After questioning why the district bought so many reading tutorials from a single company, Davis purchasing director Rick Ashby started looking into the vendor and its prices. He discovered the vendor was overcharging the district, in at least one case charging nearly 90 percent more per text than the district would have had to pay if it had gotten the books elsewhere, according to a spending analysis The Tribune obtained through a records request under the Utah Government Records Access and Management Act.
Soon thereafter, investigators were notified and Susan G. Ross, the person in charge of those contracts, retired.
A federal indictment against Susan Ross and her husband, John D. Ross, now has alleged most of the money didn't go to that vendor - it went to a company the Layton couple owned that no one at the district had heard of. The Rosses have pleaded not guilty to 47 counts of theft, fraud, copyright infringement and money laundering. A trial on charges they stole $4.3 million from the Davis district is set for February.
For decades, Susan Ross oversaw the district's federal programs, including Title I programs at schools with lots of low-income kids. A company called Research & Development Consultants had for years been the sole source of many of the program's reading tutorials. John Ross worked as the district's federal grant specialist starting in 2000.
On Dec. 3, 2004, Ashby asked Susan Ross to justify her decision to buy from a single source.
"Attached is a copy of your letter of justification dated Jan. 16, 2001. Please review the letter carefully and provide a detailed response," Ashby's request said. "Since the marketplace is dynamic, it is not uncommon for new products, services . . . to enter the market since the last review was made."
A response from R&D Consultants rehashed the 2001 justification, which was itself an updated memo from 1995. It said R&D Consultants was the only company in the nation selling the "Programmed Tutorial Reading" system. The U.S. Department of Education had supported that program until 1995 but the materials were no longer in print, yet R&D had permission to reprint and sell them, the letter said.
"While there are other tutoring programs and instruction materials out on the commercial market, none of these fit the PTR direct instruction model in which our teacher aides and tutors have been trained," said a Jan. 7, 2005, letter to Ashby from Susan Ross.
Ashby looked into those assertions and made several discoveries.
He learned that two publishers granted no reproduction rights at all for several books provided through R&D and refused to grant exclusive reproduction rights for several others.
"Neither [of the publishers contacted] have any records granting any firm or individual exclusive rights to reproduce the list of materials I sent to them," Ashby wrote in an e-mail to the district's internal auditor.
Moreover, on books for which the publisher did grant limited reproduction rights, the cost didn't come close to justifying what the district paid R&D. The district could buy the available rights, print the materials itself, and still save an average of $57 per book, a district analysis found.
District documents also included a cost comparison of dozens of books and tutorial kits. R&D charged anywhere from 50 percent to 89 percent more than the other vendors. Several books were beyond comparison because they had been copyrighted in the mid-1970s and weren't available through the other vendors.
Neither R&D's president nor the Rosses immediately returned telephone calls Monday, and the judge on Monday barred Paul Gotay, the Rosses' attorney, from representing them because of a potential conflict of interest.
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* NICOLE STRICKER can be contacted at nstricker@sltrib.com
or 801-257-899.
