Let’s recap a few Sun Sentinel headlines of recent weeks, all on one subject.
“‘Total mistake’: $2.6 million Broward schools office rental raises questions”
“‘We blew this’: Broward school board terminates $2.6 million office rental lease”
“Broward schools bungle effort to find company to oversee construction”
“‘A five-alarm fire’: Broward schools to take emergency action on construction”
It all adds up to another deeply disturbing picture of systemic failures in the management of the Broward County school district, the nation’s sixth-largest.
A public inquisition
A series of staff-level screw-ups has created a climate of suspicion among board members toward staff members that is impossible to ignore. A board that doubts its own staff can no longer function effectively. An eight-hour-plus meeting on Dec. 16 was more like an inquisition — and rightly so.
Superintendent of Schools Howard Hepburn in Broward County, pictured on Aug. 26, 2025. (Carline Jean/Sun Sentinel)
Strong, decisive action is needed from Superintendent Howard Hepburn in early 2026, lest Hepburn find himself in political trouble at the start of a year when five of nine board seats will go before voters.
“I would just say that changes clearly need to be made,” School Board member Maura McCarthy Bulman told the Editorial Board.
That suggests personnel changes, and the most vulnerable staff member is the school district’s chief operations officer, Wanda Paul, who’s at the center of two recent controversies.
It appears inevitable that Hepburn must fire Paul or demote her as a way of acknowledging that the board is in charge, not the staff.
Broward schools
Wanda Paul is chief operations officer for Broward schools.
To summarize, the district staff botched a $2.6 million lease of a Wilton Manors office building, which forced the board to break a landlord-friendly lease. The landlord, HANDY (an acronym for Helping Advance and Nurture Development of Youth), is now suing the district.
An infuriated board
Then, a flawed procurement to extend oversight of the district’s $125 million school construction program — its costliest and its most controversial area — was not presented to the School Board for approval. That infuriated members who last April had warned of problems with the contract.
An audit report found that district staff selected vendors without ensuring they were qualified and engaged in a rushed process that led to missteps, the Sun Sentinel’s Scott Travis reported.
As a result, the board was asked to throw out all three bids and negotiate an emergency contract to extend the contract with the current vendor, AECOM, which expires on Jan. 17, 2026.
“We deserve better,” School Board member Dr. Jeff Holness said.
Holness described a “de facto mini-School Board among staff” and publicly chided assistant general counsel Tom Cooney for keeping the board in the dark.
“With all due respect, sir, you don’t work for the COO (Wanda Paul), you work for the School Board,” Holness told the lawyer.
Board member Allen Zeman, who described the staff’s work as a “five-alarm fire,” said it’s urgent to clarify that the general counsel works for the School Board, not its staff. That’s another sign of the lack of trust.
If it sounds familiar …
The latest controversy was serious enough. What makes it worse is that something similar has happened before.
In 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended four School Board members in a power grab he said was justified by a critical grand jury report that found that the board mismanaged an expensive voter-approved bond program to pay for school renovations and safety upgrades.
Does Hepburn fully grasp the degree of seriousness here?
We’ll know when he presents a plan of action in the new year.
On Local 10’s This Week in South Florida on Dec. 21, Hepburn said he’s still reviewing a staff audit and other details to determine if “there’s any intentional or purposeful things that were not done, or simply a level of ignorance.”
(A new general counsel, hired from Fort Myers, will soon inherit this morass, and district auditor Dave Rhodes has announced that he will retire March 2 — creating more instability.)
“We have to get this right,” Hepburn told WPLG reporter Glenna Milberg.
He is right about that, and he does not have much time. This School Board is completely out of patience — and hopefully the taxpayers of Broward County are not far behind.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.