The man who told you so about DeKalb’s indicted school superintendent
It was all right there from the start in 2023, indications that the candidate DeKalb County’s school board was set to hire as their superintendent might end up being a hot mess.
And Devon Horton’s federal indictment last week alleging he got kickbacks for no-bid contracts in his previous school district pretty much confirms this.
Much of it was laid out before Horton was hired here in April 2023. A month before, the parent of a student in Horton’s old 6,500-student elementary school district in Evanston, Illinois, posted on his blog a road map of Horton’s alleged misdeeds.
That man, Tom Hayden, a 42-year-old techie writing a blog called FOIA Gras, laid out a series of smelly contracts in the Evanston school district.
His headlines sum it up:
“District 65 Superintendent Steering Contracts to Business Partners.”
“Superintendent formed a company in 2020, by 2022 three of his four business partners were awarded no-bid contracts with District 65.”
It turns out three of the four contractors Hayden named in this 2023 story were also named in Horton’s 2025 indictment: Antonio Ross, Samuel Ross and Alfonzo Lewis.
Mind you, Hayden’s amateur, yet exemplary, journalism was there for all to see, including DeKalb’s school board members.
The crazy thing that Hayden found was that within two months of starting his $250,000-a-year superintendent’s gig in Illinois in 2020, Horton formed a limited liability company, or LLC, called National Stand Up with his three future indictees.
Horton’s LLC didn’t do business with the Evanston school district. But his partners sure did, some $282,000 in contracts in the next couple of years, earning Horton more than $80,000 in kickbacks, according to the indictment.
Hayden’s work also ended up being a road map for the FBI investigation.
Granted, Hayden is merely a techie with no subpoena powers, so he didn’t find all $282,000 in contracts, nor did he prove kickbacks. He just named names, named companies (fittingly, one was called Connecting the Dots Leadership) and spelled out a shady scheme.
Hayden isn’t quite sure if he was suspicious of the three men’s contracts before discovering they had incorporated an LLC with Horton.
“I’d compile school paperwork, digitize it, put it on spreadsheets and then start digging, looking for connections,” said Hayden, who had worked in financial accounting for tech firms like Facebook and Grubhub. “I also have ADHD, and my special power is going down rabbit holes.”
He noticed the no-bid contracts and noted the companies “had no websites, no paperwork. They stood out like sore thumbs.”
He added, “It’s not smart to establish an LLC with your (alleged) collaborators in advance of a kickback scheme.”
Correct. That’s taught in Kickbacks 101.
Media outlets both here and in Chicago amplified Hayden’s work, but DeKalb’s board was set on hiring Horton, a man who packaged himself as an anti-racist and a “disruptor.”
“Everything that the media, the public has perceived has been consulted with our attorneys,” then-board chair Diijon DaCosta said in 2023. “And as far as we know at this point, those are just allegations.”
Just allegations?
How about this: You just don’t want allegations surrounding your incoming superintendent, the person entrusted with educating 90,000 young DeKalb residents.
There were other known indicators.
He had two previous bankruptcies and had previously owed more than $60,000 in unpaid property fines.
DaCosta at the time said the board wasn’t legally allowed to consider personal bankruptcies in hiring decisions.
Also, Horton blew up a tense situation in May 2022 when some nooses were found on school property in Evanston.
Instead of waiting for facts to come in, Horton almost immediately went Racial DEFCON 2 and branded the incident a “hate crime and a deliberate and specific incidence of an outwardly racist act.”
Turns out a middle school student planted the items, and the local cops determined it was no hate crime.
But why waste a good racial scare?
Still, the DeKalb board, knowing Horton’s background, hired him by a 6-1 vote in April 2023.
Hayden said Horton “checks boxes” for school boards. He’s charismatic, has a housing projects-to-doctorate background and talks about reaching underachieving students.
The only no vote in hiring Horton came from then-board member Joyce Morley, who often was the board’s lone no vote.
She even went and broke the rules of the board’s executive session and told my colleague Cassidy Alexander that Horton, the board’s “sole finalist,” wasn’t even ranked among the top five candidates recommended by an outside search firm.
Morley said Vasanne Tinsley, a longtime DeKalb schools employee who was the interim superintendent, was ranked higher.
“There’s a feeling they need to reach from the outside to fix the inside,” Morley told me this week.
The lure of the outsider is often strong in hiring a police chief or school superintendent. You know, shake things up.
The four remaining board members who hired Horton would not speak for this article. Horton, who makes $360,000, was on paid “administrative leave” Tuesday. State Sen. Emanuel Jones has called for him to be fired.
“In what universe does (paid leave) make sense?” Jones asked.
Has he not been to DeKalb?
About the Author
Bill Torpy, who writes about metro Atlanta for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joined the newspaper in 1990.
