NYC schools chancellor promises contract 'accountability' while under investigation for his own contract dealings

…(cont) The liaison's office had a bench outside it and a phone number taped to the door — a different number than the one on the directory downstairs — and I called it three times on my own phone before anyone picked up on theirs. Fourth try got a recording. I stopped after three. I'm not saying that's how it goes. I'm saying that's how it went for me, three times, on a Tuesday, on that bench.

While I sat there, someone came out of Compliance with a folder and asked if I was there about the Brooklyn school. I said which Brooklyn school. They said the one with the principal — parents had been asking for years to get her removed, nothing happened, and the chancellor's name kept coming up in what didn't happen. No paper on that one either. They just knew it the way people who've worked in a building a long time know things about the building.

It was only at the contracting window, on my way out — past Compliance, past School Governance, past the plants — that anybody handed me anything. A printed page. The chancellor's own statement, dated the thirteenth of this month, promising what he called a total overhaul of how the department buys things. Accountability is the word he used. I've got it right here — well, I had it. It's in the car, in the glovebox, under the fan belt receipt I still haven't filed.

Fourteen days. Nobody at the two windows that handed me anything today mentioned that part. I found it in a different stack, at a different desk, on a different visit. It isn't hidden. It's just not where the announcement was.

Here's a question the receipts answer, since I'm not in a position to: does a school where parents spent years asking to remove one principal, sitting inside a department whose chancellor is promising contract accountability from the middle of his own contract probe, share anything besides a building and a chain of command? I think a person holding both pages can tell you that faster than I can.

I was halfway to the parking structure when somebody came out the side door after me — badge, lanyard, didn't catch the title — and said, "Excuse me. Before you go — you didn't come here about the contracts, did you." I said I thought I had. They said, "No. You came here about whether the man promising to watch the money is the same man they're watching." I told them I hadn't put it that way. They said most people don't, until somebody says it to them on a loading dock. I wrote it down. Couldn't find the pen for a second. Then I found it, in the glovebox, next to the fan belt receipt, next to the page.