The schools share a building at 154 West 93rd Street (Google Maps)
A complaint about a teacher working in two Upper West Side schools touched off an investigation that revealed improper DOE contracts signed by Kamar Samuels while he ran the Upper West Side’s District 3 — before he became the city’s schools chancellor in January, according to the New York Post.
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The teacher, Ralph F. Franco, was placed at the Manhattan School for Children and Community Action School — two schools that share a building at 154 West 93rd Street — in September 2024, then going by “Rafael,” the New York Post reported, citing a 2025 Special Commissioner of Investigation report. He’d been supplied by the Language Learning Network, a company run by Sean Kreyling that provides long-term foreign language teachers to schools. A whistleblower’s tip about Franco’s presence in the District 3 schools set the probe in motion, according to the report.Franco’s placement came despite a history that should have kept him out. A decade earlier, the Post reported, an SCI report substantiated allegations that Franco — then 54 and teaching at Kingsborough Early College Secondary School — made a sexual comment to a 15-year-old male student and touched him inside an empty room. Franco denied the allegations. He retired from the DOE under a March 2015 settlement barring him from future department work unless its human resources office signed off, a condition that failed to keep him out of a classroom nine years later, per the report. His teaching license remains active.
Kreyling told the Post he was unaware of Franco’s past, saying the DOE runs its own fingerprint screening that he cannot access and that he never saw any record of a ban. “As someone who was molested as a child, I would never knowingly send a predator into a school,” Kreyling told the paper, blaming the department for the quiet settlement.
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The investigation into Franco’s placement surfaced the contracting problems, according to the Post. A bombshell SCI report found that District 3 Deputy Superintendent Mariela Graham signed the deal with the Language Learning Network — which was not an approved DOE vendor — and arranged to split payments between two of Kreyling’s companies to evade financial oversight, the Post reported. A subsequent Post investigation found that Samuels had signed a similar arrangement with Kreyling the year before, and that emails obtained by the outlet show he knew about the check-splitting.Investigators recommended that the DOE blacklist Kreyling and all of his businesses, according to the report.
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