Dallas Dance
Former Baltimore County Public Schools’ superintendent Dallas Dance plead guilty today to four counts of perjury, and prosecutors are recommending a five-year sentence, most of which would be suspended, meaning he would spend just 18 months in prison.
Maryland State prosectors in January indicted Dance on four counts of perjury. He was accused of taking nearly $150,000 in consulting fees from companies but failing to disclose those payments in sworn statements. The indictment says he also helped one of the companies, SUPES Academy, get a no-bid contract from BCPS. SUPES is a firm that trains education administrators across the country.
The indictment was only for perjury, but the prosecutor’s statement of facts goes into great detail about how SUPES Academy paid Dance consulting fees and then obtained large no-bid contracts with BCPS. In fact, a SUPES official told Dance that “RFP” were his least-favorite letters. RFP means request for proposal and they are used to compare bids so that the most competitive offer can be chosen. A no-bid contract means there is no RFP and companies don’t have to compete for a contract.
Prosecutors also said in their statement that Dance told SUPES he would fire an employee who had turned down a contract with the education firm. (Page 2 of the statement.)
He is also accused of setting up an LLC, called Deliberate Excellence, to take the consulting payments but then signing disclosure documents that said he received no money from the LLC — despite getting tens of thousands of dollars from it, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors say Dance asked SUPES Academy to deny the BCPS ethics panel the documentation it was requesting, because then it would be obvious he had lied about his consulting fees and “he might as well kill himself.” He told them the ethics panel did not have subpoena power, and SUPES did not provide the documentation.
Each of the four counts of perjury could have gotten him 10 years in prison, for a total of 40 years.
Interim Superintendent Verletta White also failed to disclose some consulting fees, an investigation by The Baltimore Sun found, and she has since agreed to travel and outside-work restrictions. She said Dance encouraged her to do the consulting work and that her failure to disclose it was an honest mistake. Her work was with a firm unrelated to those in the Dance indictment.
Page 7 of Dance prosecutors statement provides excerpts from BCPS ethics form, which Verletta White also signed repeatedly for approximately 3,4 or 5 years. She claimed it was an honest mistake.
The BCPS Ethics Panel said the form was confusing and recommended that White not be held accountable.
Recently The BCPS Board Chair (I’ve forgotten his name.) publicly reported that it was not the Board’s function to investigate the purgery matters. That was his justification to use the Ethics Panel report as an excuse to vote not to pursue White’s purgery issues any further. More to come…
I hope to be able to send a copy of Page 7 later.
Too much too young.