A troubling report about a public school teacher with inappropriate behavior has led to an investigation uncovering questionable contracts within the Department of Education (DOE) signed by Kamar Samuels before his appointment as New York City Schools Chancellor.
The investigation focused on contracts in District 3 on the Upper West Side, where Samuels served as superintendent from 2022 until his recent promotion in January. The inquiry was prompted by a whistleblower’s tip about Ralph F. Franco, a disgraced teacher working at both the Manhattan School for Children and Community Action School.
The contracts in question involved Sean Kreyling’s Language Learning Network, a company supplying long-term foreign language instructors to schools, which had placed Franco in these educational settings.
According to a report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation, Franco was involved in inappropriate conduct with a minor back in 2014. He reportedly made sexual remarks to a 15-year-old male student and allegedly touched the student inappropriately at Kingsborough Early College Secondary School.
As part of a settlement agreement reached on March 6, 2015, Franco retired from the DOE, a decision that was made permanent, as detailed in a subsequent investigation report from 2025.
Franco irrevocably retired from the DOE as part of a settlement he signed on March 6, 2015, according to a subsequent 2025 SCI report.
The agreement stipulated that Franco would be barred from all future work with the DOE unless the Department of Human Resources signed off on it.
The 2014 report detailed how the creepy teacher, who was 54 at the time, allegedly led the teen boy into an empty dance room, hugged him from behind, lifted up his shirt and said, “You’re a very cute Mexican.”
Kreyling, who said he was a child molestation victim himself, said he did not know about Franco’s past transgressions.
“As someone who was molested as a child, I would never knowingly send a predator into a school,” Kreyling said.
When pressed on how Franco was able to evade his company’s vetting, Kreyling said that the NYC DOE has its own fingerprint system he doesn’t have access to and he never saw that he was banned from working in city schools. Kreyling added that Franco’s teaching license is still active.
“They signed a settlement so he could continue to harm students and threaten them, it’s a disservice to any student,” Kreyling said of DOE officials.
The disgraced Franco began working at the Upper West Side K-8 and middle schools in September 2024, now going by the name “Rafael,” the 2025 SCI report stated.
A bombshell SCI report found that District 3 Deputy Superintendent Mariela Graham signed the deal with LLN, which was not an approved DOE vendor, and conspired to split payments between two of Kreyling’s companies to avoid financial oversight.
A subsequent Post investigation found that Samuels, who was then superintendent of the district, inked a similar deal with Kreyling the year before — and knew all about the check splitting, according to emails obtained by The Post.
Investigators recommended that the DOE blacklist Kreyling and any of his businesses.
The 2014 report stated that Franco denied all of the allegations made against him.
