Broward schools lease referred to county inspector general

A botched $2.6 million Broward schools office rental lease could face new scrutiny from the county’s top watchdog.

The Broward school district contacted the county’s Office of Inspector General requesting a review of a canceled lease agreement, School Board Chairwoman Sarah Leonardi confirmed to the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Tuesday.

According to the request, drafted by Leonardi and sent earlier this month by Chief Auditor Mark Magli, the district is seeking to find out if school district staff “engaged in gross misconduct by negotiating and entering” into the lease “to house staff while we have excess capacity in our schools and also considering that the leased space would not have adequately accommodated staff we were looking to relocate there.”

The school district had the lease agreement with the nonprofit group Handy, which stands for Helping Advance & Nurture the Development of Youth.

The School Board agreed to Leonardi’s request at a March 3 meeting. The board also asked the inspector general’s office to expand the possible scope to include district Chief Operating Officer Wanda Paul’s brief appointment to the Handy board of directors. Paul and a district official told the Sun Sentinel in November that while she was appointed to the board and initially accepted, she never actually joined the board.

Paul submitted her resignation letter under pressure on Dec. 29, stating her last day would be June 5. The resignation came the same day School Board member Adam Cervera publicly called for Paul’s resignation in social media posts.

Shortly after her resignation, Superintendent Howard Hepburn placed her under a personnel investigation for an unrelated matter, her handling of the solicitation for a manager to oversee Broward schools construction. That investigation is still ongoing, district spokesman John Sullivan said Monday.

Paul has been assigned to the district’s emergency management department pending the outcome of the district’s personnel investigation, Michael Gregory, the district’s chief of safety and security, told the School Board on March 3.

Paul could not be reached for comment, despite attempts this week by phone and email.

The decision to refer the Handy lease to the inspector general followed a meeting between Leonardi and the county’s inspector general, Carol “Jodie” Breece, Leonardi said at the March 3 meeting.

“It was brought to my attention that perhaps the board was wanting the Handy lease issue to be referred to the OIG, but that it was not,” Leonardi said at the meeting.

Breece has previously stated she can’t comment on, or confirm the existence of, ongoing investigations. In an email response to the Sun Sentinel, she said her office could not comment about whether it planned to investigate the Handy matter.

“I told Ms. Leonardi that the OIG had only received a couple of ‘referrals’ from the School Board since January 2025, and that the Handy building lease was not one of them,” Breece told the Sun Sentinel.

The School Board agreed on June 17, 2025, to enter into a five-year $2.6 million lease with Handy to house facilities staff who had been working in a district office building that had recently been sold.

The Sun Sentinel published a news article in October, calling attention to the school district’s plan to pay for an outside lease when it had plenty of space in numerous underenrolled schools, including some the district was planning to close entirely.

The Sun Sentinel also discovered that the agenda information the School Board used to approve the item had several errors, including incorrectly stating the district could terminate the lease with several months’ notice.

The Sun Sentinel later obtained emails showing the space was too small for the 138 people the district planned to house in the building. The district needed 30 more workstations and 63 more parking spaces, according to an email from a project manager to his supervisor. A district lawyer also had warned administrators that the terms of the lease were unfavorable to the district, but the district proceeded without renegotiating, emails showed.

Board members told the Sun Sentinel in October they had made a mistake by approving the lease and agreed on Nov. 4 to terminate the lease. They used a provision in the lease that allowed the district to cancel if the district fails to allocate the expense in its annual budget. Although the money had been allocated, the board agreed at the meeting to deallocate it.

The board’s action prompted a lawsuit from Handy, which alleged a breach of contract. The district later settled the lawsuit, agreeing to pay Handy $270,000.

The board’s referral to the inspector general also includes another issue that the board has only recently discussed publicly.

Three months after the June 2025 approval of the lease, Paul, who was listed as the district’s main contact on the Handy deal, got appointed to Handy’s board of directors, according to a Sept. 24 email that Handy CEO Kirk Brown sent to Paul’s work email.

“It is with great excitement that we officially welcome you to the HANDY Board of Directors, following today’s approval by our Board,” Brown wrote to Paul.

The next day, Paul sent an email to a Handy board member who had been assigned as her mentor, saying, “I am honored to be a member of the Board of Directors for Handy.”

The Sun Sentinel asked Paul outside a School Board meeting on Nov. 18 whether she was still on the board, and she responded that she never was on it. She said she went through the initial vetting process but concluded she didn’t have enough time to serve.

District spokesman John Sullivan told the Sun Sentinel in November, “Though the offer to serve on the Board of Directors was initially accepted, the employee never completed the requirements to officially join and did not participate or serve in any capacity.”

Board member Allen Zeman told the board on March 3 that he finds it problematic that Paul was offered and initially accepted the seat on the Handy board.

“Government employees are not allowed to accept such things,” Zeman told the board. “I feel like the Handy lease has many dimensions, none of them good, but the one where Handy then offered one of our employees a seat on the board, and that seat was accepted … I think it’s an important part to add.”