Investigators have reopened their inquiry into New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels over contracts he signed with a non-approved vendor while serving as a district superintendent, and a criminal litigator says the arrangement could expose him to public corruption charges. Meanwhile, senior Department of Education officials are in full panic mode, with insiders describing the atmosphere at Tweed Hall as "DEFCON 1."
The Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools, known as SCI, has now reached out to the vendor at the center of the controversy, requesting a full set of documents, contracts, emails, invoices, payments, related to the deals Samuels authorized. That outreach came only after the New York Post reported on the contracts and the vendor spent a week trying to get someone in city government to pay attention.
The story centers on two $180,000 contracts with Sean Kreyling's companies, which provided temporary foreign-language teachers to city schools. Samuels signed one of those contracts in 2023 while heading District 3 on the Upper West Side. A second was signed in 2024 by his former Deputy Superintendent Mariela Graham. Neither contract went through an approved DOE vendor process. And the payments, split into $25,000 checks, appear designed to duck the city's financial oversight thresholds.
The contracts didn't just raise procurement questions. After Kreyling's staffing company, Language Learning Network, inked the 2024 deal, it inadvertently placed a Spanish teacher in two city schools who had been banned from working for the DOE over sexual misconduct. That incident triggered the original SCI investigation.
SCI's June 2025 report found the schools' principals liable for not properly vetting the teacher. But the report failed to mention Samuels' involvement in authorizing the underlying contract. Instead, it pinned the blame on Graham and recommended she be fired.
Kreyling has charged that SCI covered for Samuels to protect a key appointee of Mayor Mamdani.
And what happened to Graham, the subordinate SCI said should be terminated? Samuels promoted her. She now holds a $225,571-per-year post as the DOE's senior executive director of strategy. That's a raise and a title bump for someone an oversight body recommended be fired.
Kreyling told the Post he informed SCI about Samuels' signed contract during the initial investigation and offered to share all materials. SCI never followed up.
After the Post's reporting broke the story open, Kreyling spent a week trying to reach City Hall. He emailed First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan. He messaged Mayor Mamdani on social media. No one responded.
Kreyling did not hold back about his frustration:
"I had a lot of hope in Mamdani, and I'm very disappointed. I was hoping we could at least come together on protecting kids."
SCI officials finally contacted Kreyling on Friday. Attorney David Casanova asked him to hand over everything, even documents previously provided to investigators who apparently never acted on them.
"Please provide everything you think is relevant, even if it was previously provided to one of our investigators (all contracts, emails, invoices, payments from DOE, etc.)."
Casanova said he would review the documents and "possibly" schedule a follow-up meeting. The Post obtained the message.
SCI has not confirmed that Samuels is formally under investigation. But high-ranking education sources told the Post that DOE leadership is behaving as though the mayor's handpicked schools chief is being probed.
A City Hall insider described the scene bluntly:
"They're completely freaked out at the DOE. If SCI is calling witnesses for documents, that means they're investigating Samuels."
A well-placed DOE source added more detail about the internal reaction:
"City Hall is scrambling, asking about the contract and grant funding.... I heard [Samuels] met with his team to brush it under the rug.... he hopes this blows over and he is not held accountable."
Mamdani's team allegedly told Samuels to "lay low," the DOE insider said. City Hall declined to comment.
Samuels earns $363,000 a year, more than even Mayor Mamdani. He paid Kreyling from a government grant his district received for foreign-language instruction. But Samuels prematurely terminated the contract in March 2025, records show. The DOE has not responded to inquiries about what happened to the remaining unspent grant funds.
In one email obtained by the Post, Samuels wrote that he understood Kreyling was not an approved vendor and suggested a workaround. That email, combined with the payment-splitting scheme, forms the core of what Manhattan-based civil and criminal litigator Jason Goldman called potential criminal exposure.
Goldman laid out the possible charges. Samuels could face prosecution for defrauding the DOE, submitting contracts that misrepresented the true nature of the transaction, and engaging in official misconduct. Federal wire fraud charges could also come into play, tied to any electronic payments sent to Kreyling and the emails in which Samuels discussed the payment-splitting arrangement.
"If there was a deliberate effort to bypass the city's financial safeguards, that could potentially lead to criminal exposure from a public corruption standpoint."
Goldman added:
"This could be much more than just a paperwork or ethics issue."
Consider the sequence. A chancellor signs a contract with an unapproved vendor. Payments get chopped into pieces small enough to avoid triggering oversight. That vendor's company then sends a teacher banned for sexual misconduct into two city schools. The oversight body investigates, but leaves the chancellor's name out of the report. The subordinate who gets blamed receives a promotion instead of a pink slip. The vendor who tries to alert City Hall gets ignored for a week. And the DOE's response, per insiders, is to hope the whole thing blows over.
That is not a system designed to protect children. It is a system designed to protect the people running it.
The Post first revealed the contract scheme last week, and the pressure has only mounted since. SCI's belated document request suggests the agency recognizes its original investigation was incomplete at best, and a whitewash at worst. Whether a formal probe leads to charges, disciplinary action, or another round of institutional shrugging remains an open question.
Several things remain unanswered. Where did the unspent grant money go after Samuels terminated the contract? Why did SCI's initial investigators never follow up on the documents Kreyling offered? And why has Mayor Mamdani's office refused to comment on a scandal involving the chancellor he personally appointed?
New York City parents send their children to public schools trusting that the adults in charge follow the rules, especially the rules meant to keep predators out of classrooms. When the people at the top treat procurement safeguards as obstacles to work around, and when oversight agencies look the other way, that trust is not just damaged. It's betrayed.
A $363,000-a-year chancellor who can't follow basic contracting rules shouldn't be running a school district, let alone the largest school system in the country.
