Appropriately, Mayor Emanuel’s name isn’t mentioned in the 43-page indictment on bribery charges handed down today by the feds against Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who was hired by the mayor to run the Chicago Public Schools.
For almost a year before Mayor Emanuel hired her as CEO—I did mention that she was hired by Rahm, right?—Byrd-Bennett was a “paid consultant” for the Supes Academy.
According to the feds, “Byrd-Bennett steered no-bid contracts worth more than $23 million” to Supes “in exchange for an expectation of hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks.”
Wait, there’s more! “In the late summer or early fall of 2013, Solomon informed Byrd-Bennett that [CPS] wanted to review Solomon’s and Vranas’s emails. Solomon said Vranas planned to use a computer program to delete the emails, and he told Byrd-Bennett to delete her emails as well.”
In June 2013, the Chicago Board of Education—also appointed by the mayor—awarded Supes a no-bid $20.5 million principal-training contract. Supes’s job was to put together principal-training sessions. From what principals tell me, these sessions largely consisted of forcing principals—who had better things to do—to sit in a room and listen to war stories told by various windbags who’d been flown in from other cities. And you wonder why so many principals detest Mayor Emanuel’s educational policies.
