Free Republic

Top Roslyn school officials and their friends and family siphoned off more than $11 million of district money in an elaborate scheme involving far more people and far more extravagant spending than had been suspected, a state report has found.

For eight years, the top officials of an affluent Long Island school district systematically plundered taxpayer funds, illegally diverting at least $11.2 million to themselves, relatives and cronies for an array of goods and services, from a 65-cent bagel to a $1,812-a-night hotel suite to a mortgage on a luxury home in Florida, a new state audit says. The scandal, in Roslyn, N.Y., is the most pervasive such school fraud in the country, say officials from the National School Boards Association. The year-old case has already had repercussions in districts throughout New York State, where school officials and bookkeepers say...

Battered by an embezzlement scandal, the Roslyn School Board last night accepted the resignation of its second member in less than a month and resisted calls from angry residents for more board members to step down. The packed house of about 600 in the high school auditorium applauded loudly as board president William Costigan read member Ellen Seigel's resignation letter. "In light of the community's loss of confidence, after 11 years of dedicated service to the children of the Roslyn public schools, I submit my resignation as a Board of Education trustee," Seigel wrote. She did not attend last night's...