The Española School Board will bid out the administration of a lucrative federal grant rather than automatically hand it over to the non-profit organization Hands Across Cultures.
The Board approved this motion Aug. 6 meeting just two weeks after it avoided breaking state law by not handing over a $926,088 federal grant to Hands Across Cultures.
Although Board Vice President Floyd Archuleta and member Andrew Chavez abstained from voting because they sit on the non-profit’s board of directors, both attempted to dissuade other Board members from engaging in what they called a potentially lengthy bid process, arguing the delay could somehow jeopardize the grant. Archuleta gave Hands Across Cultures Director and Santa Fe County Commissioner Harry Montoya a chance to tell the Board as much.
“The potential exists that if we don’t come to a consensus, we risk losing these funds,” Montoya told the Board.
Montoya did not clarify at the meeting how a bid process would jeopardize the grant, and he declined to comment further in a later phone conversation. Federal grant guidelines do not mention any deadlines for awarding the grant to an outside contractor.
The District received the three-year, $308,696-a-year grant, which would fund alcohol abuse prevention programs in secondary schools, from the federal Education Department in late May. The money is currently sitting in a District fund awaiting disbursement.
Neither the District nor Hands Across Cultures could explain how a potentially illegal contract wound up before the Board July 23 for approval.
Superintendent David Cockerham said he thought the Board was only approving the grant July 23, not a contract with Hands Across Cultures. Cockerham, who was away on travel that week, conjectured that a District secretary may have received the unsigned contract from Hands Across Cultures July 23, assumed it was meant for Board approval and included it in the agenda.
An addendum to the July 23 meeting’s agenda bearing Cockerham’s signature recommends the Board to approve several contracts, including the agreement with Hands Across Cultures.
Hands Across Cultures staff drafted the contract, but Montoya denied that he or his staff knew of federal guidelines requiring the District to follow a bidding process when selecting a contractor to manage the grant. Federal grant guidelines explicitly state the District must follow state procurement law, which requires it to bid out any contract above $50,000.
The contract presented to the Board July 23 would have given the District a roughly 5 percent cut of the grant money and funneled the remainder to the non-profit. More than half the grant — a total of $528,858 over three years — would have gone toward salaries of current and future Hands Across Culture employees, according to budget documents submitted to the Department. The grant would have covered the $40,000-a-year salaries of two current Hands Across Cultures employees, a third of director Mike Chavez’s $58,000 salary and much of the salaries of two yet-to-be hired employees, the documents state.
Cockerham, who signed an agreement with Hands Across Cultures in January allowing the non-profit to apply for the grant in the District’s name, said he never read the grant until he returned from a three-week trip Aug. 1.
“When I got back, I spent some real quality time with (the grant),” Cockerham said. “I gave it a good close look, and I told the Board to put it out for bid immediately.”
The Board also addressed in the Aug. 6 meeting grant guidelines that obligate the District to continue funding the alcohol-abuse program when the grant expires after three years. Cockerham and Montoya reassured the Board that the requirement is not binding, and does not require the District to necessarily fund the program when the grant runs out.
Like many grants of its type, the federal grant is “soft money,” temporary funding intended to jump-start a program while the District finds a permanent funding source to sustain it in the future. Cockerham and Montoya both acknowledged that, more often than not, the programs initiated with such temporary grants end when the funding runs out.
“I’ve always contended that these grants are too short-term,” Montoya said. “We’re able to provide the services while we have the funding, but not long enough to provide outcomes over the long term.”
Montoya said his group’s attempts to charge for certain services to subsidize other, free services have not worked, because “people are not wanting to pay for services they expected for free.” And while wealthier, more populous places often sustain programs through gifts from charitable foundations, that option is limited in the Española Valley, he said.
The District has struggled to secure permanent funding for grant-funded programs.
For example, administrators are currently scrambling to find permanent funding for the District’s Reading First program, whose temporary federal funding will run out in a year. The five-year-old program has so far been sustained by grants of roughly $1 million annually, which have already dropped to half that for this school year.
The District plans to sustain the program this year with federal Title One funds — but those are also “soft,” or non-permanent funds, and the District must find permanent funding if it wishes to continue the program in the future, Cockerham said.
“The issue here is that if we can meet the needs of kids for three or four years, we’re doing better for those kids that period of time,” Cockerham said. “It’s three or four years, but it’s at least something.”