News of a boondoggle recently came to light involving OPRF Superintendent Greg Johnson and Assistant Superintendent for Business Services Tony Arbogast. They spent nearly $5,000 taxpayer educational dollars and three paid workdays to present at a learning spaces industry trade show and conference in Portland, Oregon, in October 2024, according to an email from Communications Director Karin Sullivan.
At the time, OPRF already had a complete master facility plan in place and had a highly paid, presumably competent architectural firm (FGM Architects) and construction management firm (Gilbane) under contract. Both firms were already working on Project 2 of the Imagine Plan. Gilbane was a sponsor of the conference, and FGM Architects hosted a dinner for Johnson and Arbogast, according to Sullivan.
Johnson and Arbogast were essentially consultants acting on behalf of FGM Architects and Gilbane at district taxpayers’ expense. Johnson’s and Arbogast’s participation in the panel presentation with Alyson Sternquist, FGM architect overseeing the building of the Imagine Plan, along with a leader of the Imagine Group and Foundation was of zero benefit to OPRF students and taxpayers.
Their presentation was a how-to guide, complete with propaganda messaging, on creating a master facility plan without a budget, embedding it with an influential special-interest group’s pet project, in this case an oversized pool, and bypassing best practices and voters to build it.
Eighteen months earlier, Johnson proposed to the OPRF school board the unethical, against-best-practices, bypass-of-voters issuance of debt certificates to fund Project 2, the pool/PE addition with a total price tag of $135 million (construction, geothermal and borrowing fees). Voters defeated the board’s two previous attempts to build an oversized pool.
Based on school board President Audrey Williams-Lee’s recent email reply, two boards (2024 and current) were/are aware of the trip and think there was nothing unethical, no breach of public trust, with Johnson and Arbogast using paid workdays and taxpayer dollars to attend a trade show and conference in Oregon to promote the Imagine Group/Plan and its unethical funding to school construction management and architectural firms and any school administrators in attendance.
It was a boondoggle, and no amount of spin or doubling down from Williams-Lee changes that. Some school boards could consider this abuse of taxpayer dollars a fireable offense.
Johnson’s and Arbogast’s time and our taxpayer dollars would have appropriately been spent attending a conference focused on improving academic outcomes for all students, as well as one reviewing best practices in public finance. The latter would serve as a reminder to them (and the board) that bypassing voters on funding major capital projects is unethical and not a best practice.
Monica Sheehan
Oak Park
Sources:
1) Communications Director Karin Sullivan’s email reply to questions regarding the conference: https://www.facebook.com/groups/D200PragmaticSolutions
2) LearningSPACES2024 conference link listing Gilbane as sponsor:
https://learningscapes2024.a4le.org
3) FOIA of Superintendent Greg Johnson’s and Asst. Superintendent for Business Services Tony Arbogast’s travel and conference receipts:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/D200PragmaticSolutions
4) Link of conference presentation overview and pdf:
https://learningscapes2024.a4le.org/IMAGINE-OPRF.html
5) April 27, 2023, board meeting agenda/memo from Superintendent Greg Johnson proposing the issuance of debt certificates, bypassing voters to fund Project 2:
https://oprfhsorg.community.highbond.com/Portal/MeetingInformation.aspx?Org=Cal&Id=142
6) Board President Audrey Williams-Lee’s email reply regarding the conference: