By Jill Colvin
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — City Comptroller John Liu has rejected a $20 million Department of Education contract for teacher recruitment, citing impending teacher layoffs.
"Twenty million dollars to recruit teachers as the DOE insists on laying off thousands of teachers seems curious at best," Liu said in a statement.
But the DOE slammed the decision, arguing that the "New Teacher Project" contract, submitted in February, is crucial for hiring and training special education teachers and has nothing to do with planned lay off of more than 4,000 teachers.
"Mr. Liu’s hasty and ill-informed decision completely disregards the needs of thousands of special education and English Language Learning students, who deserve the best possible teachers we can bring in to our system," DOE Spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said in a statement. "If Mr. Liu had asked the DOE about the contract, he would have known this."
The five-year, $20 million contract was supposed to fund the recruitment of "teaching fellows," hired by the city primarily for special education jobs — which are exempt from city cuts. The contract was approved by the Panel for Educational Policy last May.
The DOE maintains that there are very few qualified candidates, and that without the program, special education teacher vacancies would go unfilled. The department had planned to hire 400 new fellows in 2012, the same as in the last school year.
But United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew sided with Liu.
"It is absurd that the Department of Education plans to spend millions of dollars to recruit new teachers while the mayor threatens thousands of layoffs," Mulgrew said in a statement.
The New Teacher Project, which operates the program, has also advocated for replacing seniority-based layoff policies with merit-based systems, which the mayor strongly favors.
The city plans to re-submit the contract to Liu's office.
