Broward School Board members decided Tuesday to terminate a $2.6 million office rental lease that turned into an expensive public relations blunder.
School Board members said Tuesday they made a bad decision — and got bad information from district staff — when they approved a five-year lease agreement on June 17 with Handy, or Helping Advance and Nurture the Development of Youth. The rental property was intended to serve facilities staff who had been working in an old district office complex that was sold.
Board members said they’ve been flooded with criticism since the South Florida Sun Sentinel published an article Oct. 24, questioning why the district was spending more than $500,000 a year to rent space for a small number of employees when the district is facing severe budget cuts, has plenty of space in underenrolled schools and wasn’t even required to vacate the current office building until May 2027.
The district also has been trying to reduce its vacant space to cut down on charter schools known as “Schools of Hope” from co-locating on school campuses.
“The board members up here, we are being held accountable in the court of public opinion,” Board member Sarah Leonardi said at the meeting. “We’re getting the phone calls, and we are embarrassed by our vote on this.”
The district has already paid about $275,000 in lease payments and a deposit, as well as $88,000 on technology upgrades to the building. But School Board members still hope to save more than $2 million over the next five years by getting out of the lease.
“We need to cut our losses right now,” Board member Maura Bulman, who brought the agenda item to the board, said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We have to be very vigilant. We are responsible to the taxpayers, to the people of Broward County, and we have a fiduciary duty to them.
“This is something maybe we could have gotten away with in the past, but this year in this situation right now, we cannot do this,” Bulman said.
The Handy building at 2101 N. Andrews Ave. in Wilton Manors, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025. (Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
Whether the district can easily terminate the lease remains to be seen.
A district lawyer told School Board members Tuesday the contract, which was prepared by Handy, is an “onerous one-sided agreement” that benefited the nonprofit a lot more than the district, which had planned to move 75 facilities staff into Handy’s newly acquired headquarters in Wilton Manors.
The School Board is using a contract provision that allows the district to terminate the five-year agreement if funds are not allocated in the yearly budget. The $510,000 rental expense for the 2025-26 year has been allocated in the district’s capital budget, which raised questions about whether the district had to wait a year to get out. Still, the School Board voted Tuesday “to deallocate the remaining unused funds” for the agreement in hopes of getting out now.
But there’s no guarantee Handy will accept the lease termination. Kirk Brown, Handy’s CEO, couldn’t be reached, despite repeated attempts. No one from Handy attended Tuesday’s meeting.
“Are you confident that this is a viable way for us to terminate this contract with any potential financial liability from the landlord?” School Board member Adam Cervera asked district lawyers.
“There’s no way that we can prohibit any kind of litigation against the School Board, if that’s what the question is,” district lawyer Tom Cooney responded. “This is the most viable mechanism to terminate the contract.”
Cooney said he had reviewed the lease earlier this year and emailed employees with the district’s real estate department to alert them of provisions that weren’t favorable to the district. But Cooney said no one from the department responded. Chief Operations Officer Wanda Paul told the board she would look into why that happened.
Cooney also said rental contracts are generally more beneficial to the landlord than the tenant.
“The provisions in there are perfectly legal,” Cooney said.
Board member Nora Rupert said, “This has been a debacle from the get-go. The other party created the document, so I’m incredibly disappointed that the contract still went forward, even though our attorneys on record stated it was not in our best interest.”
Cervera said he also was angry about inaccurate information in a June 17 executive summary, which said either party could terminate the contract with a certain days’ notice. The summary erroneously listed both 90 days and 180 days, but it turns out neither was accurate. The only provision that makes it relatively easy for the district to get out is if the School Board fails to appropriate money on a yearly basis.
“The summary in all regards could not have been more wrong,” Cervera told the board. “This is unacceptable.”
Board member Allen Zeman argued the board needs to accept responsibility for approving the contract.
“We could have asked more questions, and I’m just not going to point fingers at the staff and say, ‘It’s the lawyers’ fault. It’s the real estate department’s fault. It’s our chief operating officer’s fault,” Zeman said. “We blew this.”
“This is a black eye,” Zeman said. ” Let’s take it as a black eye. Let’s heal. Let’s fix the things we need to fix.”
Deputy Superintendent Angela Fulton, who was filling in Tuesday for Superintendent Howard Hepburn, told board members the district would conduct an “after-action” report to explain how this happened and the lessons learned.