The Consulting BOOM - schools use outside help for their improvements

School Administrator, Feb, 1998 by Donna Harringion-Lueker

School districts turn to outside help for reasons of economics, accountability and expertise

Like other small school districts, the Manville, N.J., Public Schools struggled with its school technology plan. "The district knew it wanted to secure technology for its schools, but it didn't know how to go about it. We were a small district, and we didn't have a technology expert on staff," recalls Dianne Mayberry-Hatt, former principal at Manville's Alexander Batcho Intermediate School.

After a districtwide committee met for nearly two years without developing an acceptable plan, the district's decision to hire an outside consultant finally broke the impasse. "She presented a grand plan for $1.5 million, which we couldn't afford," says Mayberry-Hatt. "But we liked the philosophy, and we worked out a plan to phase in technology one grade at a time.

School districts like Manville with its 1,300 students aren't the only ones turning to outside experts for help.

In Iowa, school districts are scurrying to adhere to a statewide initiative to network every school and provide on-line access in every building, says James Flikkema, director of technology for the Sioux City, Iowa, Community School District. That mandate, though, might as well be called the "Full-Time Consultants Employment Bill," he wryly observes.

"Ninety-nine percent of school districts don't have that expertise," says Flikkema, the district's first full-time technology director.

A Lucrative Market

Nationwide, the consulting industry as a whole is booming. According to Tom Rodenhauser, editor of Consultants News, a newsletter that tracks the $62-billion-a-year industry, the use of consultants will grow 13 percent overall this year. (Just four years ago, the industry dispensed $17 billion in advice.) In some of the hottest sectors--information technology, for example--Rodenhauser expects the increases to rocket along at twice that rate.

No figures exist to show how much of that outlay comes from school district budgets, and Rodenhauser and others are quick to point out that school systems undoubtedly account for only a sliver of the total expenditures. But as interviews, newspaper reports and anecdotal evidence suggest, schools seem to be increasingly following the business world's lead and buying expertise when they need it. And consultants in turn are keeping close watch on a potentially lucrative market--a market that includes more than the traditional superintendent searches, workshops on classroom discipline and the latest curriculum trend or help with finances:

* School officials in Jefferson County, Colo., last year hired a consultant to help the district find corporate sponsors to underwrite the cost of building two new stadiums for school sports. Among the deals the district has since struck: Pepsi has pledged $2.1 million in return for the exclusive right to provide the district with soft drinks, and US West has given $2 million to have a stadium named after the company.

"We hired a consultant initially because we had no idea how to go about effecting these relationships with private industry," says Mike Mitchell, the district's director of purchasing and corporate sponsorships.

* The Oakland, Calif., school board a year ago hired a public relations consultant to help it respond to questions about its controversial Ebonics proposal. The district was under "massive media scrutiny," says Crystal Rockwood, Oakland's current director of communications. (Rockwood joined the district last summer.) "It was completely inundated with calls, faxes, e-mail and media requests." The consultant was paid $100,000 for the work on Ebonics and other projects with the district.

* The Florida Times-Union paid School-Match, a consulting and database management firm in Westerville, Ohio, $125,000 to conduct a systemwide audit in 1996-97 of the effectiveness of the Duval County school system. Among the study's findings: Duval County's schools were "too big to be educationally effective," according to the newspaper, and schools needed to hold students to higher grading standards.

* Consultants with BDM Federal of McLean, Va., will provide the Dayton, Ohio, Public Schools this year with information management services at a cost of $20 million to the district. According to The Education Industry Report, an industry newsletter, the consulting group plans to aggressively market its services to other K-12 school systems as well.

* In the Carlsbad, Calif., Unified School District, Superintendent Cheryl Ernst credits the decision to work with a political consultant for voter approval last year of a $26.5 million bond by an 85.6 percent majority--the fifth-largest majority in the history of bond elections in the state. In California, where bonds must pass by a two-thirds majority, political consultants, who offer advice about campaign tactics, are fast becoming staples.

Some of the nation's biggest business consulting firms also have begun courting schools. "Schools are increasingly being asked to streamline the student data they collect, but most don't have the expertise for this kind of sophisticated information management," says John McLaughlin, president of the Education Industry Group, a publishing and consulting firm. Firms such as Arthur Andersen and Coopers and Lybrand have that expertise, though, and are interested in working with schools, McLaughlin says.