Audit Catches Teachers Playing Hooky

Sometimes the class discipline case is the teacher.

A survey by the Department of Education looked at 17 different schools and found nearly a quarter of the teachers there weren't working the minimum number of hours. The results of the report were obtained by the New York Post through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Post wrote that of those audited by the Department of Education last year, one in four city public-school teachers were not teaching the minimum number of classes their contracts required. 

This means that in just the last year $934,000 in taxpayer funds went to teachers for doing essentially nothing.

The DOE said the pattern could not be generalized to the entire school system since the schools audited were specifically selected for spending irregularities. However audits from earlier years found similar issues despite calls by the auditor general to address the problem.

Audits show that from 2006 to 2011 about $4M in taxpayer funds have gone to paying teachers taking it easy during excessive free periods.

The percentage of slacking teachers ranged from a low of 5.7 percent in 2007-8, to a high of 22.8 percent last year.