School Board Corruption Scandal Rocks New York

Over the past week, New York City’s troubled school system has been shaken by charges of school board corruption that range from rampant drug use to extortion to offering teacher promotions in exchange for sex.

Amid growing furor, New York Mayor Edward I. Koch, Schools Chancellor Richard R. Green and central Board of Education President Robert F. Wagner Jr. went to Albany Tuesday to plead with legislators for approval of legislation aimed at lessening the influence of politics over school policy.

Bronx Dist. Atty. Paul T. Gentile, whose office set up a hot line for complaints against school boards in that borough, said in an interview Tuesday that the flow of calls “is a constant. Never have I received a response like this.”

He said local school districts apparently have been operated as the “personal fiefdoms” of board members. Gentile said that Tuesday’s calls included allegations that district employees “became like the personal servants (of board members). They became their chauffeurs, cleaned their houses.”

The nation’s largest school system has long grappled with the struggles of urban education elsewhere--such problems as high dropout rates in some schools, unsatisfactory test scores, drugs and violence. Now, however, the focus is also on corruption, and a scandal that exploded last Wednesday, when Chancellor Green took the unusual step of suspending an entire locally elected school board in the Bronx.

That board and another are under scrutiny by a Bronx grand jury, and the central system’s inspector general is said to be looking into possible illegalities by more than half a dozen of the city’s 32 local boards. New York Newsday reported Tuesday that 10 local boards in the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens are under some sort of investigation.

The apparent catalyst that prompted the flurry of new accusations was the Nov. 9 arrest of a Bronx elementary school principal, Matthew Barnwell, for allegedly buying two vials of crack, the highly addictive cocaine derivative.

When Green suspended the eight-member local board responsible for Barnwell’s school, the front pages of local tabloids erupted with a series of such headlines as: “Snorting with the School Board” and “Sex for Board Jobs.”

Members of various local boards also are being accused of stealing district property, extorting campaign contributions and other payments from school employees and putting politics above education. However, many say the latest allegations, however sensational, only serve to highlight corruption that has long been festering in the nation’s largest school system.

“Very little of this is new,” United Federation of Teachers President Sandra Feldman said. “And it’s not just in the Bronx.”

Gentile agreed: “It is not recent. It’s a product of a system, and the system permits the various abuses to exist and to flourish. The people who participated in it accepted it as a way of life.”

Decentralization Blamed

Many are blaming school decentralization, a well-intentioned movement of the 1960s aimed at giving local communities more control over their own school systems.

New York’s school system took the concept the furthest. In 1970, it turned much of the control over its roughly 800 elementary and junior high schools to local boards that had relatively little accountability either to the central system or, some argue, to the communities that elected them.

“It’s really getting sickening right now,” added state Assemblyman Jose E. Serrano, who represents a portion of the Bronx and who chairs the Assembly’s Education Committee. “What’s happened is that the system has broken down. People for years have been using it as a way of gaining political mileage, as a way of gaining power.”

Some districts have prospered under decentralization, but critics say that many of the local school boards created under the 1970 law have become dominated by those who are seeking to further their own political careers. Only a handful of eligible voters participate in school board elections--a mere 6% in the last round, in 1986--which means local political organizations can easily marshal the several hundred ballots they need to put their candidates on the board.

Grand Jury Report

A Bronx grand jury wrote in 1986: “If politics has become a dirty word in the area of education, and it is clear that it has, this is because it represents the placing of personal and political interests above the interests of our children.”

The grand jury said its investigation indicated that “board members have rewarded friends with jobs, traded jobs with each other and given supervisory positions to individuals because they were recommended by local political club leaders.”

The accusations of the past week go even deeper. The Village Voice contended in a report that members of the District 9 board “held meetings in district schools that involved rampant cocaine and liquor consumption lasting into the early hours of the morning.”

Gentile said his office has received allegations from several districts that promotions to jobs up to the rank of principal have hinged on applicants’ willingness to have sex with school board members.

One school aide, Yolanda Picart, has publicly accused a former local board president of blocking her promotion when she spurned his sexual advances. The former board president, Jose Cruz, told the Daily News that the accusation was merely “a woman’s revenge.”

Other Accusations

Among the dozens of other accusations: At least one principal is said to have been forced to siphon money from his own pension fund to pay off a board member in return for being promoted from assistant principal. A security guard said he had been ordered in 1983 to move a piano from a school into the home of a school board member and another piano into the home of the board member’s sister.

“We no longer have vague allegations, people making anonymous phone calls,” said Edward McCarthy, a spokesman for Gentile.

Koch and the top school officials are supporting legislation, authored by Assembly Education Committee Chairman Serrano, that would prevent school employees, elected officials and high-level political officials from serving on school boards.

It also would implement more stringent controls over reporting campaign contributions and spending.

The measure has passed the state Assembly twice--once unanimously--but has stalled in the Senate.