Any Port In A Storm

Educators are resorting to whatever it takes to improve their school environment:

A principal who took an unusual approach to improve her TriBeCa high school — allegedly hiring a “black magic” practitioner to cleanse evil spirits through a ceremony involving sprinkled chicken blood — is being forced out a month before the school year starts. A replacement principal has not yet been named.

“There was always a running joke that, because many of the students were ill-behaved, we should use sage to cleanse the building,” an assistant principal at the Unity Center for Urban Technologies on Sixth Avenue, Melody Crooks-Simpson, told city investigators. Then, during midwinter break in early 2006, Ms. Crooks-Simpson said, Principal Maritza Tamayo invited her to a Santeria ceremony that would involve chicken blood, according to a report released yesterday by the Department of Education’s special commissioner of investigation, Richard Condon.

Ms. Crooks-Simpson said she did not attend that ceremony but did go to a second rite where a woman, Gilda Fonte, shuffled Tarot cards under a cloud of cigar smoke. The assistant principal said she was later pressured to pay $900 toward Ms. Fonte’s fee for the service.

. . .

Investigators did not interview anyone who attended the first Santeria ceremony mentioned by Ms. Crooks-Simpson. But a computer technician, Keenan Britt, told them he saw the principal and two women walk into the school over the midwinter break dressed in white clothing and white headdresses. One balanced 40 lighted candles on her head atop a stainless steel tray, he told investigators.