During the first eight months that Paul Vallas worked as the Superintendent of the Recovery School District in New Orleans, he spent about $3 million on personal service contracts.
According to an investigation by the Times Picayune newspaper, most of those consultants had worked with Vallas when he was the CEO of the Philadelphia and Chicago schools systems.
The paper also discovered that “the vast majority of the RSD’s contracts were not competitively bid.”
At the time, however, Louisiana’s laws requiring that professional-service contracts be competitively bid were more lenient. Interestingly, after all the publicity, Louisiana
