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A Bronx principal collected thousands of dollars in overtime pay for time when she was not at work, according to city investigators who trailed her to her house and a strip mall in New Jersey to document the theft.

Liza Cruz Diaz, the principal of P.S. 31 since 2006, also used school funds to pay for Mardi Gras beads and metallic sunglasses for her daughter’s “Sweet Sixteen” party, according to a report released today by Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon. The city is moving to fire her.

Cruz Diaz racked up hundreds of overtime hours by asking a secretary to punch her timecard long after she left each day. On one day that investigators trailed her to New Jersey, she left the school before 4 p.m. but wasn’t punched out until 6:21 p.m.

She also used the school’s budget to make personal purchases and falsified evidence that she had reimbursed the funds; signed her own timesheets, in violation of Department of Education policy; and smuggled records out of the building once it was clear that an investigation was underway, according to the report. (more…)

A Chinatown school that has been mired in allegations has been cleared of at least one of them, but it’s still under scrutiny.

A report released today by the Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon says investigators did not find proof of large-scale theft, which some at the school had alleged. But investigators did unearth some unorthodox financial practices that Condon has reported to the Department of Education, with the advice that the city offer accounting training to parents and administrators at the school.

The DOE’s Office of Special Investigations is still looking into different allegations against Shuang Wen, according to the report.

UPDATE: DOE officials said the SCI report identified five different ways in which school administrators violated department rules and regulations about fund-raising and financial management.

“We are deeply troubled by Commissioner Condon’s findings, which show that standard operating procedures, Chancellor’s regulations, and City Conflicts of Interest Law were repeatedly violated — specifically with regard to financial management of the school,” said DOE spokesman Matthew Mittenthal in a statement. (more…)

The head of the Department of Education’s public affairs office broke the law when he urged school employees to engage in political lobbying, according to a report today from Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon.

During “Lobby Week” in March, Lenny Speiller, executive director of the DOE’s Office of Public Affairs, inserted language into an email to parent coordinators asking them to share a petition calling on lawmakers to do away with seniority layoff rules for teachers, investigators concluded. Mayor Bloomberg was pushing the policy change heavily at the time. But the state constitution prohibits public employees from engaging in private political lobbying.

Parent coordinators told us that the lobbying had begun months earlier. We reported about the advocacy efforts, which the city immediately disavowed, on March 16. The next day, teachers union president Michael Mulgrew filed an official complaint against the lobbying, and SCI launched an investigation. The union opposes changes to seniority layoff rules.

The petition asked lawmakers to “allow the City to keep it’s [sic] most effective teachers by ending the State’s ‘Last-In, First-Out’ policy, allowing teachers to be retained based on their performance, rather than just seniority.” Speiller told investigators that he suggested that language but didn’t expect it to be included in the petition that parent coordinators were asked to distribute. But other DOE employees said he made clear that his revisions would be included. (more…)

When Maria Penaherrera was removed as principal of Brooklyn’s PS 114 in February 2009, the community breathed a sigh of relief. Her leadership had drawn protests from teachers and parents, and it was well known that the school was in bad shape financially.

But according to a report released today by Special Commissioner of Education Richard Condon, none of those problems caused the city to remove Pena-Herrera. Instead, it was failing to follow proper procedure during an evacuation that cost Pena-Herrera her job.

The report paints a picture of an uncommonly bad principal whose obvious shortcomings went unaddressed by department officials during a period when the city frequently redrew lines of authority over schools.

Pena-Herrera became principal of PS 114 in Brooklyn in 2004 after two decades in the city schools. By the time she was removed, she had amassed a reputation as a “principal from hell” who unsuccessfully tried to bully parents into giving her good marks on the city’s survey. According to the report, she ran up a deficit of more than $100,000, hired and fired four assistant principals, illicitly employed uncertified teachers and paraprofessionals, and paid consultants to replicate support she was already getting. When her replacement inquired about safety issues with a city-funded after-school program that Pena-Herrera had allowed to use school space without a permit, the program’s head offered a bribe of knockoff handbags. A school custodian told investigators that the bribe was typical of the way business was done at the school.

What’s not clear from the report is how Pena-Herrera lasted as long as she did. (more…)

When we posted the report about the tragic field trip taken by students at Columbia Secondary School, we noted that it had arrived in record time, less than a month after sixth-grader Nicole Suriel drowned at Long Beach. Today, we received a report that reflects a more typical timeline for the Special Commissioner of Investigation.

Today’s report is about a trip that several Beacon High School students took to Cuba — in 2007. A three-year investigation revealed that Beacon students had traveled to Cuba in previous years, that Principal Ruth Lacey had opposed the 2007 spring break trip, and that a Beacon teacher organized a trip anyway, with the help of a pacifist nonprofit. All of this should make headlines, except that newspapers reported most details within days of the group’s return — when the teacher, Nathan Turner, and five students were stopped while trying to reenter the country.

SCI chief Richard Condon is recommending that Turner, a Communist who posted pictures of Fidel Castro in his classroom, not be allowed to work in city schools. That would have been a useful recommendation two years ago, before Turner resigned from Beacon.

Why the delay? It’s unlikely that Condon’s office was preparing reports about charges of systemic misconduct, such as grade-changing and test-tampering, but one can only hope. (more…)

The city is cracking down on a New Jersey family that illegally enrolled their daughter at two of the city’s most competitive public schools.

Jill Schifter and Anthony Maulello’s daughter won a spot in the Professional Performing Arts School in 2005 and was accepted to the ultra-competitive drama program at LaGuardia High School two years later. But according to a report released today by Special Commissioner of Investigations Richard Condon, Schifter and Maulello live in North Bergen, N.J., not New York City, meaning their daughter wasn’t eligible to attend the schools.

Investigators responding to an anonymous tip last fall found that the couple had briefly placed utilities accounts at a friend’s apartment under their name in order to establish residency after enrolling at PPAS. It was only six months into the investigation, in February 2010, that Maulello signed a lease on an apartment in Manhattan.

The city is moving to collect nearly $25,000 from Maulello and Schifter, the art teacher at a Jersey City charter school, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Marge Feinberg. That figure represents five years’ worth of the tuition the city requires from public school parents who live outside of the city. (Last year, the city collected $692,895 in tuition, Feinberg said.) According to the regulation about non-resident enrollment, Schifter and Maulello’s daughter could also be thrown out of LaGuardia.

The story is an extreme example of a not-uncommon phenomenon. (more…)

The receptionist at the office of the Special Commissioner of Investigations, Richard Condon. Condon's staff takes up more than an entire floor at its financial district building.

I just picked up the 600 pages of reports on wrongdoing and misconduct by city school employees that got sent to Chancellor Joel Klein in 2007 and 2008, but never surfaced publicly. The Post highlighted some of the contents: a Stuyvesant librarian’s unauthorized field trips to a Quiz Bowl, a substitute teacher who showed students a movie in which he appeared with a semi-naked woman.

But the biggest story is what is not in this file: Any investigations into top or even mid-level Department of Education officials, or any evidence of educators fudging student performance data to make their school look better.

The absence is matched by a similar drought among those investigations that have been publicized. The development suggests one of two conclusions. On one hand, the new reports could disprove critics’ concerns that growing pressure to produce higher test scores and graduate more students has led some educators to cheat. They could also squash the speculation that the Special Commissioner of Investigations, Richard Condon, somehow managed to cover up looks into higher-profile targets. On the other hand, the cynical conclusion is that high-level misbehavior and cheating are happening with little intervention from an office whose purpose is to investigate schools for misconduct. (more…)

We’ve been getting a lot of tips and comments about Special Commissioner of Investigations Richard Condon, the man charged with investigating the Department of Education for corruption and misconduct, but whose office often fails to publicize its findings.

We definitely want to look deeper into Condon, and, while our FOIL requests churn through the slow grind, we could use your help. Do you know of a case that Condon investigated that wasn’t publicized, but should have been? What about a case recommended to Condon that never got investigated? Or a case that you think led to an unfair verdict?

We are also interested in cases where Condon investigated allegations of cheating on tests and fudging of graduation rate figures — behaviors that critics say the new accountability system encourages.

As always, find our e-mails here or leave a comment.

The city office that investigates the Department of Education today released a statistical summary of its last year’s work, showing that it completed more investigations in 2008 than in any other recent year.

According to the report (pdf), the Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation substantiated 327 cases out of 725 started, reflecting a slight uptick in both the number of cases opened and the number of complaints substantiated.

But the office issued only 17 press releases about its investigations. (more…)