I was always stoned, drunk and skipping class — so they let me graduate early: Maspeth alum
Enlarge Image![Front page for New York Post for Sunday September 15, 2019]()
They promoted him to the head of the class and let him graduate — six months early, in January 2015.
They promoted him to the head of the class and let him graduate — six months early, in January 2015.
“They handed me a few work sheets for each subject, and told me if I completed them in a week, I could graduate six months early,” Creighton, now 21, told The Post. “I knew I didn’t deserve it but I thought, ‘Why not?’ I had another kid fill in the work sheets, and they gave me a diploma.”
Creighton, slight and soft-spoken with piercing blue eyes and brown hair, spent his junior and senior years at the highly rated Queens school, the subject of a bombshell grade-fixing expose in The Post last week.
For years the school, which was awarded a National Blue Ribbon in 2018 by the federal secretary of education, has practiced a “no fail” policy that gives students passing grades no matter how badly they score on tests, or even if they fail to show up, according to multiple teachers and students.
Staffers inflated grades, changed test scores and even gave out answers while proctoring standardized tests. Troublesome students were pushed through and their graduations accelerated. The school, which boasts almost perfect graduation rates and high Regents test scores, is now under probe by Queens prosecutors and DOE investigators following The Post report.
For Creighton’s mother, Annmarie Creighton, the rampant corruption at Maspeth HS is no surprise. “I knew there was something rotten in Denmark,” she said. “I tried for years to get them to help me discipline my son, but the guidance counselor and principals were very nonchalant.”
For the two years that her son was enrolled at Maspeth, she said she and her husband repeatedly reached out to school officials.
“We wanted someone besides ourselves to make this kid accountable,” Annmarie, 49, told The Post. “I was looking for someone to scare him, for some school authority to push back and let him know that there were consequences to his actions. But nothing happened.”
Instead, her son — known to his friends and family as “Mac” — spiraled downward, addicted at first to alcohol then a medley of different drugs. He hung out with about five friends who were constantly stoned and ran away from home. His mother said he was mostly homeless, at times living out of an ATM lobby and a beer can-strewn flophouse in Ridgewood.
“He stunk like a homeless person and only went to school to hang out with his friends,” said Annmarie, an office manager and mother to two older daughters. “I kept expecting a truant officer to show up at our door. But nothing happened. My husband and I were stunned when he graduated early.”
Creighton transferred to the school in the fall of 2013. He had already been expelled for carrying a knife from Xavier High School, an elite Catholic high school in Manhattan where his father, a civil engineer who works on projects for the MTA, was an alumnus. He briefly attended Newtown High School in Elmhurst before enrolling in Maspeth.
“He had friends who were going to Maspeth, and he told us he would kill himself if we forced him to stay at Newtown,” his mother said. “By the time he got to Maspeth, all hell broke loose.”
Creighton, who had started drinking heavily and smoking pot at Xavier and Newtown, began using “harder” drugs that he refused to name at Maspeth. In November 2014, he and a group of friends showed up drunk to a school performance of “The Nutcracker” — “My friend was playing the evil mouse,” he said — and when the beer he had smuggled in Arizona iced tea bottles spilled in the auditorium, a parent informed school administrators, who called the police.
As students and their parents filed out of the auditorium after the performance, Creighton began to act “rowdy and disrespectful,” according to a school incident report. According to Assistant Principal Stefan Singh, who witnessed the scene, Creighton’s nose began to bleed and he was covered in blood when the police arrived. He also resisted arrest and police had to wrestle him to the ground to put on the handcuffs.
“I fought with the cops because I didn’t want to leave until I saw my friend take his bow,” Creighton told The Post. “I saw him taking a bow as they dragged me out of the school.”
School officials suspended him for only one day and the assistant principal relayed the information about Creighton’s arrest in a telephone message to his parents, Annmarie said.
“I was stunned,” she said. “I wanted someone to grab my kid by the collar and say, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’”
For his part, Creighton said he was emboldened by the lack of discipline. “I went back to school, and nothing happened to me, even though my friends and I were really f–ked up all the time,” he said. “School for me was like a party. Sometimes, we got caught smoking blunts on school property. Nothing happened.”
In fact, the only staffers who seemed to care about Creighton was the librarian who sent emails to his parents when he found him asleep in the library and a physics teacher who handed him bags of groceries and clean clothes. That teacher also gave him a pot pipe after Creighton graduated, he said.
Annmarie was so disturbed by the school’s lack of response that she acted as her own “mandated reporter” — a position usually held by a professional such as a school administrator — in reporting her son’s condition to state authorities. When a social worker appeared on the family’s doorstep, she was shocked that the school had not reported on Creighton’s condition and advised Annmarie and her husband to take out an insurance policy “because she told us Mac would probably be dead in a year.”
Despite his condition, Creighton and 10 other seniors — some of them the friends who had attended school stoned — graduated six months early from the school. When her son told her the news, Annmarie and her husband asked for a meeting with the school’s guidance counselor, and demanded to see his work.
Shortly after graduating, Creighton was arrested along with a group of friends who were accused of robbing a Harlem church. Because he had open warrants for jumping turnstiles, Creighton was taken to Rikers Island. Later, he was enrolled in a nine-month rehabilitation program on Staten Island. He said he hasn’t touched drugs or alcohol in three years, and is completing an electrician’s program at Nassau Community College.
“It’s both heartbreaking and frightening to me that my son got more help in jail than he ever got at school,” Annmarie told The Post. “I knew there were cracks in the school system, but we were dealing with the Grand Canyon.”
Last Sunday, when The Post’s expose on Maspeth High School was published, former students began to post the story on social media, Creighton said. He saw the story on Instagram, and immediately called his mom and read “the whole thing” to her.
“Everything the article said was true,” he said. “When it was happening to me I thought it was only our class, but I guess they are still doing it. They are still pushing kids through.”
Is widespread cheating, grade-changing and other examples of academic fraud occurring at your school? Is student failure being ignored, or worse, rewarded by administrators? Our investigative team wants to hear from parents, students and educators at: fail@nypost.com.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment