Betsy Combier
"Principal Linda Hill and "Berta Bucks" (Monday, May 7, 2012)
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| Linda Hill |
Dreyfus Intermediate principal under investigation for
alleged procurement violations
Dreyfus Intermediate principal Linda Hill is accused of exceeding purchasing limits on her Department of Education-issued Procurement Card or P-Card by splitting up payments made to the same vendor.
A copy of Ms. Hill's P-Card statement shows five transactions with a single vendor, The Pin Man, on Sept. 17, 2010.
None of the purchase orders exceeded $1,500 individually, but in total summed to $6,390, or more than twice the single P-Card transaction limit of $2,500 noted in the Department of Education's Procurement Card instructional guide.
"It is impermissible to attempt to circumvent the purchasing thresholds by making multiple awards to the same vendor within the same fiscal year (also referred to as 'split purchase orders')," the DOE's standard operating procedure guide for Other Than Personal Service (OTPS) expenditures states.
A 2010-2011 fiscal year audit of the school found that Ms. Hill's invoice was split for payment purposes. Ms. Hill's explanation for the subversion, according to the audit, was that she had received approval to split the payment, although she could not locate documentation of that approval.
She said she would not split payments in the future, according to the audit report.
Former Dreyfus science and technology teacher Francesco Portelos, who recently reported the allegations against Ms. Hill to DOE's Office of Special Investigation, asserts that the payments went to purchase flash drives that were later sold to students for $10 apiece.
Ms. Hill did not return a message for comment.
Portelos also was the impetus behind the department's investigation into Ms. Hill's overtime billing.
Portelos was removed from the classroom in 2012, while under investigation for dozens of misconduct complaints initiated by Ms. Hill, and whiled away in a rubber room for two years. In April 2014, an independent arbitrator found Portelos guilty on 11 of the 38 charges brought against him and recommended a $10,000 fine, but denied the DOE's request to terminate him and ruled that he could return to the classroom.
Rather than return him to Dreyfus, however, the DOE placed Portelos in its Absent Teacher Reserve pool, where he remains today, substituting for absent teachers at schools across the borough.
Dreyfus Intermediate principal double-billed district for overtime, DOE investigation finds
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- An internal investigation into Dreyfus Intermediate School principal Linda Hill's workplace timesheets has found that the longtime school administrator repeatedly clocked in for overtime she didn't work, a Department of Education spokesperson confirmed.
Ms. Hill, the principal at Dreyfus for the past decade, was accused of filing timesheets indicating she was supervising the Dreyfus Achieve Now Academy, an after-school program aimed at getting at-risk students back on track, while she was actually attending monthly School Leadership Team meetings.
In January 2012, a colleague accused her of collecting simultaneous overtime for both activities on multiple occasions. The Department of Education's Office of Special Investigation launched an investigation into the claims a short time later.
OSI substantiated the charges against Ms. Hill approximately 2.5 years later, in mid-2014, emails provided by the whistleblower show.
A Department of Education spokesperson, who declined to specify the amount of money Ms. Hill bilked from the district, said disciplinary action against her is pending.
She remains the school's acting principal.
Ms. Hill earned a salary of $143,764 in 2013. Payroll records show that she took home an average of more than $11,000 in per session fees (overtime) in 2010 and 2011, before the allegations of her double dipping surfaced. Her overtime pay dropped nearly 20 percent to $9,295 in 2013
Thank you for posting this information. Let's see how Ms. Farina chooses to handle her former intern.
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