In the bustling heart of Queens, where local schools serve as vital lifelines and community sanctuaries for working-class families, leadership is supposed to represent a sacred public trust. For Josephine Van Ess, the high-profile Superintendent of Queens South High Schools, this trust came with an impressive annual salary of $241,635 and the immense responsibility of guiding thousands of young lives toward a brighter, more secure future. Yet, behind the scenes of her administrative empire, a highly lucrative family enterprise was quietly thriving on public funds meant for the classroom. Her husband, Edward Van Ess, held a 50% ownership stake in a company called Excellence in Every Thread, which, along with its subsidiary The Modern Day Man, had secured a staggering $1,533,221 in business contracts with New York City public schools since 2023. Under the city’s strict conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spouse’s business ownership is legally imputed directly to the employee, making Josephine an implicit partner in this massive public-to-private financial windfall. The company’s primary offering was a series of youth mentoring services aimed at young boys, which carried an eye-watering price tag of $16,000 per program. A central feature of these costly workshops was the purchase of flashy, brightly colored custom suits retailing at $650 each, crafted by Edward’s business partner, the fashion designer Ilbert Sanchez. While mentoring and building self-esteem are undoubtedly vital for young men navigating the challenges of urban youth, the exorbitant cost of these dapper outfits raised immediate, painful questions among community members about whether the program was genuinely designed to uplift vulnerable students or simply to enrich the pockets of the superintendent’s household.
As rumors of this cozy, highly profitable arrangement began to circulate through the halls of the Department of Education, the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board (COIB) stepped in to draw a clear ethical line in the sand. In June 2023, under the direct guidance of then-Schools Chancellor David Banks, a delicate compromise was brokered: Josephine Van Ess would be allowed to retain her financial stake in her husband’s fashion and mentoring company, but under one absolute, non-negotiable condition. She was strictly forbidden from doing any business, securing any contracts, or pitching any services within Queens School Districts 27, 28, and 29—the very territories she was paid a quarter-million dollars a year to oversee, influence, and lead. This boundary was put in place to protect the fragile integrity of local schools and to ensure that taxpayer dollars were allocated based on merit and classroom need rather than marital connections and administrative influence. Yet, despite this clear warning and the immense privilege of keeping her side-hustle intact, Van Ess chose to bypass the rules entirely. Throughout 2024, Excellence in Every Thread quietly secured purchase orders totaling $32,525.16 from three different public schools located squarely within her forbidden territory of Districts 27 and 28. When the oversight board eventually uncovered this blatant disregard for the rules, the consequences were shockingly mild. Instead of facing suspension, demotion, or termination for exploiting her official position to benefit her family’s private business, Van Ess was handed a mere $5,000 fine with no further disciplinary action. To the teachers, parents, and taxpayers of Queens, this penalty felt like a minor cost of doing business—a tiny fraction of her salary and an even smaller drop in the bucket compared to the $1.5 million her family’s company had drained from public education coffers.
The fallout from this decision has left a bitter taste in the mouths of dedicated educators who must routinely scrape together pennies for basic classroom supplies, highlighting a deeply troubling lack of transparency within the Department of Education. When pressed for answers, the DOE flatly refused to disclose which specific schools within Van Ess’s districts had authorized the payments to Excellence in Every Thread, nor would they clarify whether the company would be barred from bidding on lucrative school contracts in the upcoming academic year. Instead, the department issued a sanitized, corporate statement claiming they had reviewed the findings and were taking “appropriate steps” to ensure compliance with ethical guidelines. This tight-lipped evasion only fueled the anger of critics and internal whistleblowers, who openly labeled the punishment a “slap on the wrist” and demanded Van Ess’s immediate removal from her post for self-dealing. One anonymous DOE official voiced the growing frustration of many, pointing out that an alarming trend of self-dealing, self-promotion, and rampant waste has taken root among the city’s educational elite, shielded by an oversight system where penalties are kept disproportionately low. The official warned that without a comprehensive, independent audit of how the city spends its massive budget, administrators will continue to treat public schools as personal piggy banks, confident that even if they are caught, they will face little more than a gentle tap on the wrist before returning to business as usual.
The impunity enjoyed by Van Ess does not exist in a vacuum; rather, it is a symptom of a much larger, systemic rot that has recently plagued the leadership of New York City’s public schools and eroded public trust. Just as the Van Ess controversy was boiling over, the school system was already reeling from a massive contracting scandal involving Chancellor Kamar Samuels. During his tenure as superintendent of District 3, Samuels bypassed official channels to sign a shady $180,000 contract with an unapproved vendor named Sean Kreyling. To keep the deal hidden from regulatory eyes and bypass standard background checks, Samuels and his inner circle conspired to split the payments across multiple corporate entities, artificially keeping the transactions below the financial threshold that would trigger automatic reviews. This elaborate cover-up fell apart in spectacular and dangerous fashion when Kreyling’s company unwittingly sent an unregistered teacher—who had been explicitly banned from working with children in the city’s public school system due to prior misconduct—to teach in two different public schools over a period of months. When the Special Commissioner of Inquiry (SCI) launched a thorough investigation into this catastrophic security breach, the final report laid the blame entirely on Samuels’ deputy, Mariela Graham. Yet, instead of firing Graham as the SCI strongly recommended, Samuels did the exact opposite, shielding his ally from accountability by giving her a highly desirable and lucrative promotion, sending a clear message that loyalty to the administration carried far more weight than child safety or fiscal honesty.
This culture of protectionism stretches all the way to the highest levels of city hall, where political survival and bureaucratic convenience often triumph over ethical accountability. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has consistently resisted mounting pressure to clean up the Department of Education’s procurement processes, choosing instead to stonewall the City Council’s aggressive attempts to audit the department’s massive $13 billion contracting budget. By actively blocking these oversight efforts, the mayoral administration has effectively thrown a protective shield over corrupt administrators, allowing backroom deals, unapproved vendors, and blatant conflicts of interest to flourish without fear of public exposure. For the everyday citizens of New York—the parents who worry about their children’s safety and the teachers who pay for printer paper and art supplies out of their own pockets—this political defensive wall is a demoralizing reminder of where the city’s priorities truly lie. The refusal to audit these billions of dollars in taxpayer money suggests a profound fear of what a thorough investigation might uncover, implying that the scandals surrounding Van Ess and Samuels are merely the tip of a very large and expensive iceberg. It reveals a stark disconnect between the struggles of working-class families and the insulated lives of high-ranking bureaucrats who view the city’s education treasury as an endless resource to be divvied up among friends and political allies.
Ultimately, the saga of the $650 designer suits and the toothless oversight of the COIB leaves behind a deeply damaged educational landscape where trust cannot easily be repaired. When asked to account for her actions and the ethical lines she crossed, Josephine Van Ess chose to remain silent, declining to offer any public explanation, defense, or apology to the community she was appointed to serve. This silence speaks volumes, reflecting an attitude of administrative invincibility that has become all too common in the upper echelons of the city’s school system. The flashy, brightly colored suits designed to make young boys look respectable stand as a painful irony in a scandal defined by a complete lack of moral respectability at the top of the food chain. While the children of Queens are taught the core values of honesty, hard work, and accountability in their classrooms, they are forced to watch as the adults in charge of their education operate under a completely different set of rules. As the new school year begins, the families and teachers of New York City are left to navigate a deeply flawed system, fully aware that until the city’s leadership embraces true transparency and rigorous audits, the real business of the Department of Education will continue to take place in the shadow of self-interest, far removed from the actual needs of the classroom.
