An ex-elementary-school administrator in the Bronx will collect $230,000 from the city in a settlement for his suit charging he was punished for being a whistleblower, The Post has learned.
Manny Verdi, ex-assistant principal of PS 24 in Riverdale, sued the Department of Education in 2016, claiming a superintendent pressured him to resign after he accused Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz of meddling in the admissions process to prevent poor, minority kids from enrolling.
Verdi is “pleased the city finally accepted responsibility” for the treatment, said his lawyer, Ezra Glaser.
Settling the case “was in the best interests of all parties,” said Law Department spokesman Nicholas Paolucci.
A separate defamation suit by Verdi charges Dinowitz falsely blamed him for the DOE’s failure to renew a lease in a nearby building used as a PS 24 annex. Dinowitz denies the allegation.
In that case, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arlene Bluth recently ordered City Councilman Andy Cohen to testify in a deposition — complying with a subpoena that Cohen had fought.
Cohen wrote a June 2016 op-ed in The Riverdale Press defending Dinowitz for sending his chief of staff to oversee PS 24’s kindergarten registration — a move Verdi denounced as “a segregationist plot.”
Mayor de Blasio’s top lawyer, Zachary Carter, filed an unsuccessful motion to exempt Cohen from testifying, but Bluth rejected it.
“Even a high-ranking official can be compelled to sit for a deposition if that official has personal knowledge about an issue,” she wrote.