Youngstown City School District Superintendent, Justin Jennings has announced on Monday that he will be resigning as superintendent for the district effective June 30.

This announcement came just months after a lengthy 21 News investigation on mismanaged funds used for numerous failed projects for the district during his time as CEO.

Our investigation revealed that in 2021, Jennings had entered into a $17 million contract to buy and install WiFi towers across the city from Arizona-based company Insight Enterprises.

In November of 2021, Jennings conducted a meeting with the company and city officials about the plan. During this meeting, Youngstown Law Director, Jeff Limbian questioned Jennings asking him why he would enter into this contract without speaking to city leaders first.

City officials told Jennings the project could not work because the city did not own all the utility poles necessary to make the project work.

While Jennings was able to cancel the bulk of the contract, $5 million in ESSER funds used to order the internet equipment had been lost. This equipment is still sitting in a bus garage, unused and collecting dust.

Jennings told 21 News's Madison Tromler that he had to buy the equipment before the project began.

“Before we started, we had to buy equipment. So, we had to pay for the equipment we purchased. We pulled the plug before then, but the equipment was already ordered, so we had to pay for that,” Jennings said.

Additionally our investigation revealed that Jennings had spent another $3.6 million on COVID-19 tests for students and teachers during a time when the Ohio Department of Health (ODH) was offering them free of charge.

The ODH told us that school districts in the Mahoning Valley had received 18,000 free COVID-19 tests with Youngstown receiving over 1,000 free kits. There was no limit to the number of kits a district could request.

Despite these tests being offered for free, Jennings spent $3.6 million on COVID-19 tests from QuickMed, a locally-owned company contracted by Jennings to run the district health clinics.

21 News obtained copies of the invoices from these COVID-19 test kit purchases revealing Jennings bought a total of 120,000 tests along with 7,000 promotional bags and 7,000 instructional letters between December of 2021 and March of 2022. 

The Ohio Department of Education has offered COVID-19 test kits to school districts for free since April of 2021.

Jennings told 21 News he did not know exactly how many of these tests were distributed, but sources within the district tell us hundreds had gone to waste being thrown in the garbage after they expired.

Finally, our investigation revealed that Jennings had attempted to solve an issue with the district's payroll issues. In 2020, Jennings had revealed that he was working with Atlanta-based company, PP&A Corporation to implement a paperless payroll system for the district.

Over the course of nearly two years, the district paid nearly $385,000 to PP&A, but ultimately stopped using the company due to issues with properly interfacing its software with Ohio teacher's time-tracking software, as well as the district's system.

“We were trying to work to get our payroll better than it was because it was so messed up at the time… We had people who weren’t getting paid and people not getting paid on time. So, we tried to do something to go paperless… It didn’t work out,” Jennings said.

Due to Jennings' position as CEO at the time, board approval was not required in order to hire PP&A. 

Jennings told us despite the plan not working out, he doesn't feel like the funds were wasted.

"When you are trying to do things the right way, it doesn’t always work out. So, you have to do alternative things … I hired them because I wanted to get the work done … it didn’t happen,” Jennings said.

The full extent of the findings of our months-long investigation can be found in our three-part Watchdog Report series linked below.

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