NYC School Workers’ Families Took Disney Trip Meant for Homeless Students

A half-dozen New York City school system employees took their children or grandchildren to Disney World, New Orleans and other destinations by exploiting a program intended for homeless students, investigators said in a report released this month.

The trips were meant as “enrichment opportunities,” attendance incentives and rewards for academic achievement for students living in shelters and other temporary housing, according to the report by the special commissioner of investigation for the city’s public schools.

The abuse of the grant-funded program was led by Linda Wilson, who at the time was the Queens manager for the Department of Education office that supports homeless students, the report says. As many as one in nine of the city’s roughly one million public school students are homeless.

Ms. Wilson, who supervised about 20 employees, took her daughters on some of the trips and encouraged several workers she supervised to do so as well but to keep the activities secret, the report says.

“What happens here stays with us,” she told one employee, according to the report.

Ms. Wilson and others forged the signatures of homeless students’ parents as part of the scheme, and she used a nonprofit organization to arrange the trips to evade Department of Education oversight, the report says.

“Few of the homeless students listed on the trip paperwork actually attended the trips,” the report says, although at least in the case of the Disney World trip, some homeless students did attend. One person interviewed by investigators told them “he had to beg” Ms. Wilson to allow him to add two of his students to the trip, the report says.