Staff Reports
New documents and council testimony have thrown New York City’s school contracting into the spotlight. A $180,000 language-teacher deal was split into small chunks to dodge oversight, and the city’s watchdog report shows this was not a one-off mistake. Chancellor Kamar Samuels now faces real questions about who signed what and why the system lets this happen.
The scheme: $180,000 split to slip past oversight
The deal at the center of the row involved a vendor called Language Learning Network and owner Sean Kreyling. City records and testimony say a June 2023 contract worth about $180,000 was broken into sub‑$25,000 payments and routed through different company names. That kept the work under the DOE’s review threshold and around Comptroller and procurement checks. In plain English: someone rigged the paperwork so the usual controls wouldn’t see it.
SCI report shows this is a system problem, not a single error
The Special Commissioner of Investigation put out a procurement review that reads like a how‑to for dodging rules. The SCI says school‑level purchases now total hundreds of millions of dollars and the weaknesses are obvious: weak training, thin oversight of non‑contract vendors, and too-easy sole‑source claims. The watchdog’s annual numbers — thousands of complaints and many substantiated investigations — prove the point. The report lists fixes: better training, tighter checks on non‑DOE vendors, and rules to stop one owner from posing as many bidders.
Who’s on the hot seat — and who gets a pass?
Vendor testimony to the City Council said Chancellor Kamar Samuels signed the original arrangement. Yet the SCI initially recommended discipline for a deputy superintendent and the vendor, not for the chancellor. Mayor Zohran Mamdani publicly stood by Chancellor Samuels, even as the Council demanded records and blasted the slow response. Meanwhile, the deputy named in the report drew controversy after being pushed up the ladder instead of being fired. If you’re surprised, you haven’t been paying attention — the system protects power more often than it protects taxpayers.
Fix it or shut it down
SCI’s recommendations are practical and fast. Freeze the use of sub‑threshold tricks, blacklist vendors who play these games, force full audits of split payments, and empower the Council to see the paper trail. An independent audit should look at every similar contract. If the city wants to keep pretending this was an isolated lapse, it can. Parents and taxpayers deserve better than theater. Demand transparency, demand consequences, and stop pretending that “educational opportunity” excuses sloppy, secret deals.
At the end of the day, this is about money and trust. The city runs schools on public cash. When contracts are chopped into secret pieces and senior officials dodge scrutiny, it’s not just bad accounting — it’s a betrayal. The Council should follow the paper trail hard, the Mayor should stop reflexively defending staff, and the Chancellor should answer straight questions in public. Anything less is just more of the same city-school theater New Yorkers have been paying for for years.
