Progress High School staff received free tickets to this Yankees game, which was branded as 'teambuilding'
A party-loving Brooklyn principal and his top assistant principal have hosted taxpayer-funded celebrations, out-of-town trips and staff retreats where drunken staffers spend the night carousing, The Post has learned.
At one boozy bash during an upstate conference attended by William Jusino, principal of Progress HS for Professional Careers in Williamsburg, faculty members slammed shots and jumped on hotel beds, witnesses said.
“Everyone was drunk. It got so loud that the hotel called the police,” a staffer said.
As The Post reported last month, Jusino faces a possible fine by the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board after investigators found he took himself and 43 on-duty faculty members to a 2014 Yankees game with 100 tickets the team had given for students.
That game was just one of many getaways that Jusino, 58, and Assistant Principal Diana Rendon, 33, call “team-building activities.”
The school gave staffers two free tickets each for a Mets game in May 2015, held meetings at luxury conference centers, and took groups to education conferences in Dallas, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Atlanta.
Progress High SchoolHelayne Seidman
Jusino made headlines in 2010 for a boozy two-night staff retreat at the Mohonk Mountain House, a posh resort in upstate New Paltz. Officials last week would not say if he was reprimanded.
But the trips have continued. Teachers described another liquor-filled “planning retreat” in May 2015 at a stylish Palisades conference center.
While the weekend event was “optional,” staffers said they felt pressured to go. Nearly the whole staff, about 60, went.
“All the food and rooms were free. We paid for nothing,” one said.
Saturday’s activities included costume dress-up, lip-syncing and a dance competition. That night, the school rented a room for a party, with one staffer serving as deejay. The merry-making and music spilled into several hotel rooms.
Rendon came into one room with a bottle of Jack Daniels. “She walked up to me, put it in my mouth, and poured it down my throat, saying ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!” the staffer said. “She was drunk. I was drunk, Everyone was drunk.”
Rendon and a female staffer “were jumping up and down on the bed, and fell off the bed,” another witness said.
Jusino shrugged off a warning by cops to keep it down, telling a teacher, “When we turn up, we get loud,” one said.
“The next day, everyone was hung over. We went outside, did relay races and hula hoops — that’s literally it. Some people were too hung over and just watched.”
Modal TriggerWilliam Jusino, left in blue, in a photo posted on Diana Rendon’s Instagram.Instagram
Rendon flatly denied accounts of her drunken revelry. “I assume it’s a disgruntled employee,” she said of staffers who recounted the events.
DOE officials said of the faculty’s drinking habits: “Employees are expected to use good judgment, but DOE does not have regulations concerning their alcohol consumption off work time.”
Rendon said faculty groups took taxpayer-funded trips for professional development at conferences held by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development in Dallas, Nashville, Atlanta and Los Angeles.
“This is going to be an epic weekend!” Rendon posted before the trip to Dallas in June 2014. A photo shows her and another staffer frolicking in a water tube. Sunday activities, the caption reads: “pool, lunch, then water park.” Rendon told The Post the conferences took the whole day.
About 34 staffers wearing custom-designed shirts attended a “planning conference” last May at the Doral Arrowwood luxury resort in Rye Brook.
In addition, Jusino uses his DOE credit card to pay for staff celebrations and feasts at local restaurants, including Fushini Williamsburg, an up-scale Japanese sushi lounge. Jusino has spent hundreds of taxpayer dollars at eateries, records show. The school also rewards staffers with vouchers for free cocktails. He did not return messages seeking comment.
The 950-student school posted a 68 percent graduation rate last year, but only 12 percent of the grads left prepared for college or careers.
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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