Financial irregularities cloud hangs over TWU Local 100

What’s worse? Stealing candy from a school kid, or stealing a prom experience from a teen?

Should we as members of TWU Local 100 give a pass to John Samuelsen about the current financial irregularities? The obvious and reasonable answer is no because how the credit cards were used in a laissez-faire manner. Imagine if a principal of a high school may have done both of the above, by allowing the general school fund normally used for things like senior trips, graduations and yearbooks to be used for other things. What would an average parent do? What will a local politician do? What would a New York State Comptroller do? What would the Chancellor of the Department of Education do? What would New York City Comptroller Office do? What would the Mayor of New York City do and say?

Just imagine what would their reports say? We will try to give you a sample ‘Based on significant control weaknesses identified by this audit, we conclude that ... it is likely that student funds have been stolen or misused’ - that is just a reasonable summary any reasonable person would make.

Now you can imagine what that type of audit would do to a high school. It would create a commotion, throw the whole school in disruption and probably the principal will resign in light of the preliminary findings. In addition students would be worried if they would ever receive their caps and gowns, graduation T shirts and yearbooks. Parents would put the blame on the principal for misuse of funds and what it has caused in dampening the students senior year. You can imagine the newspaper headlines ‘no caps, no gowns for graduating seniors’ you can fill with your own imagination. Now just imagine if the audit was able to track down how much was spent, if it was unable to discover how much was collected by the school in the first place and there were neither invoices nor receipts documenting many of the expenses. 

In addition imagine that this school also had tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills. Lets assume that the wrong-doing of the administrators may have been news to the graduating seniors while the current principal claimed the previous principal dating back was doing the same thing. Based on that the current principal demands a free pass and probably he would have the Parent Teachers Association (PTA) backing him up - a reasonable parent would conclude that something is rotten at that high school.

Can you imagine the Department of Education with its chancellor sweeping it under the rug? Or the New York City Comptroller Office ignoring financial mismanagement or misappropriated funds? Now that is just a hypothesis - now if we look at our TWU Local 100 does that ring a bell? Do you get the picture - imagine also if John Samuelsen was principal of that high school would he remain as principal? That is the question, we bet you know the answer.