By Matt Rooney
The LD24 legislative team – State Senator Parker Space, Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia, and Assemblyman Mike Inganamort – wrote to U.S Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Tuesday requesting a formal federal probe of Newark Public Schools. Specifically, the notoriously corrupt school district’s possible misuse of Covid funding.
“Newark Public Schools received approximately $287 million in federal COVID relief funding to address pandemic-related learning loss. Newark serves a student population overwhelmingly designated at-risk due to economic factors; these are precisely the students these federal funds were intended to support,” the trio wrote to the DOE. “Yet reporting reflects weak oversight, limited transparency, and spending decisions that are not clearly tied to measurable academic improvement.”
Among the concerns? “15,803 students were recommended for tutoring, yet reportedly only 1,938 actually received it” and “a $1.4 million contract in September 2023 for a literacy consultant funded in part through federal COVID relief dollars,” but “[n]early a year later, the consultant acknowledged that the work never began.”
The full letter is embedded below:
