Sexual harassment complaints
Dept. of Ed. erased 119 grievances from latest report
A VETERAN city educator who said officials botched her sexual harassment case is calling out Mayor de Blasio for shaming victims — and omitting dozens of sexual harassment complaints from recently published city statistics.
The educator, who asked to remain anonymous because she fears retaliation, said she was sickened to hear de Blasio say this week that the Education Department substantiated less than 2% of complaints because of a “hyper-complaint dynamic” in the city agency.
“I’m certainly offended that Mayor de Blasio would say that,” said the educator, who sued the city over her harassment by a supervisor and won a settlement.
“With a wife and daughter of his own, I was in shock,” she added.
She called the city Education Department’s investigation into her claims “a long, complicated, ugly process,” that ultimately failed to bring her justice.
“No one would go through this if it were not true,” she said. “It is a horrific experience. It upends your entire life.”
City officials are scrambling to contain a growing sex harassment scandal in the city schools.
A tally of sex harassment complaints published by the city Friday omitted 119 Education Department complaints erased from the record because officials deemed them “non-jurisdictional.”
Figures published by the de Blasio administration on April 20 showed 471 cases of sexual harassment complaints in city schools from 2013 to 2017.
But internal records kept by Education Department officials showed 590 complaints during the same period — a figure 25% higher than the number reported by de Blasio.
Observers said it looks like the Education Department is trying to hide the facts about sex harassment cases.
“That’s exactly what’s happening here,” said New York City Parents Union President Mona Davids. “They covered things up and they squashed the complaints.”
In the cases left out of the tally, employees reported incidents they characterized as sex harassment.
But investigators found the workers’ descriptions of the incidents weren’t consistent with the department’s definition of sexual harassment.
So their complaints were placed in other bureaucratic categories, or dismissed outright.
As a result, the internal DOE record of 590 complaints was pared down to 471 complaints when the data was released to the public.
A number of complaints from the New York City Housing Authority were removed from the official tally in a similar manner, de Blasio administration officials said.
De Blasio spokeswoman Olivia Lapeyrolerie said the city would change its policy so the data includes all filed complaints — not just the ones deemed appropriate.
“Moving forward, the data we disclose will include all complaints as they were originally filed,” Lapeyrolerie said.
“We are creating these disclosure policies for the first time in city history and there will no doubt be adjustments in these protocols,” she added.
Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza himself was at the center of a $75,000 sexual discrimination settlement in San Francisco where he was a superintendent before coming to New York.
But de Blasio administration officials did not disclose the suit involving Carranza or the settlement paid to his accuser until it was reported by the Daily News.
Likewise, City Hall officials didn’t reveal that sex harassment complaints had been erased from the official tally until they were pressed by The News.
Education officials said that the agency has a culture that seeks to stifle complaints of sexual harassment.
“There’s definitely pressure on HR teams to resolve things internally,” said one official who asked to remain anonymous.
“Of course they’re walking it back. They got a me-too chancellor.”