Report details improper pay to substitute teachers, teacher helping kids view porn

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Updated: February 6, 2012 9:37AM

Retired Chicago Public Schools teachers working as substitutes racked up $1.13 million in improper benefits between 2007 and 2011, while in a separate case, a teacher showed students how to bypass filters so that they could view pornography on school computers.

Those are just two findings — among dozens — included in the Office of the Inspector General’s 2011 report on investigations into possible waste, fraud, misconduct and financial mismanagement in Chicago public education.

The new report says the school district improperly paid the retired teachers for holiday, vacation and sick time when they worked as substitute teachers.

Retirees serving as substitutes are only entitled to a fixed day’s pay, not any of the other benefits, under the collective bargaining agreement between the Chicago Teachers Union and CPS, according to the report. But CPS’s payroll system didn’t prevent the extra payments to retirees.

Inspector General James Sullivan recommends the district tighten its controls and try to recover money improperly paid.

A CPS spokeswoman blamed a computer coding error that has since been fixed and said the district is “in the process of recouping those payments.”

In another investigation detailed in the report, a teacher allegedly “touched the genital area of a male student by running his fingers down the zipper of the student’s pants.” To “buy the student’s silence,” the teacher gave him a bag of Snickers candy bars. The same teacher allegedly showed students how to use “proxy servers to circumvent CPS computer filters and access pornography in class using CPS classroom computers.”

The teacher later resigned from his job, but it was unclear whether he was ever prosecuted.

The report states that because current CPS efforts to prevent access to pornography can easily be defeated, there’s “a very high risk that CPS students and staff are regularly accessing pornographic websites via the CPS server system.”

Elsewhere, the report details numerous instances of alleged employee theft, including a “central office manager” who used CPS funds to buy champagne, condoms, flowers and a king-size mattress — among other things.

One elementary school teacher used his CPS e-mail account to solicit sex partners on Craigslist for him and his girlfriend, according to the report. The teacher received a six-day suspension.

The inspector general’s report describes one CPS substitute teacher who’d been arrested six times for shoplifting. The woman told investigators that she successfully shoplifts between 50 and 150 times before she is caught.

A spokeswoman for CPS said the report’s findings are both “serious and disappointing.”

“We are already taking necessary corrective actions and additional steps to implement accountability measures throughout the system to ensure that proper protocols and procedures are met,” said the spokeswoman, Marielle Sainvilus.

“We have a responsibility to maintain public trust and as we continue to work towards providing every student with a high quality education that prepares them for college and career, we will hold everyone accountable in that process who do not work in the best interest of our students.”

Contributing: AP