NYC schools deploy truancy officers to track student absences, leave the chancellor's own procurement file open.

…(cont) Here's what got me, though, and I promise this connects: when you call to dispute a toll, the very first thing they ask for is your account number. Before your name, before the amount, before anything. The account under review has to identify itself before it gets to complain about anybody else's. So I wondered, when the chancellor says he's going to hold DOE contracts accountable, does that promise come with an account number of its own? Because the same story that carried the accountability line carried this, a few sentences down: Samuels is himself under investigation. For procurement. Not a review, not an inquiry — the word the story used was investigation. Into contracts. Somewhere in that department there's a file with the chancellor's name on it, and the word for a file like that, the one still being looked at, is open.

Meantime — and I only found this out because I kept scrolling past the toll company's hold screen to kill time — that same department is putting attendance officers out on the street. Actual officers, to go find the students who make up the thirty-three percent who aren't showing up. A third of a classroom, missing every day, and the answer is to send somebody out to go look for what's unaccounted for.

I think that's the right instinct, honestly. Go find the thing that's supposed to be there and isn't. That's the whole idea behind sending somebody out. Check the roster, count who's missing, go get them.

I just keep circling back to the toll booth — sorry, I know I already brought this up — because before they'll help you with anything, they need your account number. They need to know what's still open on your side before they'll touch what's open on theirs. So if the department can spare people to go find a third of its own student body, one at a time, house by house, I'd think somebody over there already knows how to locate one file. His file. It's not lost. Nobody's out looking for it. It's just sitting there, open, the way a thing sits when nobody's closed it.

I never did get the toll people back today. Fourth transfer, then the call dropped. I'll try again tomorrow from the porch, where the bars are better.

Oh — excuse me, one more thing before you go. The procurement investigation into the chancellor's own contracts, the one that didn't come up when he announced the accountability plan. Is that file open or closed right now?

I already know. I just like hearing somebody else say it.

Open.