A few months after Newark Public Schools revealed that third grade reading proficiency hadn’t budged at 19%, the same as the previous year, the school board was asked to vote on a $1.4 million contract for a literacy consultant to help. 

The two-year contract with educator Jamie Walner would address literacy head on. 

Nearly one year later, Walner said her work under the contract never got started. While the Board voted to approve the work, there is no indication the Board was told that the work didn’t actually begin. 

As for the $1.4 million set aside for Walner, the district won’t say where it went. 

The Newark Public Schools spends $1.5 billion a year to educate its 40,000 students, so a $1.4 million contract is a minuscule fraction of the overall budget. But the district has hundreds of consultants, and the Walner application and approval shows how easily big dollar amounts can get earmarked for consultants who may not be experienced or even certified to do the work. 

Walner was not certified in New Jersey to teach, but her proposal involved providing professional development and training to certified teachers and school leaders. Walner apparently personally knew Mary Ann Reilly, the assistant superintendent at the time, who retired last Fall shortly after the contract was approved by the Board. 

Reilly was in charge of all things literacy, but said she stayed out of the decision to hire Walner because she knew Walner. 

Walner’s application received high marks from the employees who rated the proposal–all of whom reported to Reilly. Out of 14 proposals–some of which were from organizations with a long history of positive results in student achievement–Walner’s proposal ranked #2. Hers was among the four of the 14 who were chosen to provide services for Newark Public Schools. 

Among other applicants who ranked worse than Walner and were rejected were providers like Houghton-Mifflin, Pittsburgh University’s Institute for Learning, Educational Testing Services, and Relay Graduate School of Education. 

At $1.4 million, Walner’s contract was double the amount of two of the other winning contracts. This was despite the fact that her application was riddled with basic errors and typos and her firm had been set up only the year before. 

One example from her final submission: “COMPANY NAME or WE recognize that students’ ability to employ a range of strategies to comprehend and analyze texts develops over time through guided instruction and practice.” In another section she proposed to “provide professional development to instructional, supervisory and administrative personnel on site and/or virtually in accordance with Newark’s Strategic plan.” Appended to this sentence is a note to herself that made it into the final application: “Go back and look at plan.”

These types of details from her proposal were obtained through an Open Public Records Act request. The public document attached to the Board’s September 2023 resolution only contained the names and rankings of the 14 proposals, plus the justification for their rankings. The justifications were boilerplate language largely copy and pasted from the proposals. 

When the contract came up for a vote in September 2023, one board member, Crystal Williams, asked for more information about Jamie Walner, whom she said she Googled but didn’t find anything about. 

Williams asked about Walner’s “track record,” adding that “there is no evidence of this person on the Internet…We know nothing because we can’t even look at this company…It just does not add up to me.” 

Responding to Williams’ questions, Reilly came to the podium and explained that Walner and other educators that were part of her firm were very experienced but that because she knew them, she didn’t help pick them. 

“I know every single person, it’s why I have distanced myself from this,” Reilly said that night. “I didn’t read this review, I didn’t select, I didn’t participate in it, but I actually know all of the people who are part of this company,” she said of Walner. 

Reilly retired two months later.

When reached by phone and e-mail, Reilly declined to comment about the contract and would not say if she was consulting for Newark public schools after her retirement from the district. She told NJ Education Report that she didn’t know anything about the cancellation of the grant.

That night in September, the board voted 6 to 1 to approve the Walner contract. Board member Williams was the dissenting vote. Nothing more was ever spoken publicly about Walner after that. 

In a response to an email inquiry, Newark Public Schools spokeswoman Nancy Deering acknowledged the cancellation of the grant: “The district frequently approves multiple vendors for projects to consider potential partnerships during the contract period,” she wrote, “ but not all approved vendors receive funding.” Deering had no comment on the lack of public disclosure.

Walner’s 85-page application suggested a long track record of serving Black and Latino children. She wrote, in reference to NPS’s enrollment, almost entirely Black and Hispanic students of whom 75% live in low-income households, “Jamie’s commitment to fostering inclusivity and equitable learning opportunities is demonstrated through her work with high poverty, linguistic minority, and special education populations…Jamie has gained valuable insights.”

Yet Walner’s last 27 years of employment were spent as a teacher and administrator at New York’s George Fischer Middle School in Carmel Public Schools where students are mostly white and relatively wealthy. (The median household income in Carmel  is $127,230. The median household income in Newark is  $49,688.) 

Carmel is also not a high-performing district. While New York State recently changed assessments so there is no baseline data, GreatSchools comments, “this district has a larger number of schools whose students are making less academic progress than their peers at other schools in the state.”

Before working in Carmel, Walner spent five years in the 1990s teaching in Harlem, whose demographics are closer to Newark’s. 

After retiring from Carmel in June 2022 and obtaining a Business Registration Certificate with the State of New Jersey two months later, Walner worked as a reading coach for third through fifth grade teachers at Newark’s McKinley Elementary School from September 2022-February 2023. Her contract for that work never went before the Board for a vote. She ended up charging the district $46,499 for that work, invoices obtained through OPRA show. State procurement law requires any project above $44,000 to be put out to bid.

Walner’s $1.4 million proposal that was approved promised an increase of reading proficiency levels by 15% in the five schools she would work in this year. 

Her work at McKinley, however, showed a decline in proficiency. At the end of her stint at McKinley, when students took state standardized tests (according to the NJ Department of Education’s database), McKinley student proficiency rates in reading dropped five points, from 30% proficiency to 25% proficiency, below Newark’s district average of 29%. While McKinley’s third and fifth graders scored two points higher than the previous year on state proficiency assessments, fourth-graders dropped 24 points, from 34.7% proficient to 10.6% proficient.

[photo credit] Flickr: Phil Murphy