SHOW ME THE MONEY!
School officials never tracked $101M in ‘coaching’ contracts
BOMBSHELL AUDIT SLAMS CITY
The city Department of Education has awarded contracts worth up to $101 million to the NYC Leadership Academy — but didn’t keep track of where the money went, a scathing audit by city Comptroller Scott Stringer charges.
The Long Island Citybased nonprofit was paid $45.6 million from the contracts to coach “aspiring principals” and teachers. But the DOE failed to produce records to prove the $183-an-hour coaches did their jobs.
“If the DOE can’t be sure whether or when the professional coaching even happened, how do we know it was effective?” Stringer asks in a report obtained by The Post. The contracts also require progress reports and meetings to monitor the vendor’s performance, but the auditors found none — raising the specter of “waste, fraud and abuse,” the report says. “These failings point to a broken procurement system that allows the DOE to spend freely, devoid of oversight,” it concludes. The DOE has entered into three contracts with the Queens academy since 2008, the first two under thenMayor Mike Bloomberg. The last was inked in July 2014 under Mayor de Blasio by Schools Chancellor CarmenC Fariña’s chief operating officer a and extends to June 22019. Under all three contracts, $45.58 million has been spent,spen the comptroller said.
Last month, de Blasio declared a “NYC Leadership Academy Day” and called the outfit “an important partner” in running city schools.
Fariña praised the academy “for its tremendous work to prepare and support great school leaders.”
But the academy, founded in 2003, has also become notorious for graduating inept — and sometimes corrupt — principals with little teaching experience.
Its “leadership coaches,” mostly retired principals, have also been hired in the mayor’s 3-year-old Renewal program for struggling schools, which has shown meager academic gains.
The comptroller’s auditors reviewed $559,667 in DOE payments to the academy, including $394,007 for “leadership coaching.”
“Disregarding the safe- guards in its own contracts and procurement rules,” the comptroller said, the DOE spent $385,612, or 98 percent of the coaching payments, without the required documentation.
No sign-in sheets were produced at the time showing the dates and hours each coach worked. The academy simply billed for a total number of hours, the audit found.
The absence of records made it virtually impossible to find fake bills or bill-padding, said Stringer spokesman Devon Puglia.
More alarming, the DOE “did not request or receive any progress reports,” which the contracts require quarterly. Nor did DOE officials meet monthly with academy officials — another layer of oversight the contract requires.
The DOE listed phone calls and other “check-ins” but had no memos or reports on what was discussed.
The academy’s president and CEO, Irma Zardoya, a former Bronx superintendent, collected $260,000 in pay and benefits in 2015-16, according to the group’s latest tax filings. She did not return a message.
The DOE said it’s reviewing the audit. But it will now train new principals in-house and use NYCLA to coach “experienced principals” who request it, officials said.