Robbing Schoolchildren
Kudos to City Councilman Brad Lander for slamming the School Construction Authority for having “far too many” projects running “over time and over budget.” For a follow-up, the council might try focusing on rampant waste and cronyism at the main Department of Education.
As Yoav Gonen reported in Monday’s Post, the SCA is overspent on more than half of its current major capital projects, to the tune of $300 million. The cost of one Queens project nearly doubled, from $53.9 million to $98.6 million.
Mayor de Blasio praised the SCA last month: “We’re giving them more and more money, because they’re using it so well.” But Lander’s colleagues agree the overruns look bad.
DOE spokesman Michael Aciman waved it all off as merely the result of too-low initial cost estimates — as if routinely low-balling what a job will cost isn’t a problem.
That’s been the DOE’s attitude toward damning audits by city Comptroller Scott Stringer. This week’s Stringer release noted that the DOE failed to keep track of $84 mil- lion paid to outside vendors for services to students with disabilities. (A DOE spokesman insisted to us that the department “has robust financial processes in place.”) Last month, he found that the DOE had lost nearly 2,000 computers.
He has also faulted the DOE for routinely breaking not only city rules on contracting, but also its own: In 2016, it awarded more than 500 contracts, for roughly $2.7 billion of its nearly $30 billion budget, without competition or proper safeguards. It also often fails to review contractors’ performance.
A Post investigation in March revealed that mismanagement reigns over the DOE’s Renewal-schools program. Susan Edelman and Bruce Golding found a $40 million-ayear jackpot for outside consultants — especially principals with checkered histories.
In 18 audits since January 2014, Stringer has shown the DOE to be “an opaque agency that acts as if the rules don’t apply to them.”
And all that mismanagement picks the pockets of the 1.1 million kids the schools are supposed to serve.