New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels personally signed an improper $180,000 no-bid contract with an unapproved vendor while running an Upper West Side school district, then escaped mention entirely in the official watchdog report that investigated the deal, the New York Post reported. His deputy, Mariela Graham, took the discipline. Then Samuels promoted her.
The sequence is worth spelling out plainly: Samuels signed the contract. An investigative body probed the contract. The investigative body's final report never named Samuels. His subordinate got a two-week suspension. And months later, that same subordinate landed a $225,571-a-year job at DOE headquarters, courtesy of Samuels himself.
The 11-page report from the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools, issued in June 2025 and made public this week, found that Graham and vendor Sean Kreyling "conspired to split" Department of Education billings to "disguise the fact" that Kreyling's two companies were unapproved vendors and that the contracts were improperly no-bid deals. The SCI recommended Graham be fired. The DOE gave her two weeks without pay instead.
The mechanics of the arrangement are straightforward. Under DOE rules, any contract above $25,000 requires three competitive bids and triggers city comptroller scrutiny. Samuels, who became District 3 superintendent in July 2022, found a way around that ceiling.
In a September 5, 2023 email to Kreyling obtained by the Post, Samuels wrote: "It is my understanding that you do not have an MTAC and cannot provide services beyond $25,000 each for two vendor IDS listed below. So the total amount for the work is $50,000." That email, which the Post described as a smoking gun, shows Samuels understood the vendor lacked proper city approval, and moved forward anyway.
Payments were split between Kreyling's two companies, Kreyco, the parent company of Language Learning Network, and Reimagine Education Group, to keep individual transactions below the $25,000 threshold. Over the life of both contracts, 17 purchase orders totaling $365,000 were issued: $220,000 to Kreyco and $145,000 to Reimagine Education Group. Comptroller records show Kreyling's companies ultimately received $250,000, spread across 10 separate $25,000 payments.
None of the standard safeguards were followed. The contracts were drawn up on the vendor's own letterhead, a violation of DOE procurement rules. One DOE insider told the Post bluntly: "A vendor needs to go through a whole gauntlet of things. None of the safeguards were in place. The procurement office should have drawn up the contract."
That same insider added: "There should have been dozens of people involved in this contract. The superintendent does not have the authority to sign it on his own."
The SCI investigation began after the agency received a complaint in January 2025 about a temporary teacher Kreyling had placed at two Upper West Side schools. That teacher, it turned out, had been forced to quit the DOE in 2014 after SCI substantiated charges of sexual misconduct with a 15-year-old student. The fact that this individual was back in a classroom, placed there through the very contract Samuels initiated, is its own indictment of the procurement shortcuts involved.
But the SCI report's most conspicuous feature may be what it left out. Despite emails and contracts showing Samuels signed the original deal and was copied on the check-splitting scheme, the final report never mentions his name. The Post characterized the omission as "apparently by design."
No-bid contracting abuses are hardly unique to New York's school system. Federal investigators have pursued similar no-bid contract allegations at the federal level, where the stakes and the scrutiny tend to be far more intense. The question is why city-level watchdogs seem less eager to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
SCI First Deputy Commissioner Daniel Schlachet pushed back on the implication, telling the Post: "It is absurd to imply that SCI might have been attempting to 'cover up for Samuels.'" Schlachet said investigators focused only on the 2024, 2025 contract signed by Graham because it was tied to the disgraced teacher. He claimed he never saw or knew about the contract Samuels had signed a year earlier.
When the Post pressed Schlachet on whether SCI would now investigate Samuels, his answer was tepid: the agency "will take it under advisement."
Graham signed a near-identical $180,000 contract renewal with Kreyling in August 2024, picking up where Samuels left off. When SCI came calling, Graham told investigators she was "unaware" who had signed the first contract, even though it was her own boss. She acknowledged she knew what she was doing violated DOE rules but insisted the arrangement was entirely her idea and Kreyling's.
The SCI report was unsparing in its assessment of Graham: "It is inconceivable that Graham should continue to be employed by the DOE in any capacity." The DOE ignored that recommendation. Graham received a two-week suspension without pay. Then, in April 2025, Samuels rewarded her with a promotion to senior executive director for strategy at DOE headquarters in Tweed, a position paying $225,571 a year.
A high-ranking DOE insider described the arrangement in terms that require no editorial embellishment: "She took the fall and now is being rewarded."
The pattern should concern anyone who cares about how public dollars are spent. When officials who circumvent procurement rules face minimal consequences, or outright promotions, the message to every other bureaucrat in the system is unmistakable. The SCI report itself noted that the DOE's vendor check-splitting problems are systemic, and that "violations of procurement rules often resulted in financial losses to the DOE, led to state and federal prosecutions, and/or prevented the DOE from working with the most qualified vendors at fair market prices."
The DOE spent $386 million on goods and services last year. That is a lot of taxpayer money flowing through a system the city's own watchdog describes as "plagued" by procurement problems.
Kreyling, the New Jersey-based vendor at the center of the deal, is not staying quiet. He told the Post he informed SCI investigators that Samuels signed the original contract and offered to hand over the documentary evidence. He claims the investigators were not interested.
"I definitely think it was a cover-up."
Kreyling alleged that Samuels "had designs on the chancellorship" and that protecting his record was the priority. He explained the underlying arrangement this way: "They needed a vendor and the grant was tied to world language; if you didn't have a way to offer it, you weren't eligible for the grant." In other words, the contract existed to help the district access grant funding, which raises its own uncomfortable question.
As Kreyling put it: "What did they do with the remaining grant money? Because they didn't pay us?" He says he plans to sue District 3 for the $95,000 he claims he is still owed. Samuels terminated the second contract in March 2025 before the full amount was paid.
The willingness to hold individuals accountable for misuse of taxpayer funds varies wildly depending on the jurisdiction and the political profile of the person involved. In some cases, federal prosecutors pursue charges aggressively. In New York City's education bureaucracy, the person who signed the contract becomes chancellor.
Mayor Mamdani appointed Samuels as schools chancellor in January 2025, the same month SCI received the complaint that would trigger the investigation. A City Hall spokesperson told the Post: "The administration was unaware of this, and we are looking into it."
That response is difficult to square with Mamdani's own campaign rhetoric. The mayor ran on a promise to "overhaul procurement infrastructure across the DOE" and vowed to target waste, fraud, and abuse. His hand-picked chancellor now stands accused of the very conduct Mamdani pledged to root out.
City Councilman Phil Wong, a Queens Democrat who sits on the Council's education and finance committees, called the Post's findings "deeply concerning" and demanded an immediate probe. Wong did not mince words about the watchdog's role, either.
"These revelations warrant further investigation, and if the SCI failed to fully disclose or pursue relevant information, that raises even more serious questions about oversight and accountability. We need a truly independent audit of DOE contracting practices to restore public trust and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent appropriately."
Wong is right that the problem extends beyond one contract. If the agency charged with investigating DOE misconduct can produce an 11-page report on an improper contract and somehow omit the name of the person who signed it, the oversight system itself is compromised. The question is whether anyone with authority will act on that realization, or whether this becomes another episode that fades into the background noise of New York City governance.
Across the country, federal officials have signaled a harder line on fraud involving public funds, with real consequences for those who abuse the public trust. New York's education establishment appears to operate by a different set of rules, ones where the person who breaks procurement law gets a promotion, and the watchdog report reads like it was written with an eraser in one hand.
Several questions hang over this story. Why did SCI investigators apparently decline Kreyling's offer to provide documents showing Samuels signed the original contract? What happened to the grant money the district accessed through the language program if the vendor was never fully paid? And why did the DOE not only ignore SCI's recommendation to fire Graham but actively promote her to a senior headquarters role, under the authority of the very chancellor whose name the report conspicuously omitted?
The pattern of fraud and accountability failures in publicly funded programs is not limited to any one city or agency. But New York City's school system, with its $386 million annual procurement budget, offers a particularly rich environment for the kind of self-dealing that thrives when oversight is weak and consequences are optional.
Taxpayers fund the schools. Parents trust them with their children. The least they deserve is a system where the person who signs an improper contract cannot simply hand the blame to a subordinate, collect a promotion, and move on as if nothing happened. Right now, that is exactly the system New York City appears to have.