TERCERO'S UNILATERAL DECISION TO COST TSC MILLIONS

By Juan Montoya
The minutes of the Sept. 20, 2012 meeting of the Texas Southmost College board of trustees had an item (#8) dealing with the granting of a three-year contract for providing textbooks and instructional materials for students in the varied courses, marketing and online instruction.

Only one vendor, Pearson Learning Solutions, submitted a bid to the Request For Proposals (RFP). Curiously, it was the same company, that Dr. Leonardo De la Garza, TSC President Lily Tercero's former boss and $180,000 consultant had worked for and that he also recommended.

Tercero and then-VP of Finance and Administration Chet Lewis recommended to the board that the contract be awarded to Pearson. The RFP contract term was for three years, starting in the Fall of 2013 with an option for renewal in 2016.

The board then instructed Tercero to enter into the contract with Pearson Learning Solution for the materials and services.

Just this week, the new TSC board was handed an invoice from Pearson Solutions for just over $1,072,796 million for eBooks and online services to cover the costs of the existing contract. But lo and behold! they found out that instead of the three-year contract they had specified on the RFP that Tercero had signed a contract for four years.

The TSC board back then, with chairman Kiko Rendon, apparently missed the discrepancy, and the college was on the hook for a year that they hadn't approved. This Thursday, the new board bit the bullet and extended the contract for yet another year to cover the gap between the time Pearson stops providing the service and a new vendor is approved.

Like it or not, with Pearson going out of of the LMS business next year, and a need to transition to a new Learning Management System, they  paid the vendor, and covered the college until December 2017.

Additional payments of $1,000,000 will have to be made to cover the Spring of 2017, $50,000 for Summer 2017, and an additional $1,000,000 for the Fall of 2017.

Meanwhile, the search is on to find a new LMS provider for electronic books and materials. If the original RFP had been followed, the process to select a new LMS provider would have been over last year. Instead, the new board gave itself a few months to complete the process.

Why did Tercero bypass the parameters of the RFP and unilaterally sign on for four years?
"She pretty much did what she wanted," said a TSC administrator. "As long as she had Kiko and a majority on her side, she pretty much did things on her own with or without board approval."

This is just the latest revelation of Tercero's maverick actions during her tenure at TSC. She was terminated in August 2016. She has been president since 2011. At her firing, trustees cited her unilateral renewal of a windstorm insurance contract without board approval. Later, it was revealed that she had used the rubber stamp signature of former trustees Kiko Rendon and Ed Rivera to sing checks totaling millions of dollars.

The total amount that was approved by Tercero where the name of one or both former trustees was used to countersign the payments totaled about $1,502,082.

After her dismissal she sued the trustees and TSC claiming she was denied due process and that there were no grounds for her dismissal. She asked the court to have the college pay her for the three-year contract that was extended by the board majority under Rendon before the next trustee elections where the majority changed.