THE HIRING OF XPEDIANT SOLUTIONS:
One of the more questionable actions of former KISD
superintendent, Leonard Merrell, was the hiring of Xpediant
Solutions as the Information
Technology provider for the
district. (It was first called just "Xpediant," but A. D.
Muller, upon learning of their expired name franchise contract
with the State of
Texas, bought it out from under them, so they
had to change to "Xpediant Solutions.")
Under Merrell's watch, the IT situation in the schools
had, in my opinion, moved from bad to worse over the
years.
The previous head of IT disappeared overnight. Rumors as to the
reason abound, and "yelling and shouting" pretty much describe
that episode.
An effort to go through a bidding process was begun to find a new provider, and then it was halted mid-stream, and Wayne Caskey and Scott Wright emerged with an unbelievable IT service provider contract.
Please remember that it appears that almost all that money for
Xpediant and their "contract" workers came from bond funds.
During the 2006 bond election, George Scott discovered and
printed images of KISD computers being used by Xpediant
technicians that held accumulated lewd and obscene music
files that they had collected. The cited computers were located
in a KISD Administration building.
Many millions of dollars later, that group was fired by Superintendent Frailey but not until he had left Xpediant in place for over a year after he arrived.
An accounting of that separation
that appeared in the Houston Chronicle
has since disappeared from the Chronicle's archives!