Kamar Samuels, the city schools chancellor, is now enmeshed in a personal scandal — and a far larger systemic one.
Both were on display this week as his Department of Education minions tried the old “dog ate my homework” excuse as they refused to share contracting information with the City Council.
The DOE spends about a quarter of its $43 billion budget on these contracts, yet Chief Procurement Officer Elisheba Lewi testified that it would “take months” to produce the info for the council, as it’s all on “a secure system that very few people have access to.”
If that’s not an outright lie, then the DOE has no way to monitor these outlays for fraud, waste or other abuse — which is even more damning: They can’t truly explain $10 billion a year in outlays.
“I mean, this should take like an hour of work to do,” Speaker Julie Menin rightly summed up of the DOE’s “inability” to cough up the info.
Then again, that failure is convenient at a time when Samuels is under the microscope for his part in a shady no-bid contracting scandal centered on his role as superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3.
Last week, The Post’s David Spector reported exclusively that Samuels had approved a $180,000 no-bid contract (to provide temporary foreign-language teachers) with a non-DOE-approved vendor — and then let a subordinate take the fall.
And then, as chancellor, he gave her a lucrative promotion: Loyalty rewarded?
Samuels allegedly authorized the contract — then split the payments into $25,000 chunks in an apparent effort to circumvent reporting rules, and finally killed the contract early after it began to attract notice because the contractor had provided a teacher already banned from the city’s schools.
The New York Times, catching up this week (doubtless with the help of sources hoping that the paper’s clueless education reporters and editors can provide cover for the corruption), reports the Special Commissioner of Investigation has opened a probe into Samuels.
The Times, of course, didn’t ask: Should the SCI also probe itself, to learn how it missed Samuels’ role until The Post revealed it?
We imagine this is only one example of what could come out if the DOE actually came clean with its contracting info.
Menin, who spearheaded the passage of a package of reforms limiting the use of no-bid emergency contracts to put an end to an abuse-ridden system, has every right to go on the warpath.
All this is on the table as Samuels brags about how he’s maintaining funding levesl for schools whose enrollment is plummeting, as if overfunding them is something to be proud of.
Hmm: For that to be true, he’d have to think (as many plainly do) that the true purpose of New York City’s public schools is simply to enrich those with the right connections; pretending to educate the kids is just a cover for all the scams.
Care to explain, Mr. Chancellor?
This story originally appeared on NYPost
