She was fired from her job of 10 years over a lousy $ 3.28.
While teachers keep their positions after far more egregious offenses, the Department of Education kicked veteran parent coordinator Maria Torres to the curb because she used a DOE tax-exempt form on a $ 37 personal purchase, saving $ 3.28 in sales tax.
Torres, who worked at East Harlem’s Mosaic Preparatory Academy, was fired from the elementary school in July after an investigation of the January purchase, according to a report issued by the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board.
Torres told The Post she was never even asked about the transaction by Mosaic Principal Lisette Caesar and didn’t know about the COIB probe until it was finished.
“I was completely blindsided,” said Torres, who claimed the questionable purchase was an error on the part of a Bronx store clerk.
The COIB probe was launched after Torres and her daughter-in-law went to a Bronx dollar store in January, buying books, art supplies and other items that Torres routinely distributes to the kids at the “school store” as rewards for excellence.
She said she used the school’s tax-exempt code for a $ 51 purchase she made, handing the paperwork to the clerk, who kept the document.
She said her daughter-in-law then made her own purchase of about $ 27 for items she planned to donate to a Mosaic school-trip fund-raiser, and asked for another $ 10 cash back on the debit-card purchase. It is that purchase that got Torres canned.
“We had no clue the clerk put that purchase through on my tax-exempt. I did not present it to the clerk,” Torres said. “We paid in separate transactions. I didn’t even find out it had happened until I saw the COIB report. I was floored.”
Her firing stunned parents, who said she is a committed, outspoken advocate for them and their kids.
Hector Nazario, president of Community Education Council 4, said Torres, who was paid $ 36,127 a year, came with parents to meetings and didn’t hold back discussing the school’s problems.
Several parents said Caesar and former superintendent Luz Cortazzo was furious that Torres dared air their issues in public.
“She came multiple other times to my meetings, but with other parents, for the last two years. Then she stopped,” Nazario said.
“She had to stop because they started making her job a little hard,” Nazario said. “They took her office away from her . . . They demoted her in many, many ways internally. Every time she showed up to a CEC meeting, she would get reprimanded to a certain degree back at work.”
Torres believes her firing was retaliatory. “It was a vendetta,” the mom of four said. “This was solely a way for [Caesar] to get me where she wanted me This is her payback, her way of getting back at me.”
Torres said Caesar began “targeting” her after she alerted union reps to questionable Mosaic practices, including vacation-time disputes and Caesar’s practice of hiring parent advocates as personal secretaries and lunch aides.
She said her firing “is just such a slap in the face. It’s madness.”
A COIB rep said it was the DOE’s decision to fire Torres.
DOE sources said the accusation against Torres was “substantiated.”
Neither Caesar nor the DOE responded to requests for comment.
Yahoo Local News – New York Post
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=16341
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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