Word: alvarado
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...case has received wide attention not only because New York City supports the nation's largest school system but because Alvarado is no ordinary educator. Eleven months ago, he became the city's first Hispanic chancellor, after working educational magic as superintendent of East Harlem's Spanish-speaking District 4, one of the city's poorest sections. In just a decade, Alvarado's energy and imagination improved student performance dramatically and attracted talented teachers. He became known as an administrator who made fast decisions and had little use for bureaucracy. The only serious reservation about...
...chancellor, Alvarado increased his popularity among poor and working mothers by extending half-day kindergartens to full-day programs. He brought in volunteers and businessmen to work with city schools and began to combat the city's 45% dropout rate with pilot programs providing personal counseling for students. Says Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers...
...Alvarado's plans and actions reflected a real educator's concern for the schools...
...claimed that the chancellor solicited loans from District 4 employees "in a manner that was inherently coercive and frequently deceptive." His former secretary complained that she had made several loans to the chancellor, but had not been repaid. More damaging, investigators found that the eight school employees who lent Alvarado money had received a total of at least $65,000 in overtime pay in 1982 and 1983. They had in fact worked the hours, but most of the overtime earned was above the school district's average. To all this, Alvarado answered, "I never used public funds...
There was even more bad news in the investigators' report: $1,200 in unpaid parking tickets, 38 building-code violations on rental property owned by Alvarado, and failure to disclose personal debt and child-support payments in mortgage applications. The district attorneys in Brooklyn and Manhattan have reportedly begun investigations for possible criminal charges...