The D.C. Board of Education is considering whether to approve a six-month contract extension with a security firm that has been criticized by investigators for charging more than other bidders and has drawn complaints from parents that it provides too few guards to patrol the schools.
School board members are to vote tonight on whether to retain the Watkins Security Agency of D.C. from January to June.
A fatal shooting in February at Ballou Senior High School in Southeast Washington brought heightened scrutiny of the three-year, $45.6 million contract with Watkins and prompted the D.C. Council last summer to shift authority over school security from the school system to the D.C. police department. The contract also became controversial when school officials acknowledged that they implemented the agreement without submitting it to the council for approval, as required by law.
Under legislation passed by the council, the police department was required to take over school security this month. But school officials, the council and the police agreed that changing security firms in the middle of the school year would be disruptive. The council gave the school board the option of extending the agreement with Watkins, and several board members said last week that they saw no alternative to the extension.
The Ballou shooting brought to the surface parents' numerous concerns about security in schools citywide. Some parents complained that large school buildings were staffed with only a handful of guards. And they alleged at a council hearing that some youthful guards acted unprofessionally by escorting students to the prom and buying them alcohol.
Terry Goings, president of the parent, teacher and student organization at Coolidge Senior High School in Northwest, said last week that the situation at his school has not changed.
"They had three guards in the school [Thursday]. How can three guards patrol four floors?" Goings said.
"The average age [of the guards] is 20 to 25," he added. "You can't have kids overseeing kids. That's what we have now."
Watkins's president, Richard Hamilton, was a D.C. police officer for 24 years. His spokeswoman, Donna Henry, said the company follows the school system's security plans, which dictate staffing and deployment levels.
Asserting that guards were not to blame for the smuggling of a gun into Ballou, Henry said: "There were police officers as well as security guards in the school. They were positioned where they were told to be positioned."
She said school officials never complained to Watkins about the ages of its guards until after the shooting.
The school system "didn't go through the council on the contract," Henry said. "Watkins became a scapegoat for a school system we feel needs to be fixed."
In June, the D.C. inspector general alleged that the school system wasted as much as $8.8 million by awarding the contract to Watkins in 2002 and said that the company was the most expensive, yet least qualified, among several bidders.
The inspector general faulted Watkins for high absenteeism among security guards. He also cited problems with the school system, including a lack of standards in its procurement process and failure to properly monitor contractors' work.
"D.C. can be an easy mark for contractors. People know they can rip us off," school board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz said.
"This new superintendent [Clifford B. Janey] is addressing it," she added. "We're going to get better contracting people -- people who can negotiate, people who know what they're doing."
D.C. Council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3), who chairs the council's education committee, said the police department has identified a security contractor that it proposes to hire after June. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey was unavailable Friday to comment on the issue, a spokesman said.
Council members said that in putting the school security force under police authority, they are following a model used in New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Oakland, Calif.
"It makes sense to let the school system focus on academics instead of focusing on security," Patterson said.
Some school board members and parents, however, said they oppose having police in charge of school security. "I'm not for police taking over and manning [schools] like a jail," Goings said.
School officials have not given up on the idea of trying to regain control over security. The system's chief business officer, Thomas Brady, said officials are studying whether it would be more cost-effective to return to using school employees as security guards, which was done in the early 1990s.
The security issue illustrates the sometimes fractious relations among the school board, the council and other agencies over control of the 63,000-student system, some school advocates said. They said the school system is made more vulnerable in these turf fights because of frequent turnover in the superintendent's job.
"The turnover and lack of stability hurts us, with [new superintendents] wanting to do something different," said Cathy Reilly, director of the Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principals and Educators. "If we would stick with one thing that works, it would help a lot."
