Principal fired over chicken blood, coercion

Posted by Philissa at 9:41 PM

I've heard of school officials being censured and fired for all sorts of reasons, but this, reported by the Associated Press, is by far the oddest:

Maritza Tamayo, principal of the Unity Center for Urban Technologies, paid a woman named Gilda Fonte to lead several Santeria rituals at the Manhattan school during midwinter break in 2006, when students were not there, according to Richard Condon, the special commissioner of investigation for city schools. Tamayo coerced staff members to participate in and help pay for the cost of the ceremonies, investigators said.

The coercion, not the fact that she paid for chicken blood to be sprinkled on her school, is the reason for Tamayo's firing, DOE officials said. She has been the principal since 1997 and oversaw the school's transition from a transfer alternative school to a regular high school. Evidently, the transition did not make a difference for the troubled school, as the AP reports that "there was a running joke at the school that sage should be used to cleanse the building because many of the students were ill-behaved."