Dominican teachers block NYC DOE staffer knocking at 11 pm for rent cash

Dominican teachers working in city schools were startled when a city Department of Education administrator knocked on the door to their Bronx duplex last week at 11 p.m. – apparently to round up rent payments, sources said.

Teachers housed in the Pilgrim Avenue building identified the city employee as Daniel Calcaño, treasurer of ADASA, the Dominican-American Association of Supervisors and Administrators — a well-connected fraternal DOE group that offered to recruit bilingual teachers from Latin America to work with Spanish-speaking students.

Calcaño, a former assistant principal working in a Bronx DOE office, had been collecting monthly payments of $1,350 to $1,450 from each of the five Dominican teachers required by ADASA to share the duplex.

When teachers opened the door late Dec. 2, they found Calcaño whipping out his own key to the apartments. They blocked his entry and asked him to leave, the teachers told DOE and union officials in a Dec. 4 meeting, sources confirmed.

“He was trying to open the door. They didn’t let him come in,” said a person who attended the meeting.

Calcaño and a spokesman for his union, the Council of Supervisors & Administrators, did not respond to a request for comment. 

It wasn’t the only intrusion at Pilgrim Avenue. On Monday, an Asian man who refused to identify himself, but said he was “in charge of the apartment,” got into the shared living room and started knocking on bedroom doors, teachers said. He, too, was told to leave.

Starting this weekend, all five teachers, and one’s husband, will move out of the ADASA-run duplex into housing they found themselves or with their relatives living in the area, a source told The Post.

Eleven other teachers were paying rent to Calcaño for rooms in a Baychester Avenue duplex.

Another three teachers paid rent for a co-op on Marion Avenue to the wife of Emmanuel Polanco, ADASA’s first vice president and the principal of MS 80 in the Bronx, who was removed from the school last month after an investigation began. The co-op was purchased in 2006 by Polanco’s mother, who died several years ago, yet remains listed in city records as the owner.

Polanco’s wife, Sterling Báez, collected rent from the three teachers. A week ago,  Báez ordered the teachers to pay this month’s rent by Dec. 6 or get out.

“It was an ultimatum,” an insider said. The teachers wanted to move, saying Polanco and his wife barred visitors and controlled their mailbox.

At the meeting, DOE representatives told the teachers to cut off contact with ADASA, and stop paying or taking orders from members of the group. 

“ADASA is not your employer,” they were told.

Ruskin Pimentel, a spokesman for Bronx State Sen. Luis Sepúlveda, said his office is in touch with the DOE on its efforts to resolve the distressing problems.

“We are happy the DOE is addressing this situation. Our main concern is the well-being of the teachers, and we are confident that, so, far, the DOE is taking the right steps,” Pimentel said.

The teachers faced another threat last week. On Monday, Marianne Mason, executive director of the Cordell Hull Foundation, which sponsors the exchange program, sent the teachers an email saying their visas are subject to termination if they don’t give the organization updated addresses and phone numbers.

The email came after The Post reported that the teachers’ cell phones – provided by ADASA for $60 a month– were inexplicably shut off the prior week.

At the Dec. 4 meeting, representatives from UFT, the teachers’ union, said they would provide the recruits with legal aid for any problems as they sought other accommodations. They met with lawyers on Tuesday.

UFT president Michael Mulgrew, at a Zoom town hall on Wednesday, briefly mentioned the Dominican “scandal.”

“We’re there for those teachers,” he said, “but the city allowed that to happen and acts like they had nothing to do with it.”