Money that was supposed to fund educational trips for children without homes actually paid for the vacations of New York City schools staffers and their families, including a visit to Disney World, according to a recently released investigative report.
By Ben Brasch
Staff members’ families weren’t joining the trips under a misunderstanding of the rules, independent investigators wrote. In one instance, STH Queens regional manager Linda Wilson allegedly told her staff: “What happens here stays with us.” She denies saying it.
“Wilson brought members of her family on some of these trips at the expense of STH by forging permission slips in the names of students,” according to an investigative report that the New York City School District released Sept. 9.
Wilson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Jenna Lyle, a spokeswoman for the city’s Education Department, said in a statement Tuesday that the behavior described in the report was “unacceptable” and that all staff members identified in the document “are no longer employed by New York City Public Schools.”
“Our students in temporary housing deserve to have the supports they need, and when we were given the report from SCI, we acted immediately,” she said.
There are nearly 30,000 students without permanent homes in Queens, according to the latest data from the New York State Technical and Educational Assistance Center for Homeless Students.
The investigation into the STH program began in March 2019, when the school district’s special commissioner of investigation (SCI) received a complaint about the trips.
Among the findings, according to the report: Wilson and staff members filled out permission slips using the information of unhoused students and signed the documents as the parents of those students. A whistleblower told investigators that “few of the homeless students listed on the trip paperwork actually attended the trips.”
Staff members, including Wilson, told investigators that their children sometimes drove to the trip locations separately and linked up with the group. Some employees recanted their testimony after being shown pictures of their child on the trip.
A person whose name was redacted in the report told investigators that some of the trips Wilson planned were supposed to give the underprivileged students a chance to visit college campuses, according to the report, but representatives of the schools said Wilson had never contacted them.
The excursions allegedly had little educational value, despite a requirement by the city’s Education Department that school trips “have an educational or appropriate celebratory focus.” On one outing to Syracuse University in June 2018, a group ate lunch on campus but never toured the school. Instead, investigators wrote, they visited Niagara Falls about 145 miles west.
One person overheard someone ask a program manager why they ate on campus. She “replied that they had to visit the school as a requirement to plan a trip for the students,” according to the report. Six children or grandchildren of staffers allegedly attended that trip.
The report said there were also trips to a YMCA campground, a performance of “Stomp” in the East Village, an Upstate resort, Boston and New Orleans.
Then there was the Disney trip.
Some unhoused students did visit Disney, but so did six children or grandchildren of staffers, the report says. One person told investigators that they had to “beg Wilson to allow him to add two of his students to the trip.”
Wilson said during a December 2018 workshop that she had to cancel a trip to Philadelphia after someone told the department about it.
When a woman whose name was redacted recognized Wilson’s daughters in the photos of a 2016 trip to Washington, she told investigators that Wilson “shrugged” her off and indicated that there was nothing wrong with bringing family on the trips. Wilson told employees that she “allowed staff members to bring family members on trips because homeless students often ‘drop[ped] in and out,’ and their spots on the trips were already paid,” according to the report.
Asked why they didn’t report the trips, one person told investigators they didn’t confront Wilson because she “had already created a hostile work environment.”
Wilson told investigators that students with good attendance and who had attended Saturday programs were given priority for the trips. But she denied bringing her daughters and said she didn’t know whether staff members had done so because she didn’t know their children. She added that her staff members are “staff, not friends,” according to the report.
Among the people that investigators suggested the district fire was Mishawn Jack, who reached a settlement this summer with the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, an independent agency that enforces ethics laws. Jack did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Jack, who worked as a school aide for a decade, said she “used slots intended for students in temporary housing to take” her children on two trips — a May 2016 performance of “Wicked” on Broadway and a trip that same year to Washington.
The board originally fined her $3,000 to reimburse the city for the expenses of the trip, but board members lowered the number to $1,200 because she had gone into debt after being fired. The board also considered that Jack was told by her supervisor that she was allowed to bring her family on the trips.
