Last Day for Teachers Living Outside City To Come Clean if Children Are in City Schools

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The New York Sun

Today is the last chance for employees of city schools who live outside the five boroughs to come clean and tell the Department of Education if their children are enrolled in city schools.


In the last month, 122 employees have come forward to take advantage of a one-month grace period in which they can ‘fess up and pay the tuition they owe without facing disciplinary action.


The department kicked off the amnesty program at the end of last month after the embattled principal of Brooklyn Technical High School, Lee McCaskill, resigned following the discovery that he used a web of falsified documents to send his 9-year-old daughter to P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, even though he lived in New Jersey.


The Department of Education also reassigned Mr. McCaskill’s wife, Cathy Furman, a teacher at Boys and Girls High School, and is seeking to terminate her contract.


The highly publicized case raised concerns among other teachers, principals, and administrators, some of whom quietly stepped forward to ask about how to clean their slate. “Nobody knows who they are, and we will not pursue disciplinary action against them,” a spokesman for the Department of Education, David Cantor, said about employees who take advantage of the amnesty program.


Those employees must immediately pay up for this school year and can either pay for past years immediately or get on a payment plan. In exchange, their identities will not be disclosed, although the department may release a breakdown by position.


After today, any non-resident employee who is found to be sending a child to a public school without paying tuition will face normal disciplinary actions.


Currently, only three students who live outside the city pay to attend local schools.


The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said she is in favor of the amnesty program, but is concerned about teachers who didn’t lie about their address and didn’t know they were breaking the rules.


“To ask people who never deceived anybody to pay back tuition for years and years when they didn’t know what the rules were, is unfair,” Ms Weingarten said. “With McCaskill, there was out-and-out fraud and deception … that’s very different than people who tell people from the getgo what their address is – and there’s never been an issue about it until this moment.”


The New York Sun

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