Former Baltimore County school superintendent Dallas Dance pleaded guilty Thursday to four counts of perjury for failing to disclose nearly $147,000 he earned from consulting jobs — including payments from a company he helped win a no-bid contract with the school system.
Prosecutors recommended a sentence of five years and want Dance to serve 18 months in jail. A sentencing hearing was scheduled for April 20, Dance’s 38th birthday.
Maryland State Prosecutor Emmet C. Davitt read a lengthy list of facts that laid out in detail how Dance repeatedly deceived the school board and ethics officials and manipulated the purchasing process to award a contract to a company that was paying him for consulting.
The facts show that Dance began negotiating for private consulting work with executives of the Chicago company, SUPES Academy, shortly after he was hired as Baltimore County schools superintendent in July 2012.
Dance told the executives that he needed to make more money due to a divorce, Davitt said in Baltimore County Circuit Court.
“Keep me as busy as you can,” Dance reportedly told one of the SUPES executives, Davitt said.
Davitt also said Dance vowed to a SUPES official that he would fire a Baltimore County Public Schools employee in order to get a no-bid contract for SUPES, which the school board approved in December 2012.
After his private consulting work with the school contractor became public in media reports, Dance lied to ethics officials about payments from his SUPES job and begged SUPES executives not to provide information to the ethics panel, Davitt said.
He also provided false documents to the school system’s ethics panel that showed any income he had earned was going to the school system’s education foundation. It was not, Davitt said.
Dance told SUPES executives not to worry because the ethics panel has no subpoena power. He also said that if they turned over any documents “he might as well kill himself.”...
