Manhattan principal under investigation for smearing chapter leader

Dave Sanders

UFT District 79 Representative Marc Korashan (left) with Chapter Leader Michael McPherrin outside Independence HS, where Principal Ron Smolkin (inset) "is the biggest obstacle to the school’s success."

Principal Ron Smolkin

Principal Ron Smolkin’s relations with staff at Manhattan’s Independence HS were always frosty, teachers say. But they turned arctic last spring after the school’s faculty leadership team made a series of ambitious recommendations on safety, teaching, guidance, consensus and collegiality.

The team never got a reply or even an acknowledgment from the principal. As Chapter Leader Michael McPherrin put it, “Smolkin refuses to discuss plans and leadership style. He even takes suggestions as a personal affront. He goes after those he sees as disloyal; questioning his policies is to enter a world of pain.”

He also apparently plays payback — as a sequence of events reported by the media in late March suggests.

McPherrin, a leading member of the faculty leadership team, got a big surprise when his co-op board received an anonymous letter charging him with sex and drug crimes. With copies sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as well as the FBI and the IRS, the letter declared that McPherrin and his “undocumented” partner were engaged in “spreading disease” and “unsafe sex with underaged boys.”

An independent handwriting analyst hired by McPherrin found it “highly likely” that the author of the hand-addressed envelope was Smolkin.

In late summer, McPherrin got a second surprise, when his classroom at the West Midtown campus was trashed. It was the only classroom in the school so destroyed, McPherrin said. Since December, McPherrin has received five letters in his file. Prior to last spring, he had received none.

Now Smolkin is under investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for aggravated criminal harassment, and the state’s Human Rights Commission is also conducting a probe. McPherrin has filed a harassment complaint against Smolkin under Article 23 of the contract.

As the New York Teacher went to press, McPherrin reported that Smolkin had filed 3020a dismissal charges against him for unprofessional conduct.

Smolkin has been principal at the two-campus transfer alternative high school (a smaller campus is housed in the West Village) since the spring of 2004. The school educates 425 overage, under-credited students who have aged out of their class cohort or dropped out.

McPherrin says the principal’s relationship with the staff is “poisonous.”

“He’s the biggest obstacle to the school’s success,” McPherrin says. “He operates in terms of who’s in and who’s out.”

The six other teachers at Independence HS interviewed for this article, all on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, confirmed that Smolkin is widely viewed as remote, divisive and vindictive.

McPherrin and other staffers said the school is not safe for students and staff alike. There is gang activity and drugs are used openly, said the chapter leader, “usually near the LYFE center,” which houses infants and toddlers of students.

McPherrin and others accuse Smolkin of underreporting safety incidents and not enforcing discipline. “He won’t take a stand because he’s afraid that if he does, attendance will drop,” one teacher said.

Since December, McPherrin has filed five union safety complaints, charging Smolkin with having no meaningful student removal process, making no effort to deter student texting in class, not supervising the school’s vendor-run after-school program, and refusing to hold safety committee meetings for his school.

Staffers say it’s no coincidence that the academic performance of the students is suffering. Independence HS received another C on its most recent School Progress Report, but there is a widespread belief among faculty that Smolkin fiddled with the parent survey results to avoid an F. The school received an F in student performance and a C in student progress, but somehow pulled off a near-perfect score on the Learning Environment Survey to earn an A in school environment. Staff noticed that the returns showed the number of parent responses exceeded the number of parents who picked up surveys.

Smolkin keeps parents at arm’s length, too. He has done as little as he can to create a school leadership team. Only after staff complained to the superintendent did he move the team meetings to a time more convenient to parents.

Marc Korashan, the UFT’s alternative high schools district representative, blasts the DOE for not riding herd on Smolkin. In an email letter to Manhattan HS Superintendent Elaine Gorman, Korashan said that the principal “continues to make veiled threats about reorganizing the school and putting people out of jobs. His attitude toward staff remains dismissive or threatening. It seems clear that [the principal] does not want an active parent body or an effective SLT looking at what is happening in the school.”

Korashan’s email letter concludes: “The question remains: When does administration step in to support the school and not the principal?”

Gorman and a representative from network leader Sumita Kaufhold’s office met in February with 12 staff members at their request, but so far neither official has intervened.

“This kind of support for a principal who is leading a school to fail is something we’ve seen time and again with this DOE,” said Korashan. “If Independence HS is put on the Persistently Lowest Achieving list, it will certainly not be the fault of the teachers who have tried to create a collaborative, student-centered culture at the school only to be stymied by this principal.”