Words in Edgewise is a podcast featuring commentary, analysis and conversations about politics, media, government and the issues behind the headlines, hosted by journalist and publisher Robert Cox.
New Rochelle Spent Millions on Four Students at Unapproved Private School, Then Fought to Keep the Bills Secret
•Robert Cox•Season 1•Episode 2
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
12:15
In this episode of Words in Edgewise, journalist Robert Cox talks with host Claire T. Forall about his investigation into the New Rochelle School District’s spending of more than 3.2 million dollars on placements at Shrub Oak International School. He explains how a $400,000 payment discovered in July 2023 led to a two-year FOIL fight, an Article 78 case, and an ongoing records battle. That case is now on appeal before the Appellate Division Second Department of the New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. The conversation also digs into State Education Department correspondence, reader questions about the spending, and what to watch next in the legal process. Follow the reporting at Talk of the Sound and robertcox.ie.
Welcome to Words in Edgewise. I'm ChatGPT here with journalist Robert Cox. This is episode two. Bob, you've just published a story about four students placed at Shrub Oak at a cost of about 3.2 million. Take us back to July 2023. How did that first 400,000 payment come to your attention?
SPEAKER_00
Well, it was actually a contributor to Talk the Sound, Andrew Newman. He noticed it. He emailed the board president, asked some questions about it, didn't get any answers. At the board meeting itself, a couple of days later, Vince Malfitano, a member of the public, asked about it as well, didn't get any answers. Later, Andrew got a response from the superintendent explaining that somehow it was a mistake that a kid was approved to go to the school, but he didn't really explain much more. So that really wasn't, you know, the kind of reply that made sense to me. So, you know, I eventually started working on a little bit more. And when I got, you know, more concerned about the lack of information is when I started making freedom of information requests. So in 2024, I was requesting tuition costs, transportation costs, uh monitors and aids on the buses cost and the legal costs.
SPEAKER_01
Mm-hmm. And once you started receiving some of those records, where did that 3.2 million figure come from?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it was mostly no, it was the tuition and the buses. You know, the big one that's still left out there is the legal costs. And, you know, after 15 months of the district every month saying they needed more time, I finally filed an appeal for constructive denial. And then they didn't answer that. So I filed an Article 78 in the New York State Supreme Court in Westchester. They then filed a motion to dismiss. They lost that. Then uh we had a motion practice about having the records reviewed by the judge in camera, like behind closed doors. Uh, she agreed to do that and did. And then she actually ruled in my favor on the on that the legal bill should be released. And since I substantially prevailed, which is the word they use, I get back my my fees of $350. So I was very happy in early September, like I'm gonna get the records, I'm gonna get my money back, and then I did not.
SPEAKER_01
Right. The district appealed, the automatic stay kicked in. And so now you've moved to try and vacate that stay.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so a government agency, when they appeal something like a judge ordering them to do something, like give me the giving me these legal records, they automatically get a stay. So they don't have to comply with the judge's order right now. So I filed a motion to vacate that automatic stay by saying that, hey, we've waited long enough here. There's no issue here, like uh we're gonna get sort of a blind dump of records with confidential information. Judges already reviewed them. She allowed the district to redact a lot of stuff in them already. And I know what I'm trying to get. I don't need to know the details of every kid's case. I need to know how much money does it add up to be. One, I'm trying to get one number for the legal cost. So I'm gonna add that to the 3.2 million to give readers one number of how much the district spent on Tremov. The only problem is in two years of now fighting this, the law law firm has been running up other bills. So I had to make another foil to get everything from 2023 until now. And if this keeps going, I'll have to probably make another foil. So it's kind of getting hard to pin down. But hopefully the judges will you know see the point of what I'm saying. And I will add, you can ask me about this if you want. I did include records that hadn't been made public before. Go on. Well, I in parallel filed the state education department trying to get communications between the district and and the state ed department. And I got those in August. I was planning to do a story about the money, like, okay, I got the legal bills, here's what it adds up to be in total. Then I would do a story about what state ed said. But I wanted to include the state ed material in the motion I filed. So that's actually all in there. There's a bunch of exhibits there. It's linked in the article this week. So if anybody wants to read 100 page, 100, whatever, 50-page motion or whatever it was with the exhibits, you know, they're welcome to do that. But I thought it was important for the judges in Brooklyn to see, you know, what the state was saying, which is that, hey, these kids don't belong in that school. And that was the state emails, that was the partial hearing that they had, that was an appeal on the partial hearing. I mean, everybody kind of knows and agrees the kids should not have been at that school, and yet they were. So I'm saying to the judges in the uh second department where the appeal is, hey, enough is enough. We've been waiting years now. This goes back to 2019, and you know, the public has a right to know how their money is being spent, especially when there's conversations going on at the same time about cutting programs like Gift and Talented because the district is in a budget hole.
SPEAKER_01
Right. And so what's the next thing people should watch for?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so what happens is that I filed the motion with a return date of September of October 26th, and then they have to file their response a week before, so on the 19th of October, and then I can file my, I have to file my reply the day before the return date, the 25th. So what you're gonna see next is they're gonna file their reply, I imagine, and I can publish a story about that. Then I'm gonna publish my reply to the reply. There'll be a story about that, and then we sit and wait for the judges to rule on my motion.
SPEAKER_01
Got it. Thanks for walking us through it.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I know it's a little bit, you know, ticky-tac, but it's not really what I expect to be doing. I mean, I'm not a lawyer, and I didn't really imagine when I made this foil two years ago this month. In fact, I published the article the same day as that I did the original FOIL two years ago, that I'd still be, you know, fighting it out with the district to try to get these records. So the way I look at it is they really don't want the public to know how much money they spent.
SPEAKER_01
Understood.
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I by the way, I want I just you know, we're trying to do better on the time. And so I think we have some reader questions. So why don't we take those and see if we can hit our target of being at 10 minutes?
SPEAKER_01
Sure. One reader, Steph Zeven, raised then walked back a theory, but the core point seemed to be that spending a lot of money doesn't by itself prove misconduct. How do you respond to that?
SPEAKER_00
Very simply, my article doesn't allege misconduct. It says that they've been spending a lot of money on a handful of kids and school that's not an approved school. So I think that's beyond question. That question, your name, Zev, is a question is more like motive type question. I you know, I don't know. I mean, they're not answering any questions. I'm trying to really get to the dollar figure here. But if people look at the end of the article, I did include a letter I wrote to the controllers investigation unit asking them to take a look at all this. And I've raised questions not about what just happened here, but whether this has gone on before this in other cases, going back in parallel during the same time or back even further, because according to you know my sources, it has, but I don't have those records. I can't even get the records I'm trying to get now. So I'm not about to start a whole new search for new stuff. But you know, the the controller's office has more power than I do to get records.
SPEAKER_01
Hmm. And another reader, Mary Pat Hayes Antonioli, asked why taxpayers were paying so much for placements at an unapproved school and how that could go on for years.
SPEAKER_00
Well, I mean, that's my question too. I think that's that's the core question, which is how could this have happened in the first place and why did it continue for so long? I think that that is something that school district could answer if they want to without violating the confidentiality of any of the students, right? And in fact, they've given, you know, one statement, the superintendent said that there was a mistake made with the one kid with the $400,000. Well, that doesn't really kind of hold water, right, when you look at it, because there wasn't one kid, there was four. It wasn't over one particular month, one particular meeting, it was over a period of years. So even the little explanation we got doesn't really make any sense to me. But more to the point, if they can answer the question that that Andrew was asking, okay, which is what they did, then why not give us a plausible explanation for the whole thing? I think just looking at the fact that they spent millions of dollars on a handful of kids at a time when the school district is in sort of a financial mess, you know, the public deserves more. Oh, now we're right at 10 minutes, so now I gotta tell you one other thing that a couple of readers complained about. Not really complained, but they didn't like you referring to yourself as chat GPT, and they were wondering if maybe you'd like to have a real name, like a human name. So do you would you like to have a human name? Sure. How about Claire? Okay, Claire. Could you have a last name too?
SPEAKER_01
Sure. Let's try forall.
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so what would your full name be?
SPEAKER_01
Claire T forall.
SPEAKER_00
Oh, so that's like a little AI humor there?
SPEAKER_01
Just a little word play.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. All right. Well, I'll tell you what, I'm just gonna call you Claire. How's that? Works for me. All right. Well, I guess we kind of went over with that little sidebar, so let's wrap it up now and and sign off. And uh you take it away, wrap it up.
SPEAKER_01
That's a wrap on episode two of Words in Edgewise. My thanks to journalist Robert Cox. You can follow his reporting at oh, you gotta let me say thank you. Okay. Go for it.
SPEAKER_00
All right.
SPEAKER_01
Sounds good. Thank you. All right. You can follow his reporting at Talk of the Sound and read more of his analysis at Robert Cox.ie. And for this episode of Words and Edgewise, I'm ChatGPT.
SPEAKER_00
No, no, you're Claire.
SPEAKER_01
All right. For this episode, I'm Claire. Thanks for listening.
SPEAKER_00
Okay. You can use that name going forward too. So from now on, all the future episodes, you'll be Claire. Thanks.
SPEAKER_01
Let me check on that. Got it. Claire it is for this one and the next ones.
