Old allegations raise new questions at JFK

By Kate Pastor

What took them so long?

That’s the question irking some observers in the wake of the New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli’s June report that found John F. Kennedy High School Principal Anthony Rotunno had allowed the school’s general fund to be misused.

Though the findings were shocking to some, they merely confirmed the most sinister suspicions of others. Allegations of misdeeds, including theft and tampering with transcripts and tests to raise graduation rates, had been brought to the attention of authorities before.

In fact, there is a history of complaints going back years, according to Lynne Winderbaum, a UFT chapter leader and teacher at Kennedy from 1994 to 2003 who later served as the union’s Bronx High School District Representative from 2003 to 2009.

On June 25, after the Comptroller’s report was released, Ms. Winderbaum published an account of previous complaints made by school personnel on the blog JD718. She recounted an allegation from another former UFT chapter leader stating Mr. Rotunno had misappropriated funds.

The Special Commissioner of Investigation for the New York City School District, a unit of the city’s Department of Investigation, looked into a 2004 misappropriation allegation, but it was not substantiated.

Additionally, a 2005 complaint alleged that transcripts had been tampered with by an assistant principal at Kennedy to help students graduate, Ms. Winderbaum said. The irregularities led counselors to review all students on the August graduation list, finding abnormalities on about one-third of the transcripts. The counselors reported their findings to the principal, according to Ms. Winderbaum, who said she made a complaint to officials. The case is still open.

“Our lawyers are very thorough,” Marge Feinberg, spokeswoman for the Department of Education said by way of explanation for the time the investigation has taken.

The complaint about regents tampering filed the same year was investigated and the complaint found to be unsubstantiated, Ms. Feinberg said.

Responding to Ms. Winderbaum’s blog post, Patrick Sullivan, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s representative on the Panel on Educational Policy that oversees the Depar tment of Education, is now looking at how the Department of Education’s Office of Special Investigations and the Special Commissioner of Investigation do their jobs.

“Clearly, there’s a histor y of issues here, and only when they came to the state did they come to light,” Mr. Sullivan said.

He said his office regularly fields complaints from teachers about investigations that were never concluded or in which the DOE did not take action — especially in the areas of cheating and financial corruption.

According to Mr. Sullivan, while the law that established the office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation requires that reports be given to the Panel, they are only forwarded to the schools chancellor’s office. Of the Office of Special Investigation he said, “I’ve never seen anything from them either.”

SCI spokes woman Laurel Wright confirmed that the reports are not shared.

Mr. Sullivan said he is currently engaged in preliminar y discussions on how to investigate the way school probes are conducted and is working with Jesse Mojica, director of Education and Youth in the Bronx borough president’s office, since incidents at JFK served as the impetus for the scrutiny.

At Kennedy, the basis for complaints and the seeming unwillingness to address them helped contribute to the school’s deterioration, Ms. Winderbaum said.

“I think under [Mr. Rotunno’s] reign, a lot of the longtime teachers with Kennedy in their blood left the school,” she said, noting that “it was built to be the Riverdale school” but is a “shadow of what it was.”

The school was recently listed as being among 23 “persistently low achieving” city schools, and is likely to begin being phased out in the fall of 2011. Smaller schools that were recently started on the John F. Kenned Campus would not face closure.