A former Atlanta schools technology director is under federal investigation, reportedly involving ties to a company that he approved payments to in 2006 while working for the city school system.
Willie Jerome Oberlton, who worked in Atlanta from 2004 to 2007, resigned from his job with a Dallas school district Monday because of the federal investigation, the Dallas superintendent said.
The investigation involves technology consulting contracts awarded by the Atlanta school board, according to a Dallas Independent School District official familiar with the case in an interview with The Dallas Morning News.
The consulting contracts were worth up to $1 million annually between 12 companies, according to the Atlanta Board of Education’s agenda from Feb. 6, 2006.
One of the companies was called Computech Corp., which worked in partnership with a company connected to Oberlton called Global Technology Services, the Dallas school district official told The Dallas Morning News.
Federal authorities contacted Atlanta Public Schools a few months ago seeking information, and the school district is cooperating with the investigation, APS spokesman Stephen Alford said.
“It’s a federal investigation. You know the feds are very tight-lipped about what they do,” Alford said. “The people who do know something that happened as far as an investigation, there’s very little info they can share. It has to come from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia couldn’t provide any information about the case, a spokesman said.
Oberlton didn’t return a phone message left at his home in Texas.
After Oberlton left his job as chief information officer for Atlanta schools in 2007, he worked as president and CEO of Global Technology Services before joining Baltimore City Public Schools in 2011, according to a news release the Baltimore school district issued at the time. In January, he began working for the Dallas school district after resigning from the Baltimore school system.
Dallas Superintendent Mike Miles said in a statement Tuesday that he was “shocked and disappointed” when Oberlton told him about the investigation.
“When I learned of the seriousness of this issue yesterday, I immediately requested Mr. Oberlton’s resignation,” Miles said Tuesday. “My disappointment is accompanied by anger because Jerome did not inform us about his involvement in this investigation until yesterday.”
It’s not clear what the consulting contracts now under investigation involved, but during the same period they were awarded, APS was embroiled in a scandal concerning the E-rate program.
A 2004 investigation by the AJC found that APS had misspent nearly $73 million in federal money from E-rate that was meant to help schools and libraries pay for Internet access systems and maintain their telecommunications infrastructure.
In 2007, former APS technical director Arthur Scott was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison for accepting nearly $300,000 in bribes from vendors. In 2008, a federal jury convicted Peachtree City businessman R. Clay Harris of paying more than $200,000 to a consulting company set up by Scott — money that federal prosecutors described as bribes. Harris was sentenced in 2008 to five years in federal prison.
APS didn’t receive E-rate reimbursement funds from the federal government from 2004, when misspending was revealed, until after a 2011 audit restarted the flow of funds.
Oberlton was involved in two spending controversies while working at Baltimore City Schools, The Dallas Morning News reported. He wrote a $5,000 check to cover questionable expenses charged on procurement cards, and he was criticized for $250,000 in renovations for his office suites in Baltimore.
Oberlton’s case doesn’t appear to be related to the APS cheating scandal, in which 35 former Atlanta educators face criminal charges related to allegations of changing answers on standardized tests.
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