Not only does the New York City Department of Education pay very well, some employees get to collect salaries without actually showing up for work.
According to a report from Special Commissioner of Investigations Richard Condon, DOE lost track of at least three employees in recent years; they simply stopped reporting to work for months at a time — yet still got paid.
As of this past summer, all three are finally no longer with DOE.
But the fact that they all managed to stay on the payroll (one for as long as 20 months) while not working shows again why DOE seems to house the most pampered public employees in the city:
* Rita Anderson took advantage of DOE confusion over her workers-compensation eligibility to continue collecting full salary for 18 months, despite not working.
* Janet Strobel, a Queens school shrink, developed “emotional distress” herself and just stopped showing up for work — but got paid $108,000 over a year.
* Maegan Henriquez-Ford, a teacher who requested leave but was turned down, nonetheless got paid without working for 20 months, collecting $115,000.
The latter two were both part of the notorious Absent Teacher Reserve — which includes teachers yanked out of the classroom but paid to sit around.
Rubber-roomers, in other words.
Three such free-riders in a 110,000-plus workforce may seem minuscule — but Condon says he has no way of knowing if he got them all.
Despite his request for a written protocol for tracking employees, Condon wrote, “The problem continues, and the DOE has not reported a plan to correct it.”
Sure, DOE says that the incidents represented “unique situations” that have been since resolved — but without a protocol, how does it really know?
How does anybody know?
Some things can’t be taken on faith.