In March the voters of Durham, Lee and Madbury approved a warrant article authorizing the expenditure of up to $420,000 for technology infrastructure improvement throughout the Oyster River School District's facilities. Accordingly, in early May the District released an RFP for the replacement of network switches valued at more than $300,000. In doing so, the District is required to follow its own bidding requirements (policy code DJ) which mandate: - at least three competitive bids - bids shall be advertised appropriately Furthermore, the School Board is required to oversee the distribution of funds (policy code DA): - the board will be vigilant in fulfilling its responsibility to see that these funds are used wisely for achievement of the purposes to which they are allocated School administrators violated the bidding requirements and ultimately awarded the contract to a vendor who will provide an lesser product at a higher price. Once the School Board was made aware of these developments, they apparently failed to consider the Administration's actions as urgent and did not convene, publicly, to address how to handle the obvious administrative malfeasance. Furthermore, there has been an historical pattern of policy negligence relating to septic systems, Aramark contracts, and school laptops. All details can be found at http://oysterrivercommunity.blogspot.com We, the undersigned, agree that this is not a tolerable practice and look for accountability and enforcement of the policy. The aforementioned procurement process should be publicly available on the ORCSD web site. Going forward, we expect to have a status (e.g. bid description,open, pending review, closed) on all bids made publicly available on the ORCSD web site.