acting as babysitting services. Hint: No company, charity, group, or individual should be receiving any taxpayer school funds if they overtly discriminate and refuse to assist students based on race or gender or can provide a detailed curriculum and detailed paper trails with assessments and evidence that students are actually being tutored. Not one penny should be handed over to a group that uses race specific determinations to select students. It is time for some spring cleaning ladies and gentleman and ridding the Bibb school district of race or gender specific groups that are babysitting services is a great place to start.
Maybe Tom Hudson, Ella Carter and Wanda West are just perturbed that that they were unable to easily cajole or manipulate Thelma Dillard as easily as they might have hoped. Thelma Dillard does not appear to be a puppet and has earned this watchdog’s respect as an independent thinker more interested in the schools and students than self-aggrandizing pomposity. I may not always agree with Thelma Dillard on her votes, but I can at least respect someone with gumption and independent thought. She is her own woman with her own opinions and does not appear to be easily bullied by special interest groups or other board members.
Keep it up Thelma and you might win our Elba Peach Award. Guess who we might nominate for the Rotten Peach Award….
Stay tuned for much more to come and in the meantime make sure and read our Cotton Avenue Mafia report. It is not succinct but it is a virtual page turner that would make Tony Soprano jealous. Nepotism, Cronyism, and the Cotton Avenue Mafia Rule Macon, GA
In the meantime it looks like the Perry retreat is not off to the best of starts as they try and mend fences. The best way to move the Bibb school district forward would be for the reaming three members of the BOE5 to voluntarily or involuntarily resign. It also seems a blog in Macon is getting under Tom Hudson’s skin. I wonder who he could possibly mean? As I have stated here many times before Tom Hudson and any other BOE member are welcome to call me for a phone interview where they can give their side of the story as long as they agree to answer some questions I have over connections to educational consulting contracts, connections to DFACS, Progressive Consulting, Cliffard Whitby and a few more.
http://youtu.be/hqh1-2y4qxs
Mr. Wood, I believed when registering/signing up to participate on your forum it was a breath of fresh air. Because you were going after the corrupt in Macon and exposing their misdeeds…….hard hitting reporting. Now, because I’ve experience how deceitful and conning you play, I’m skeptical of your agenda and motives. It may be all a ruse and guise to keep the status quo relevant in Macon (shell game). I believe also, your defense of Oedel is not a defense but a comradery the two of you have with the same agenda.
I hope you fight as hard to expose what I believe are questionable funding practices of the College Hill /Knight Foundation/Mercer/Historic Macon Foundation/City Government projects. If not, “I rest my case”, a term I’m sure you are familiar with………just saying.
My conjecture above is just speculative, I have no proof, but if its walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, my gosh, it’s a “Duck”.
Proceed Governor
You know what I would find a breath of fresh air? Someone that feels compelled to come to my website and criticize someone trying to shed light on corruption in Macon and the whole state would be able to find the big donate button. After all you seem to think you are a paying customer so I thought I would point out you aren’t.
Do you have any idea how much it cost to run this website? Go Price a CDN, hosting, all the plugins, the theme, open record, gas, software, and most importantly my time. Let me save you some time, I have spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours and instead of you showing gratitude you decide to bitch.
Let me be very clear. I have no idea what you are trying to insinuate, but I have nothing to prove to you. I write about stories that interest me. If you don’t like what you read then by all means stop visiting. You are free to set up your own website and write about any topics you like. The problem with Macon are people like you that expect another person like me to do all the work, spend all my own money and time, and then you have the audacity to come here and criticize without donating a penny or at least trying to contribute to the discussion. No, it is far easier for you to just sit back and hope others do it for you while you complain they aren’t doing it fast enough or covering the topics you want to read about.
If you think you can do any better by all means go for it. If you think there is a story about the funding please submit some open record requests or donate a couple of hundred dollars to me so I can request the records. Did you forget that I am doing this for free????
I enjoy debates and I am pretty damn good at it. If you want to discuss points in the story feel free. Don’t come to my website and presume to cast aspersions or dictate what I should write about. It is fine to discuss points in the article but you didn’t choose to do that and instead chose to go off topic with wild tangents. In fact I have no idea what if any point you were trying to make. Nothing you wrote had anything to do with this article nor was it even lucid.