It was a day of celebration as Riverside Elementary in Coral Springs unveiled a much-anticipated renovation to the school library, showing it was finally getting some return from the decade-old $800 million bond referendum.
The media center now had new paint, flooring and furniture. Colorful tables and cushioned chairs replaced the old wooden furniture that had been there since the school opened in 1987. The renovation was part of an overall $2 million investment in the school that also included restroom renovations, air conditioning and roofing upgrades and a new fire alarm system.
“Media centers are often the heart of a school and serve as a hub for learning,” School Board Chairwoman Debbi Hixon said at the Dec. 12 ribbon-cutting. “Within these walls, incredible, exceptional, educational experiences will be able to take place.”
But Hixon and others attending the Riverside event told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that as excited as they were about the renovation, it highlighted a problem. A modest renovation that was planned to cost $1 million and be complete in 2020 cost twice that and forced students and parents to wait for years.
“There were a lot of questions from parents,” said Lisa Ivanik-Geller, the longtime media specialist at Riverside. “It’s been many years since they said it was going to happen. But it finally did.”
It’s a story that’s far from unique to Riverside. Broward school officials poorly managed the $800 million bond referendum that voters approved in November 2014 to provide much-needed upgrades to schools, forcing many students to learn in leaky, moldy and uncomfortable conditions for years, according to audits, investigations and a statewide grand jury report.
While the bond program has produced some nice libraries, culinary labs, weight rooms, art and music rooms and classroom additions, those have often been overshadowed by years of long delays in addressing the basics, such as roofs, air conditioners and perennial flooding.
Broward schools are now planning to end the program next year, while still finishing any work that was promised.
“I think it’s pretty clear the program didn’t work the way it was supposed to,” said School Board member Sarah Leonardi, who was first elected in 2020. “Obviously, it has done a severe amount of damage to public trust, and I think it’s going to take a long time to repair.”
The district’s bond-related work is known as the SMART program for its focus on safety, music and art, athletics, renovations and technology. It was supposed to be completed by 2021 at a cost of $1 billion (including some non-bond funding). Instead, the program has now reached the 10-year mark with less than half the work complete and a price tag of $1.7 billion, a 70% increase.
Even when the work is finally complete, the district will have still have billions of capital needs, officials said.
“We overpromised and underdelivered, we poorly planned how to do the work and we poorly executed the poorly planned work,” School Board member Allen Zeman, who was elected in 2022, told the Sun Sentinel. “All three of those made it end up with the unfortunate fact the SMART bond was anything but smart.”
The SMART program was the focus of a statewide grand jury report, completed in 2021 and released in 2022, that concluded school administrators had mismanaged the program and misled the public for years.
The same grand jury indicted three school district administrators, including then-Superintendent Robert Runcie, who was charged with perjury. He was accused of lying not about the substance of the bond but whether he was prepped about a technology contract that was partially bond funded. He has pleaded not guilty, and his case is set for trial in June. He could not be reached for comment, despite attempts by phone.
Issues with the bond program also led the grand jury to recommend that Gov. Ron DeSantis remove Runcie’s allies on the School Board. DeSantis removed four board members and replaced them in August 2022.
The state Department of Education forced Runcie’s successor, Vickie Cartwright, to fire three administrators named negatively in the report. The School Board later fired Cartwright, in part due to what some board members felt was a lack of urgency to fix issues identified by the grand jury. (Cartwright’s firing later was rescinded, and she agreed to a mutual separation from the district.)
Now many in the school district want the stench of the SMART program gone. They’ve set an official end date for the program of Oct. 31, 2025, even though they acknowledge the work won’t all be finished by then. The unfinished projects will just move over to the district’s regular capital budget.
Zeman, who asked the School Board in May 2023 to set the completion date, told the Sun Sentinel recently that imposing a deadline is getting better results.
“We’ve had some systemic improvements,” he said. “It used to take 12 months on average to get a change order approved. Now it’s being done in 10 working days.”
Howard Hepburn, who started as superintendent in April, said his staff is working hard to get bond projects finished.
He has made what many see as an overly aggressive prediction that all but 25 of the 172 projects now under construction will be complete by Oct. 31. The remaining 25 are scheduled to be finished in 2026.
“We’re an administration of high expectations,” Hepburn told the Sun Sentinel. “We know the impact of what we do every day, how it impacts our students and impacts our learning environments. We’re trying to close out 10 to 12 projects per month, minimum.”
That’s a completion rate the school district has yet to come anywhere close to achieving. A Sun Sentinel analysis of Bond Oversight Reports from the past two years show that the district has closed out an average of 3.5 schools per month. The most recent report shows that for the months of July through September, the district finished five new projects, an average of 1.7 per month.
“Based on that analysis, it doesn’t look good. They’ve got to really step up,” Stephen Hillberg, an engineer who chairs the Bond Oversight Committee, told the Sun Sentinel.
Kimberly Burke-Mohorne, who chairs the Facilities Task Force, another district oversight committee, responded “absolutely not,” when asked whether it was realistic for the district to finish 147 projects in less than a year.
School Board member Nora Rupert, whose northeast district includes many projects that are still waiting to be finished, said, “Obviously it’s not going to get done by October.” While she voted last year to support the Oct. 31, 2025, deadline, she called the decision to move unfinished projects from the SMART bond budget to the regular capital budget a “shell game.”
Rupert is the only current School Board member who was on the board when the bond passed in 2014. However, the grand jury didn’t recommend she be removed, saying she had “diligently attempted to hold the superintendent and the rest of the district accountable.”
Hixon, who was first elected in 2020, said the decision to end the program next year is a good one. The $800 million bond money ran out two years ago, so the district is already using other funds to pay for these projects. The district will no longer pay for a program manager, a function now handled by the consulting firm AECOM. She said it’s time to move on from the SMART program.
“We won’t be stuck in the whole bond place when that’s not where the funds are coming from anymore,” she said. “We’ve still committed to finishing the projects.”
The school district’s bond fatigue is a far cry from a decade ago when Runcie campaigned to put the bond referendum on the November 2014 ballot and to sell it to the public.
The district had a long history of problems in its facilities department outlined by previous grand juries, and two School Board members had been arrested on ethics and corruption issues in 2009 and 2010. One pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges, while another was convicted of a state charge of misconduct in office.
In a news conference in 2014, Runcie said the problems were in the past.
“This is a different School Board,” Runcie said at the time. “Over the past 2 ½ years, this school district and administration have worked hard to show our commitment to spend taxpayer dollars responsibly and continue to build and restore public trust and confidence in us.”
What was not widely known at that time was that the district made a number of key blunders that year that it struggled to overcome.
Instead of focusing the bond program on the oldest schools with the most dire needs, the district spread the program out countywide to improve its chance of passing, the grand jury report said.
It resulted in newer schools like Cypress Bay in Weston and Falcon Cove Middle in Weston getting new buildings to relieve crowding, while numerous older schools got less visible improvements, like roofs and air conditioners.
Instead of fully using a professional firm to survey schools to assess needs, the district decided to save money by using its own staff, many of whom lacked the skills or training to assess the condition of schools, the statewide grand jury found.
The needs assessment also grossly underestimated the cost of roofs, putting them at $6 to $8 per square foot, about half of what the district had paid seven years prior.
“It is difficult for us to overstate the ridiculousness of this amount,” the grand jury report stated.
“That needs assessment just got everyone off on the wrong foot,” Bob Nave, senior vice president for Florida TaxWatch, a government accountability group, said in a recent interview.
TaxWatch provided quarterly feedback to the Bond Oversight Committee from 2015 until it dropped out earlier this year, citing a lack of funding.
The 2018 tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland brought intense scrutiny on the district, including the bond program. Media reports, including one published in The Hill based on the research of a high school journalist, revealed that the district was far behind on promised safety projects, including single points of entry to control visitor access to schools and fire alarm systems.
Shortly after taking office in 2019, DeSantis commissioned a grand jury to look at safety issues as well as how districts managed voter-approved bonds. Broward quickly became the primary focus.
“This is not normal. BCPS is not the first local school district to undertake a construction project of this scale. In fact, all three school districts in South Florida are currently involved in similar projects,” but without similar issues, the grand jury report stated.
Since the grand jury report was released in 2022, the district has had three permanent and two temporary superintendents. There has been progress, district officials and observers said. The district has made changes to its inspections department that enabled reviews to be completed faster. The School Board now allows the superintendent to approve smaller change orders instead of them having to get on a board agenda.
Some delays produced better results, school officials say. Northeast High in Oakland Park was only set to get a renovation, but after community pressure, the School Board approved a new classroom building. Stranahan High in Fort Lauderdale is getting a cafeteria that wasn’t planned. C. Robert Markham Elementary in Deerfield Beach is being rebuilt instead of just renovated.
Rickards Middle in Oakland Park is also being rebuilt but that’s due to a major roof collapse related to a structural failure when the school was built in the late 1960s.
Zeman said the upgrades have resulted in the public getting 18% more in scope than what they approved. However, the cost increase has been about 70%.
School Board members are now pondering the idea of asking voters for another bond in the future. They said they’re correcting mistakes from the past. They’ve enlisted a firm to conduct the thorough assessments of school conditions that should have been done in 2014. They’ve also entered into contracts with companies to assess roofs and structural conditions.
Zeman said he wants to “beg forgiveness” from the public and ask them to give the district another chance, estimating there are still $5 billion to $6 billion in capital needs in the district. He said the district’s recent A grade is already helping to restore confidence.
“I think the public will be convinced of the overwhelming need to build great schools, and we can point to systemic improvements we’ve made,” Zeman told the Sun Sentinel.
He said the district should have the needed data to go to voters as soon as 2026, although he doesn’t know if other decision-makers will be ready that soon.
Hixon said the district still has a lot of work to do to ensure before it can consider another bond referendum. She noted the district is in a multiyear effort to close or repurpose schools, which could affect what type of renovations are needed.
“I think we would have to finish out all the (2014 bond) projects that were supposed to be done and show with different leadership, there’s a commitment to doing it right,” she said. “I would say it would be a few years before we could do that.”