MCPS Board of Education Makes Major Decisions without All the Facts #buscameras

In May of 2016, the Montgomery County Board of Education received a Memorandum from the then Interim Superintendent, Larry Bowers.  The purpose of the memo was to convince the Board of Education to agree to a no Request for Proposal (RFP), no bid deal with a company that wanted to install cameras on the outside of MCPS school buses to generate citations that would fine drivers for allegedly passing stopped school buses with their stop arms out. 100% of the fine revenue generated from these cameras would go to the outside company. 

For some inexplicable reason, MCPS Board of Education members traditionally take these types of memos as factual, even when there have been many instances where the information in memos has been proven to be wrong or inaccurate.

The May 2016, memo shown below demonstrates once again how the Board of Education relies on a memo with questionable information on which to base a major decision.

Here is a key to questionable statements in the memo.  Each statement is circled in red on the document below.

• RFP - The Board of Education was not approving a contract based on a MCPS RFP.  If you are familiar with MCPS RFP designations, the RFP 22-10 looked wrong.  22-10 was, in fact a RFP from the East Baton Rouge Parish School System in Louisiana. 22-10 is not a RFP that the Board of Education members authorized or have ever seen.  They would have no idea how that RFP was written or what it included.

• The memo states that the current stop arm bus camera system costs $250,000 a year to administer.  What the memo leaves out is that the proposed system will also cost the Police Department and MCPS upwards of $500,000.  

• Notice how the term BusGuard has a cute "tm" symbol next to it.  It's cute, but it's apparently not accurate.  BusGuard is not trademarked according to the PTO website shown in the image.  They tried to get a trademark in 2009 but dropped their effort in 2010.  By 2016, BusGuard was still not trademarked.  But putting "tm" in the memo gave the name a little panache.  

•  "No cost" - As noted above, the program does have a cost to the Police and MCPS because each of those agencies have to hire staff to process the bus camera citations. 

• "Existing contract" - This is a really intesting reference in this memo because the Board of Education does not have access to the existing East Baton Rouge Parish contract. What's in the contract?  What is the MCPS Board agreeing to?  They didn't know.   

• "additional vendors" - This is also an interesting statement as this contract was not formally bid.  Who were the additional vendors? How were they evaluated? Were they allowed to participate in this selection process or was the process exactly as has been stated to the County Council?

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