Disgraced former Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett landed in prison for steering $22.5 million in no-bid deals to her friends — but her wrongdoing was much worse, a new report concludes.
CPS’s inspector general says in his annual report, released Wednesday, that Byrd-Bennett orchestrated schemes that resulted in another $10.1 million in public school contracts going to her friends’ companies.
The findings come six years after the schools chief former whom Mayor Rahm Emanuel chose and affectionately called “B3” abruptly resigned.
Byrd-Bennett, 71, got out of prison in early May after serving nearly three years of her 4 1/2 -year sentence in a low-security facility thanks to a federal policy aimed at sparing nonviolent offenders from the coronavirus.
In 2013, Byrd-Bennett helped steer an eye-catching $20 million contract for principal training to a company that had employed her before she worked at CPS and which promised to take her back after she left the Chicago school system.
That same year, CPS Inspector General Will Fletcher now says, Byrd-Bennett also made sure that two more friends landed $6.3 million in a separate training contract with professional development firm Knowledge Delivery System, a company she had ties with in Detroit.
After a year of work at KDS, the two unnamed friends left the company in a tiff to start their own firm along with a CPS aide they hired as their general counsel. Byrd-Bennett tried to move the work along with them to the new company without approval from the Chicago CONTINUE READING: Barbara Byrd-Bennett steered another $10 million from the Chicago Public Schools to ‘friends,’ CPS inspector general says - Chicago Sun-Times
