If its other failings weren’t maddening enough, now the $45 billion city Department of Education is hiring obvious psychos to work with kids and paying “principals” $200,000 to run nonexistent schools.
Sayed Mohassib allegedly slaughtered jogger Katie Suarez near the Belt Parkway in Bath Beach Oct. 30; he claims he found himself sitting on a nearby bench, drenched in blood but with no knowledge of why.
Scariest of all, he was then working as a substitute paraprofessional at PS 200, a position of trust and responsibility helping young children.
Did anyone check his background? After a red-flag few weeks with the NYPD, he joined the Marines only to get discharged on psychiatric grounds, then be rejected for reinstatement as a cop — and that very same day win transport to Bellevue because of his erratic behavior.
In 2024, cops took him to Coney Island Hospital after he threatened to “chop” his mother and sister into pieces.
Despite extensive documentation of Mohassib’s instability, the DOE somehow hired him as a substitute paraprofessional, a low-paid though hands-on position that typically requires personal nomination by the school principal.
Meanwhile, Caleb Haraguchi-Combs is earning close to $200,000 a year to serve as principal of an AI/fintech high school . . . which doesn’t exist.
Higherups’ decision to abort that school didn’t trouble Manhattan High School Superintendent Gary Beidleman enough to bump Haraguchi-Combs back to his prior salary or otherwise find him a school to run.
Meanwhile, schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels is neck-deep in accounting and contracting scandals related to his approval of lucrative no-bid contracts, as well his refusal to release information on more than $10 billion in third-party expenditures.
And none of this touches the real outrage: most DOE schools’ failure to teach kids how to read, write and do simple math, even as enrollment continues to plummet as any parents who can gets their kids out of the system.
It seems the system is now designed to produce nothing but scandal.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
