He might have pulled it off if the “secret handshake” hadn’t given him away as a liar.
Brooklyn charter-school principal Lewis Franklin Thomas III has been booted from education jobs in three other cities after a string of résumé falsehoods — which were first exposed in Cleveland in 2005 after he claimed he was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity but couldn’t do the handshake, the education news site Chalkbeat reported.
And while Thomas has deleted the fictitious frat membership from his bio — and no longer claims, as he did in Cleveland, that he had held staff jobs with Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton — other apparent lies and exaggerations still riddle his online bio at the at the Urban Dove Team Charter School in Bed-Stuy.
The lies include a claim that he “transformed” a DC charter school where he served as principal two months before being asked to leave.
He also claims that, “in 2006, he was recognized by the White House as one of the top 50 Innovative Principals in the country” — an award that the Department of Education says does not exist.
“He’s a con artist, come on,” Tim Goler, an Alpha member and Cleveland educator who first sussed Thomas out, told Chalkbeat.
“People exaggerate their résumé all day,” Goler said. “But his stuff was just so blatant, it was almost pathologic.”
Urban Dove is a 182-student charter school for teens on the brink of failure. Its philosophy — heavy on phys ed — had been profiled by CBS, Sports Illustrated and ESPN when it hired Thomas to be principal last summer.
“He does a good job here. He’s trying to help out these kids,” one teacher said Friday, declining to give his name.
But had administrators performed even a cursory background check, numerous red flags would have snapped up.
A 2006 story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer said Thomas was fired from his job at the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy after his botching of the black fraternity’s handshake prompted Goler to start digging.
Goler found Thomas had invented a doctorate and a master’s degree and claimed to have been a principal at a DC school where he had merely been a teacher.
“I went to hug him, grip him, and show him some love as one Alpha man to another Alpha man,” Goler told the Plain Dealer. “I tried that two separate times, but he just didn’t get it.”
Thomas has denied faking his résumé to the Plain Dealer and Chalkbeat. Attempts to reach Thomas and others at Urban Dove were unsuccessful Thursday.
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