Kamar Samuels swims waist-deep in NYC faculties’ – Latest News
Kamar Samuels, town faculties chancellor, is now enmeshed in a personal scandal — and a far bigger systemic one.
Both have been on show this week as his Department of Education minions tried the outdated “dog ate my homework” excuse as they refused to share contracting data with the City Council.
The DOE spends about a quarter of its $43 billion funds on these contracts, but Chief Procurement Officer Elisheba Lewi testified that it will “take months” to provide the information for the council, because 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 strategy to monitor these outlays for fraud, waste or different abuse — which is even more damning: They can’t actually clarify $10 billion a yr 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 information.
Then again, that failure is handy at a time when Samuels is beneath the microscope for his half in a shady no-bid contracting scandal centered on his function as superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3.
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Last week, The Post’s David Spector reported completely that Samuels had permitted a $180,000 no-bid contract (to offer non permanent foreign-language lecturers) with a non-DOE-approved vendor — after which let a subordinate take the autumn.
And then, as chancellor, he gave her a profitable promotion: Loyalty rewarded?
Samuels allegedly licensed the contract — then break up the funds into $25,000 chunks in an obvious effort to bypass reporting guidelines, and at last killed the contract early after it started to draw discover as a result of the contractor had supplied a trainer already banned from town’s faculties.
The New York Times, catching up this week (probably with the help of sources hoping that the paper’s clueless schooling reporters and editors can present cowl for the corruption), experiences the Special Commissioner of Investigation has opened a probe into Samuels.
The Times, of course, didn’t ask: Should the SCI additionally probe itself, to be taught how it missed Samuels’ function till The Post revealed it?
We think about this is just one instance of what may come out if the DOE really got here clean with its contracting data.
Menin, who spearheaded the passage of a package deal of reforms limiting the use of no-bid emergency contracts to put an finish to an abuse-ridden system, has each proper to go on the warpath.
All that is on the desk as Samuels brags about how he’s sustaining funding levesl for faculties whose enrollment is plummeting, as if overfunding them is one thing to be proud of.
Hmm: For that to be true, he’d need to assume (as many plainly do) that the true goal of New York City’s public faculties is solely to counterpoint these with the best connections; pretending to coach the youngsters is simply a cowl for all of the scams.
Care to clarify, Mr. Chancellor?
