School workers' families took Disney trip meant for homeless students

New York: A half-dozen New York City school system employees took their children or grandchildren to Disney World, New Orleans and other destinations by exploiting a program intended for homeless students, investigators said in a report released this month.

The trips were meant as "enrichment opportunities," attendance incentives and rewards for academic achievement for students living in shelters and other temporary housing, according to the report by the special commissioner of investigation for the city's public schools.

The abuse of the grant-funded program was led by Linda Wilson, who at the time was the Queens manager for the Department of Education office that supports homeless students, the report says. As many as 1 in 9 of the city's roughly 1 million public school students are homeless.

Wilson, who supervised about 20 employees, took her daughters on some of the trips and encouraged several workers she supervised to do so as well but to keep the activities secret, the report says.

"What happens here stays with us," she told one employee, according to the report.

Wilson and others forged the signatures of homeless students' parents as part of the scheme, and she used a nonprofit organization to arrange the trips to evade Department of Education oversight, the report says.

"Few of the homeless students listed on the trip paperwork actually attended the trips," the report says, although at least in the case of the Disney World trip, some homeless students did attend. One person interviewed by investigators told them "he had to beg" Wilson to allow him to add two of his students to the trip, the report says.

Wilson could not be reached Tuesday. In an interview with The New York Post, which first reported the investigation, she denied that she had taken her daughters on the outings or had suggested that others do the same, and she called the inquiry by the special commissioner, Anastasia Coleman, "a witch hunt."

The trips in question, which also included travel to Boston, Washington, DC, and upstate New York and to at least one Broadway show, happened from 2016-19.

A Department of Education spokesperson, Jenna Lyle, noted that the abuses occurred before the current chancellor, David C. Banks, took the helm of the nation's largest public school system.

Still, Lyle said, "this kind of behavior is unacceptable, and all staff identified in this report are no longer employed by New York City Public Schools." The department has taken steps to prevent such misconduct in the future, she added.

Most of the trips included about half a dozen Department of Education staff members as chaperones and one or two buses carrying about 30 students apiece, the report says.

Several of the trips were supposed to be college tours, but the students and those accompanying them never visited the campuses, according to the report. In one instance, the report says, a group that included Wilson and one of her daughters ate lunch at Syracuse University in June 2018 but did not tour the school and traveled to Niagara Falls instead.

The special commissioner's inquiry began in 2019 after a whistleblower's tip, and the report detailing the investigators' findings was issued in January 2023. It was released Sept. 9 after administrative actions against Wilson and the other employees became final, the special commissioner's office said Tuesday.

In addition to the Department of Education, the investigators' findings were referred to the city's Conflicts of Interest Board.

In a settlement with the board last month, one of the employees, Mishawn Jack, admitted taking her two daughters to the Broadway show "Wicked" and on a trip to Washington in 2016, using slots meant for students living "in a shelter, a car, a park or an abandoned building."