Frank Briscoe, center, a gym teacher and basketball coach at Anacostia Senior High School.
(Post photo by Tyler Mallory)

Richard Winston, the deputy superintendent brought in by Smith, said in a recent interview that he went out of his way to recuse himself from any management decision that might have affected his wife, who worked in a separate part of the bureaucracy. But many other D.C. school officials, he said, did not.

"You had to stop and find out who you were dealing with and what the relationships were before you could make decisions," said Winston, who ultimately clashed with Smith and left the school system in 1995. "There were too many hidden agendas that were related to personal matters that had nothing to do with running the schools -- matters involving husbands and wives, cousins and other relatives."

A Host of Connections

From the moment Smith arrived, the superintendent's office suites on the upper floors of the Presidential Building at 12th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW were full of clerks, managers and top officials with family and political connections throughout the vast bureaucracy.

In Smith's outer office, Lola J. Singletary worked as a $28,461-a-year administrative assistant, a position she retains. Her mother, Lola Johnson Singletary, was a $47,903-a-year administrator in bilingual education; her salary has since increased to $53,610.

Deitra Bryant, now an elementary school teacher, was a $14,000-a-year clerk in the superintendent's suite. Her mother, Gwendolyn W. Bryant, was a $58,327-a-year program director who has since become principal of Aiton Elementary School.

Down the hall, Shelia G. Handy held the title of assistant for planning in the superintendent's office in 1991 -- and ultimately was promoted by Smith to be an $81,944-a-year associate superintendent for educational accountability, a post from which she retired at the end of last year. Perry Handy, her ex-husband, who has since retired, was principal of Giddings Elementary School. Perry Handy's current wife, Saundra Handy, is a $55,248-a-year coordinator of science education.

Bettye W. Topps, a former school principal, was Smith's first director of his Center for Systemic Educational Change. (She remains as Becton's senior policy adviser.) Her husband, Andrews J. Topps III, receives $68,720 a year as principal of Adams Elementary School.

Constance R. Clark became one of Smith's deputy superintendents, making $77,634 a year, before she was fired by him in October. Her sister, Nancy R. Shannon, is principal of Merritt Elementary. Her son, Robert W. Clark, is a clerk at Reed Elementary School.

And B. Garnett Pinkney -- also fired by Smith in October -- was another deputy superintendent, in charge of special education and making $70,286 a year. One of Pinkney's sisters, A. Lorraine Harris, is the principal at Stoddert Elementary School, and another sister, Martina Matthews, was principal at McGogney Elementary School until she retired in 1995. Barbara T. Jackson, Pinkney's cousin, held numerous posts in the bureaucracy's upper reaches, retiring in 1995 as its $74,967-a-year director of grants.

The Pinkney clan was out in force at a reception Smith held shortly after he came to town. Kathleen Reilly Mannix, a former administrative assistant to school board member Jay Silberman (At Large), was at the party and remembered Smith's asking Pinkney's extended family to stand and be recognized.

"I looked over in the Garnett Pinkney section," Mannix recalled, "and legions of people were standing -- and I recognized them all as working for the school system."

Mannix said there is nothing necessarily wrong with school employees being related to one another if they were hired properly and perform well. The public school system for decades represented a gateway for African Americans striving to join the middle class in Washington at a time when racism and discrimination closed many other avenues, she said, and the hiring of family members was a consequence.

But Mannix and others contend that along the line, the school personnel system became highly politicized. Far too many school board members and D.C. Council members, they say, came to regard it as a middle-class jobs program.

"The whole issue of what was a quality employee was lost. And certainly nepotism was part of it," Mannix said.

No Selection Panels

James R. Daugherty, a retired Army colonel, was hired by Smith as personnel director in 1993 -- making him Smith's fourth personnel chief in three years. Fresh from his assignment as commandant of the Army's finance, personnel and recruitment school, he was aghast at what he found.

More than 800 employees were categorized as "extras" on the payroll, and few administrators in the system were running truly competitive selection panels for hiring and promotions. "It's a small town -- and everybody knows each other," Daugherty said. "They've all been in the system for 25 years. So they say, 'Suzy would be a good person for this job.' And they make the decision before there's ever a competition."

Instead of convening panels of disinterested parties, he said, top officials and other program managers hired and promoted employees using "temporary" and "acting" labels to circumvent competitive selections. In 1993, there were 35 acting principals and 85 acting vice principals, meaning those jobs had been filled -- often for years -- without the superintendent and his deputies forming selection panels, conducting interviews and making permanent selections.

Daugherty immediately began convening panels and making permanent principal and assistant principal appointments.

He knew the process would make virtually all of those in acting positions permanent, because each worker in question knew the job and would have a leg up in the process. But he said he figured he had to go through the exercise to get back to "ground zero" and restore credibility before he started building a real personnel system.

He never got the chance.

Daugherty was fired Nov. 1 by Smith, who also eliminated most of his personnel office without ever saying why. Two weeks later, Smith himself was fired by the D.C. financial control board.

They left behind a hiring and promotion system that valued who you knew.

Legacy of Patronage

The D.C. schools have been a patronage haven for as long as many veteran observers can remember.

For years, powerful subcommittee chairmen who oversaw the District in Congress placed their friends and associates in the system. When Congress approved an elected school board for the District in 1969, the patronage remained, but the sponsors changed.

Dwight S. Cropp, associate professor at George Washington University and former D.C. School Board employee.
(Post photo by Susan Biddle)

"With the elected board, the school system became politicized," said Dwight S. Cropp, an associate professor at George Washington University who is familiar with the D.C. system.

In 1970, Hugh Scott arrived from Detroit. Scott was brought in as the first black school superintendent under pressure to reverse decades of discrimination and elevate African Americans to senior management positions, said Cropp, a graduate of Eastern High School. Cropp, a schoolteacher in the late 1960s, went to work for Scott, then for the elected board, then for Mayor Barry before entering academe in 1990.

When the drive to promote black managers combined with local political forces through the 1980s, Cropp said, the results were mixed: Some people who rose to new heights were qualified, he said, but many were not.

"When you continually put people in positions they are not qualified for and then refrain from evaluating them," Cropp said, "it's going to take its toll."

R. Calvin Lockridge, who represented Ward 8 on the school board from 1978 to 1990, agrees that unqualified people built fiefdoms and created a system he now calls "incestuous."

But he traces the problem not to the elected school board but to the 1980 demand by Congress that the District government and the school system sever ties to the federal civil service and create their own personnel systems. The people running the new District system, Lockridge said, simply decided "to do what white folks had been doing for some time."

Lockridge and his supporters describe his school board tenure as that of a confrontational crusader for poor black children. Lockridge's detractors say he came to epitomize political meddling, demanding that principals and school officials hire and fire at his whim.

Lockridge's school board career ended in controversy after Michael Wheeler, his best friend and longtime political aide, was arrested in 1988 while driving Lockridge's Mercedes-Benz in New Jersey with a pound of cocaine in the trunk. Wheeler was convicted of drug possession in 1990.

Lockridge, defeated at the polls in 1990, went to prison in 1994 on charges that he stole $20,000 from an elderly woman who had asked him to manage her affairs.

Lockridge's nephew, William O. Lockridge, remains on the school system payroll as a $34,962-a-year teacher coordinator. Calvin Lockridge, released from prison in 1995, says he didn't help his nephew secure the job and denies ever helping constituents get work in the system -- beyond those on his school board staff.

But in earlier interviews while he was a school board member, Lockridge spoke openly about finding school jobs for constituents. "Sometimes I feel like I run a job placement service," he told The Washington Post in 1988.

Board Recommendations

Members of the current school board carried on the tradition, before being stripped of power in November by the control board. A former school system administrator who handled personnel actions in her department and asked not to be quoted by name said that before being laid off in August, she frequently processed paperwork for constituents who had been recommended by school board members.

The system also is full of officials who have connections to current or former school board and D.C. Council members, three of whom previously served on the school board.

Marilyn Tyler Brown, the system's longtime associate superintendent who was making $77,634 a year when she retired last summer, was a renowned political fund-raiser who had worked on the campaigns of school board (and later D.C. Council) members Betty Anne Kane (D-At Large) and Linda W. Cropp (D-At Large). Linda Cropp is married to Dwight S. Cropp.

Before Daugherty's arrival, the school system's personnel chief was Karen Jones Herbert, a lawyer who went on to become chairman of the D.C. Taxi Cab Commission. Herbert started in the school system's personnel office in the 1980s before going to work as an aide to then-council member Wilhelmina J. Rolark (D-Ward 8), herself a former school board member.

After gaining a law degree, Jones Herbert returned to the school system in 1990 as its top personnel administrator.

Lockridge, then chairman of the school board's Personnel Committee, said recently that then-Superintendent Andrew Jenkins came to him and told him his wife, Dorothy, the school system's head of counseling, had recommended Jones Herbert.

"As chairman, I was very supportive that he was moving in that direction because [Jones Herbert] was a Ward 8 resident," Lockridge recalled. "And there were very few professionals living in Ward 8."

Neither the Jenkinses nor Jones Herbert returned phone calls seeking interviews.

Larry Hawkins worked for 22 years as a school construction foreman before resigning in late 1994. He said he got his job on the recommendation of a school official in industrial education whose house he'd worked on as a private carpenter.

During his time, Hawkins said, he watched fully qualified sons and daughters of employees get on the payroll. Problems arose, in Hawkins's view, with those who weren't qualified.

Said Hawkins, "You got guys out there who hired all of their children and just should have hired one."

Metro resource director Margot Williams contributed to this report.