High Stakes testing prompts
Principal to seek help from on high
Santeria priestess to 'drive away bad spirits'
A Manhattan principal determined to rid her school of "negative energy" paid a priestess to drip chicken blood on the floors and stalk the halls with dozens of lighted candles during bizarre Santeria ceremonies, investigators and sources revealed yesterday.Principal Maritza Tamayo invited a neighbor to perform the rituals twice in Unity Center for Urban Technologies in SoHo - hoping "it would calm the students down," according to a report by schools investigator Richard Condon.
"She had the ceremony to drive away the bad spirits in the school," said an upset teacher. "Why would you bring someone doing voodoo into the school?"
Tamayo later forced her assistant principal to pay the Santeria priestess $900, then improperly paid her $350 more to drive children to school for Regents exams.
Education officials are pushing to fire Tamayo, a 17-year veteran of city schools who earned $133,998 last year.
The peculiar events began in early 2006, when Tamayo told former Assistant Principal Melody Crooks-Simpson that she believed that Santeria - a South American and Caribbean religion known for its unusual rituals - could calm misbehaving students.
The Sixth Ave. school, once a second-chance haven for dropouts, isn't among the city's most violent but has had consistently low test scores.
Several weeks after the conversation, over midwinter break, two staffers saw Tamayo in a white headdress and carrying branches, elephant plant leaves and incense up to the school's fourth floor.
Walking beside Tamayo was her neighbor Gilda Fonte - carrying on her head a silver tray with about 40 lighted candles.
Though there were no children in the building and no witnesses to the ritual itself, staff members told investigators the fourth floor smelled of incense and was "really smoky." School sources said chicken blood had to be cleaned off the floors.
Later that week, Crooks-Simpson agreed to participate in one of the rituals and heeded Tamayo's creepy warning: "Wear white. If there's anything evil, it won't get on you."
Crooks-Simpson sat in a conference room as Fonte "took two puffs from a brown cigar," spoke in another language and read tarot cards, according to yesterday's report.
Tamayo - who displayed a black doll wrapped in purple fabric with its head covered in pins in her office - later insisted that Crooks-Simpson write a $900 personal check for the ceremony.
This January, Fonte returned to the school, this time to drive five chronically absent students to Regents exams for $350. Tamayo paid her with teacher contributions and school funds.
Tamayo didn't return calls for comment yesterday but gave investigators lengthy excuses for every allegation. She denied holding the ceremonies, said the head with pins was an interior design project and that the cloth doll belonged to her predecessor, according to investigators.
Fonte told probers she was Catholic, "prays all the time" and does not participate in Santeria.
Report from the Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation
This from the New York Daily News.
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