Infrastructure Leadership Confusion
A couple weeks ago I woke up at 4am and couldn't get back to sleep. I decided to use that weird time to follow up on a question I'd been wondering about: who makes decisions when it comes to the School District of Philadelphia's buildings? What's the power structure like for facilities maintenance and updates? I'd been in a bunch of meetings with parent organizers and these questions came up. Parents have been fighting like hell alongside teachers, students, and community members for years to get something done about the city's toxic schools, which as 2017 needed around $5 billion of updates.
In these meetings, I realized I knew about the superintendent (who's leaving next year) and the board of education and the mayor. These individuals are well known and common targets. But what about all the departments, committees, teams, and offices devoted to infrastructure--how do those work and who's in charge of them? Who's actually doing this work day to day? Who should parents target? After some digging, I found some wild things.
After saw what was going on, I got mad and tweeted a thread about the confusion at the top of the Office of Facilities Management and Services. You never know what's going to get picked up on Twitter, and this thread traveled a bit. There were a bunch of comments in the thread from teachers, parents, and others interested in school facilities. Some of those people had new information I wasn't able to find too. Then I did a second thread to organize some other info I found out about the Office of Capital Programs and got similar feedback. So here's a summary and updated info on those threads. And organization charts!
Carp Diem
SDP has an Office of Operations (OO), headed by Reggie McNeil. Within that Office is an Office of Facilities Management and Services (OFMS). Within OFMS are several departments, among them a Department of Facilities (DF) and a Department of Maintenance (DM). I haven't been able to find a properly updated SDP organization chart, so here's how that looks for the relevant parts of the district (I'll refer to this throughout the post):
When did my early morning digging, I found something pretty unnerving. The OFMS leadership, including the heads of maintenance and facilities, were gone–but this wasn’t reflected on the district’s website. At the time, Ralph Carp was listed as the Executive Director of Operations, which oversees both DM and DF for OFMS. Tim Holman was listed as Director of Facilities.
But a quick look at LinkedIn (where the ruling class basically puts everything about themselves in public) showed that Carp was consulting in Alabama and Holman was the facilities director at an entirely different district! Wild.
Carp’s story is pretty wild too. He was director of Parks and Recreation in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. During that time he had at least two racial discrimination suits filed against him. Then he won the lottery in an office pool and decided to quit in 2016. He worked for the SDP for less than a year before disappearing to Alabama. Who hired him? How did that happen?
Now the website has been updated since my twitter thread, which is interesting. Disturbingly, in the middle of a facilities crisis, the Executive position is listed as Vacant while there’s an interim Director of Facilities, Jeff Scott. A comrade on twitter who works in the district forwarded me a newsletter sent by the Office of Operations called “Operations Update”–someone in the communications department for operations under Chanice Savage is being proactive–introducing us to Oz Hill, the new Deputy Chief Operating Officer. He’s not listed on the website and I can’t find him in the employment listings, and it’s not clear if he’ll be overseeing facilities and management, but at least there’s someone. The head of finance Tejal Pandejee is still there, probably wondering who the heck to talk to (seems like an organizing opportunity to me). Another note: I found that in the DM there are supervisors that oversee different kinds of projects. One of them asbestos abatement, which is a flashpoint in the city’s schools. That supervisor was and still is listed as vacant.
Das Capital Projects
But OFMS covers existing facilities, not necessarily new facilities projects or environmental remediation. There are other offices for that. The next thread I did was to try and understand the Office of Capital Projects (OCP). This office’s remit is:
identifying and prioritizing capital work within the School District of Philadelphia. This includes maintaining the physical integrity of existing facilities, constructing new buildings, and renovating existing facilities to meet code compliance and to support the educational needs of the District.
This is important! Ahmed Sultan, a large-scale project manager with a bespoke green architecture background, heads up this office. Rather than departments, like the OFMS, OCP has seven “units” headed by different people (see above in the org chart).
I didn’t find as many shenanigans in the OCP as I did in the OFMS. Everyone listed appears to be working there still and, from what I could find, don’t have colorful pasts. But I came away with a question. Steve Link is listed as the Environmental Unit lead for the OCP. Link is interesting. He worked for an environmental remediation firm, but he’s also an award-winning volunteer fireman.
The thing is, Link is also listed as the Director of the Office of Environmental Management and Services (OEMS). Link oversees an ‘A-team‘ of people devoted to OEMS’s mission. There was a bunch of new OEMS hires in January, where we see that the Environmental Compliance Manager is John M., who oversees the A-Team, in addition to an Environmental Response Manager named Kevin M. and an Environmental Compliance Manager named Gaeton T. But when I looked up “environmental compliance manager” in the district’s most recent staff files, the only entry is for Frances Tavella.
The A-Team itself is Jonathon Bartivic, James Williams, Christopher Lynch, Albert McDonough, Robert Arant, Scott Rooney, and John McCready, Shannon Pressey, Micheal Joseph, John Truesdale, Julio Candelaria, Danielle Minor, and Jerry Taylor. Here’s what they do:
The A-Team has one point of contact; John is able to organize and schedule each member of the team and efficiently report their progress out to others from a centralized hub. The A-Team is working in our buildings every night, and on weekends, to provide a safe and improved space for teachers to teach and students to learn.
The A-Team has completed approximately 770 individual projects since January, across hundreds of our schools. The projects would include the encapsulation and/or removal of asbestos containing material (ACM), the abatement of mold, and the re-insulation of exposed pipes with fiberglass. The A-team has also instituted a new practice of installing PVC protection sleeves around pipe insulation (asbestos or fiberglass) in our buildings. They are utilizing the time it takes to perform air sampling to provide this added service.
This is a lot of people! In the staff spreadsheet, many of them are listed as asbestos workers.
The Link link?
The big question is whether Link is part of the OCP or if he leads his own office. He’s listed as the head of OEMS but OCP says he reports to Sultan. Maybe it hasn’t been updated yet? There’s no dedicated OEMS website that I can find. I see an Environmental Programs and Services (EPS) page under OCP, which actually describes various projects like asbestos abatement and says OEMS rather than EPS. There’s also a dedicated page for the Environmental Unit of OCP that lists all the things that OEMS does. Which is it? In other words, what’s the Link link to OCP? This matters, because what if Link has to report to Sultan? What if he doesn’t? The employment spreadsheet is ambiguous. Link is listed as the Director of Env Mgmt and Services, but his office is in Capital Programs.
To add more layers, there’s a new entity called the Environmental Advisory Council that lists itself under Environmental, which I presume is OEMS by another name. From what I can tell, EPS is the same thing as OEMS, or maybe was an older version of OEMS? Let’s assume that’s true. Within this office there are several ‘services’, as I showed in the org chart above.
Who you gonna call?
The upshot of all this is a sense of deep confusion in facilities leadership. We know Philadelphia schools have an asbestos problem, for instance. Who’s in charge of this problem? By my count, there could be three places where asbestos detection, remediation, and management might fall. You could go to the Office of Facilities Management and Services, but there are two departments there: the Department of Maintenance and the Department of Facilities. These have no leadership and different directors. The former has an asbestos supervisor attached to it, but that position is vacant.
Next you could go to the Office of Capital Projects, which has an environmental unit dedicated to these issues. If you were to do that, you’d want to call Ahmed Sultan who oversees the office. But the environmental unit head is also the director of a separate office called the Office of Environmental Services and Management, which lists asbestos inspection and remediation under its remit. The director, Steven Link, would be the person to go to. Or maybe Frances Tavella. Here’s my best guess at a leadership chart with positions and names:
Ultimately, who’s responsible here? Of course the superintendent and the Chief Operations Officer are ultimately in charge but who’s actually doing the day to day work of overseeing the school buildings? How do decisions get made? Who reports to whom and when and under what circumstances? This seems like a creaky, leaky, and disorganized ship. I’m a parent of a child who will go to Philadelphia public schools, and I’m a professor of education policy, but I can’t figure out based on public information who’s accountable if my daughter gets asbestos poisoning at school.