{"id":34206,"date":"2025-11-05T12:09:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T12:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/34206\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T12:09:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T12:09:07","slug":"we-blew-this-broward-school-board-terminates-2-6-million-office-rental-lease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/34206\/","title":{"rendered":"‘We blew this.” Broward School Board terminates $2.6 million office rental lease"},"content":{"rendered":"

Broward School Board members decided Tuesday to terminate a $2.6 million office rental lease that turned into an expensive public relations blunder.<\/p>\n

School Board members said Tuesday they made a bad decision \u2014 and got bad information from district staff \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Board members said they\u2019ve been flooded with criticism since the South Florida Sun Sentinel published an article Oct. 24<\/a>, 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\u2019t even required to vacate the current office building until May 2027.<\/p>\n

The district also has been trying to reduce its vacant space to cut down on charter schools known as \u201cSchools of Hope\u201d<\/a> from co-locating on school campuses.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe board members up here, we are being held accountable in the court of public opinion,\u201d Board member Sarah Leonardi said at the meeting. \u201cWe\u2019re getting the phone calls, and we are embarrassed by our vote on this.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to cut our losses right now,\u201d Board member Maura Bulman, who brought the agenda item<\/a> to the board, said at Tuesday\u2019s meeting. \u201cWe 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is something maybe we could have gotten away with in the past, but this year in this situation right now, we cannot do this,\u201d Bulman said.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Handy building at 2101 N. Andrews Ave. in Wilton Manors, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025. (Mike Stocker\/South Florida Sun Sentinel)<\/p>\n

Whether the district can easily terminate the lease remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

A district lawyer told School Board members Tuesday the contract, which was prepared by Handy, is an \u201conerous one-sided agreement\u201d that benefited the nonprofit a lot more than the district, which had planned to move 75 facilities staff into Handy\u2019s newly acquired headquarters in Wilton Manors.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s capital budget, which raised questions about whether the district had to wait a year to get out. Still, the School Board voted Tuesday \u201cto deallocate the remaining unused funds\u201d for the agreement in hopes of getting out now.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s no guarantee Handy will accept the lease termination. Kirk Brown, Handy\u2019s CEO, couldn\u2019t be reached, despite repeated attempts. No one from Handy attended Tuesday\u2019s meeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you confident that this is a viable way for us to terminate this contract with any potential financial liability from the landlord?\u201d School Board member Adam Cervera asked district lawyers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no way that we can prohibit any kind of litigation against the School Board, if that\u2019s what the question is,\u201d district lawyer Tom Cooney responded. \u201cThis is the most viable mechanism to terminate the contract.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cooney said he had reviewed the lease earlier this year and emailed employees with the district\u2019s real estate department to alert them of provisions that weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Cooney also said rental contracts are generally more beneficial to the landlord than the tenant.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe provisions in there are perfectly legal,\u201d Cooney said.<\/p>\n

Board member Nora Rupert said, \u201cThis has been a debacle from the get-go. The other party created the document, so I\u2019m incredibly disappointed that the contract still went forward, even though our attorneys on record stated it was not in our best interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe summary in all regards could not have been more wrong,\u201d Cervera told the board. \u201cThis is unacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Board member Allen Zeman argued the board needs to accept responsibility for approving the contract.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could have asked more questions, and I\u2019m just not going to point fingers at the staff and say, \u2018It\u2019s the lawyers\u2019 fault. It\u2019s the real estate department\u2019s fault. It\u2019s our chief operating officer\u2019s fault,\u201d Zeman said. \u201cWe blew this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a black eye,\u201d Zeman said. \u201d Let\u2019s take it as a black eye. Let\u2019s heal. Let\u2019s fix the things we need to fix.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deputy Superintendent Angela Fulton, who was filling in Tuesday for Superintendent Howard Hepburn, told board members the district would conduct an \u201cafter-action\u201d report to explain how this happened and the lessons learned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Broward School Board members decided Tuesday to terminate a $2.6 million office rental lease that turned into an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34207,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[113,249,251,250,114,115,109],"class_list":{"0":"post-34206","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fort-lauderdale","8":"tag-education","9":"tag-fort-lauderdale","10":"tag-fort-lauderdale-headlines","11":"tag-fort-lauderdale-news","12":"tag-latest-headlines","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-social"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}