The speaker of the New York City Council on Thursday ratcheted up pressure on the leader of the city’s public schools, accusing him of failing to comply with her request to provide copies of hundreds of contracts with outside companies and offering nothing but excuses.
In a scathing letter, Julie Menin, the speaker, told Kamar Samuels, the schools chancellor, that the city’s Department of Education had shown a “pattern of opacity, slow-walking and delay” in responding to her request, first made in March, for 579 contracts with companies that provide goods and services, including those that supply speech therapists and counselors. The department spends more than $12 billion a year on contracts.
Ms. Menin said that officials at the Department of Education — which has an annual budget of roughly $40 billion, the largest of any city agency — have blamed staffing shortages and technical challenges for the delay. She noted that the Council could subpoena the records from the department, which would represent a significant escalation in her efforts to obtain them.
“It strains all credulity to say that D.O.E. does not have the staff and technical ability to download these contracts into a file and make them available to the Council,” Ms. Menin wrote. “Downloading the contracts to a file and providing them to the Council should constitute no more than a few hours of work.”
Jenna Lyle, a spokeswoman for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, said that department officials had been working with the speaker’s office for months and had provided a list of companies with contracts and their dollar amounts.
Ms. Lyle said that the speaker’s request was especially burdensome and would require department lawyers to spend thousands of hours reviewing millions of pages of contracts in order to redact proprietary information.
“We have been clear that this would be an extremely laborious thing to do,” Ms. Lyle said. “It would require a massive amount of time in the legal office, and time would be better spent delivering for students.”
Mr. Samuels, who started in the position in January, has already faced scrutiny for his role in awarding a no-bid contract in his former role as superintendent of schools on Manhattan’s West Side. Some City Council members have become increasingly frustrated that the Department of Education has not been more forthcoming and have criticized Mr. Samuels’s leadership of the largest school district in the United States.
Ms. Menin sent a similar letter to him in early June, in which she chastised Mr. Samuels after the Department of Education missed her earlier deadline for providing the information. The agency has provided no contracts, she said, and has instead supplied summaries of some deals that were already publicly available. Of the 579 contracts she has requested, 352 of them were awarded without considering other bids.
In the latest letter, she said that at her meeting with department officials two weeks ago, they offered an additional reason for the delay, saying that they would have to notify companies with contracts and allow them to redact “sensitive information” before the documents could be released. Ms. Lyle said that department procedures involved such a review.
For months, Ms. Menin and another high-ranking Council member, Eric Dinowitz, who chairs the Council’s education committee, have turned their attention to no-bid contracts at the department and especially to those under $25,000, which receive the least oversight within the agency. The smaller deals are often approved by school principals without involving the central administration.
Their concerns took on greater urgency after The New York Times reported in June that Mr. Samuels’s handling of the no-bid contract in his previous role was being investigated. The inquiry was opened by the Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation, an independent watchdog that investigates fraud, corruption and misconduct at the Department of Education.
Mr. Samuels signed the $180,000 contract for foreign language instructors at several schools in Manhattan before the 2023-24 school year. The deal was renewed the next year and signed by his deputy superintendent, Mariela Graham.
In a previous inquiry, investigators scrutinized the renewal by Ms. Graham, who approved an installment structure that broke up payments into chunks of $25,000. But they did not look into Mr. Samuels, who had signed off on the same arrangement in the initial contract.
By doing that, Mr. Samuels avoided the department’s cumbersome rules that would have required him to consider multiple bids.
Investigators chastised Ms. Graham’s actions and recommended that her employment be terminated. She remains with the department and was recently promoted to a senior position. Ms. Graham has not responded to messages seeking comment.
Last month, Mr. Samuels acknowledged a “lapse in procedure” with his handling of the contract for foreign language instructors and said that his actions were “not for personal gain or to benefit anyone other than our schoolchildren.” Mr. Mamdani has repeatedly expressed his support for the chancellor.
