Mayor's office withholds records on school contract scandal
yor Rahm Emanuel's office was more involved in a $20.5 million school contract with a now-indicted consultant than previously disclosed, public records indicate, but his administration has refused to release hundreds of emails that could provide a deeper understanding of how the deal came to be.
Emanuel and his aides have maintained that the mayor's office had nothing to do with the contract to provide leadership training for principals that is at the center of a federal bribery indictment against ex-schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett and the consulting firm where she once worked.
When asked in April if his administration had any role at all in the SUPES contract, Emanuel told reporters, "No, you obviously know that by all the information available. And so the answer to that is no."
Yet the mayor's office and schools officials have been in an ongoing struggle with the Tribune over reporters' public records requests that could bear directly on the controversy, withholding many emails for months before releasing them, several so heavily redacted that little more than the subject line and addresses remain.
The Emanuel administration has declined to provide about half of the roughly 1,000 emails requested. As part of that fight, the Tribune in June sued the city under the state Freedom of Information Act after the mayor's office redacted or withheld about two dozen emails emanating from Emanuel's office.
While much of the picture remains missing, the email logs and documents the administration did release show frequent communication among key Emanuel aides, Chicago school leaders and the heads of the SUPES Academy consulting firm in the months, weeks and days leading up to Emanuel's hand-picked school board awarding the contract in June 2013.
The consulting firm's ties date to the beginning of Emanuel's administration in 2011; in addition to recommending Byrd-Bennett, SUPES co-owner Gary Solomon helped recruit Emanuel's first schools CEO.
Specifically, the email logs indicate that key CPS officials and SUPES executives had numerous discussions about the SUPES firm and principal leadership training — a crucial element of Emanuel's education agenda — ahead of education meetings in the mayor's office in May 2013 and in June 2013, prior to the board vote. Those meetings included the mayor, his top education adviser Beth Swanson, Byrd-Bennett and top CPS officials involved in the SUPES discussions, according to copies of Emanuel's public calendar.
On Thursday, Byrd-Bennett and the co-owners of SUPES were indicted on charges that she steered them the no-bid business in return for promises of more than $2 million in kickbacks, other perks and a future job. Prosecutors alleged that Byrd-Bennett schemed with her SUPES colleagues even as she was joining CPS.
Much of the alleged scheming is laid out in the federal indictment by way of emails between Byrd-Bennett and Solomon. It's unclear what type of email accounts were involved and therefore hard to know whether the emails should have been turned over in response to Tribune requests for public records.
SUPES' work at CPS predated Byrd-Bennett's time as CEO. The firm had begun providing leadership training for school executives in 2012, months before she took over the reins at CPS.
But by early 2013, efforts to expand the program were growing, and emails obtained by the Tribune show SUPES' co-owners and CPS officials discussing how to secure more money to broaden the training. Some of those emails were exchanged on the same day in May Mayor's office withholds records on school contract scandal - Chicago Tribune: