The Mobile County Education Association demanded that School Board President Judy Stout release public documents detailing what the teachers’ organization called “the hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds being doled out in the form of no-bid contracts paid by the Mobile County Public Schools.”
The demand followed what the association described as the revelation of an ethically questionable practice: the solicitation of funds from vendors who were doing business with the school system.
The core allegation
MCEA Director Wade Perry laid out a sequence that, if accurate, described a closed loop.
The school system solicited contributions from companies. Some of those companies received contracts. Many of those contracts were awarded without competitive bidding. Perry wanted to know whether the two facts were connected.
Specifically, the association questioned whether the firms that contributed funds to the school system received preferential treatment when they were selected for thousands of dollars in public school work, and, as Perry put it, “more importantly, whether or not the school system and the tax-payers could have gotten a better deal if these contracts had been competitively bid.”
“It is time for Judy Stout and the school board to come clean and publicly release any and all information regarding the solicitation of vendors and the board’s approval of thousands and thousands of dollars in no-bid contracts,” Perry said. “It’s the tax-payers’ money, not the school board’s, and the tax-payers deserve to know the truth.”
He added the line that always accompanies such demands and always puts the recipient on the defensive: he anticipated prompt disclosure “if there is nothing to hide.”
The board’s response
In a letter to Perry, Stout said the request had been conveyed to School Superintendent Harold Dodge and that “the mechanics of the system’s response will be determined.”
It was, in the careful language of institutional correspondence, neither a yes nor a no.
Why no-bid contracts draw fire
Competitive bidding exists to accomplish two things: to get the taxpayer the lowest responsible price, and to remove the awarding official’s personal discretion from the transaction. Alabama’s competitive bid law requires public entities to seek bids for purchases above a statutory threshold, with carve-outs for professional services and certain other categories.
Those exceptions are where the trouble usually lives. Professional service contracts, consulting agreements and specialized purchases can be awarded on judgment rather than price, which is defensible in principle and difficult to police in practice.
Layer onto that a school system that had been asking its vendors for donations, and the appearance problem becomes acute regardless of whether any individual contract was improper. A vendor asked for a contribution by an agency that also decides who gets its business is not operating in a neutral market.
An unusual antagonist
The identity of the accuser gave the episode extra weight. This was not a taxpayer watchdog group or a defeated contractor. It was the teachers’ organization, the body that represents the system’s own employees, publicly accusing the board that employs them of mishandling public money.
Teacher organizations in Alabama had substantial political muscle, and a public break between the MCEA and the school board signaled a rupture that went beyond a records request.
The wider climate
The demand arrived in a year when the stewardship of public education money in Mobile County was already under sustained scrutiny, with questions swirling around board members, administrators and the two-year college system across town. In that atmosphere, a request for records about no-bid contracts was not going to be treated as a routine paperwork matter.
- Who asked: Mobile County Education Association, through Director Wade Perry
- Who was asked: School Board President Judy Stout
- What was sought: A full accounting of all no-bid contracts for the past several years
- The suspicion: That vendors solicited for donations received preferential treatment
- The answer so far: The request was passed to Superintendent Harold Dodge
Whether the documents would be produced, and what they would show, remained to be seen.