Wife of Principal Accused of Lying About Residence May be Ousted Too

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The New York Sun

A week after the beleaguered principal of Brooklyn Technical High School retired from his post – amid allegations that he was sending his daughter to a public school in Brooklyn despite living in New Jersey – the city’s Department of Education called for the termination of his wife’s contract.


Yesterday, the special commissioner of investigation for the city schools, Richard Condon, released a detailed report that implicates the principal, Lee McCaskill, and his wife, Cathy Furman, a veteran social science teacher at Boys and Girls High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant.


Mr. McCaskill, who had headed Brooklyn Technical, one of the city’s elite high schools, for almost 20 years, reached a deal last week to step down and pay $19,441 in restitution for tuition he should have paid for his daughter to attend elementary school for the past four years. In exchange, the department agreed not to bring disciplinary charges against him.


Ms. Furman may not get off so easy.


The Department of Education announced yesterday that it had removed Ms. Furman from her teaching post and would seek to terminate her teaching contract.


Ms. Furman did not return a call to Boys and Girls High School yesterday.


The 14-page report released yesterday concludes a four-month investigation by Mr. Condon’s office into the case that included stakeouts and extensive interviews and unveiled a trail of falsified documents.


The McCaskills, who live in Piscataway, N.J., obtained a variance to send their 9-year-old daughter to the highly regarded P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The principal of the school, Melanie Woods, told investigators that she granted the variance to him as a “professional courtesy,” but said she thought the family lived in New York City.


While Ms. Woods claimed she only dealt with Mr. McCaskill, Ms. Furman told investigators that she enrolled their daughter.


“I enrolled her. I’m the only one who had anything to do with enrolling her,” Ms. Furman told investigators.


Mr. McCaskill provided a Brooklyn address that can be linked to a “family friend,” according to testimony provided by Ms. Furman.


In November, investigators followed the family driving in their green Ford between their home in New Jersey and Brooklyn.


Interviewed under oath, Mr. Mc-Caskill said his family had “both a Brooklyn and New Jersey address.” Investigators said that Mr. Mc-Caskill, in an effort to prove he in fact resided in Brooklyn, provided a copy of a lease supposedly starting October 1, 2002. However, it was printed on a document dated 2004. Investigators have referred the case to the Brooklyn and Manhattan district attorney’s offices.


Both Mr. McCaskill and Ms. Furman traded in their New York driver’s licenses in 1997 for ones from New Jersey. While they have not voted in the city since the early 1990s, they both voted in New Jersey as recently as last November.


Mr. McCaskill, who was notorious for clashing with teachers during his tenure at Brooklyn Tech, immediately left his post last week, but will continue to collect his $125,282 salary until the end of August, as part of a deal brokered with the city.


Over the years, teachers have complained about management problems at the school and criticized Mr. McCaskill for, among other things, heavily censoring the student newspaper and canceling popular classes.


Last year, Mr. McCaskill came under fire when he gave an “unsatisfactory” rating to a teacher after she spoke critically about him in the teachers union newspaper. He also gave an “unsatisfactory” rating to a veteran teacher for assigning Russell Banks’s “Continental Drift,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist that Mr. McCaskill called pornographic, while he allowed another teacher to use a novel with graphic sex.


Mr. Condon yesterday questioned why the city brokered a deal with Mr. McCaskill before viewing the investigation’s findings.


“We had no idea how long the investigation would go on or what the findings would be,” a spokesman for the Department of Education, David Cantor, said. “Meanwhile, you have a school that is already somewhat unstable with regard to its principal, and that situation could become really disruptive, and it was a big priority to maintain the stability of the school and the students in it.”


The New York Sun

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