The City Let Her Keep the Company on One Condition. She Broke It. The Fine Was $5,000.
Josephine Van Ess runs Queens South High Schools for the New York City Department of Education. Her husband Edward owns half of a company that has done $1,533,221 in business with New York City schools since 2023.
The city knew. In June 2023 the Conflicts of Interest Board let her keep her imputed stake in the firm, on one condition: no business in Queens districts 27, 28, and 29 — the districts she oversees.
In 2024 the company took $32,525.16 in purchase orders from three schools inside those districts. The Board caught it. The penalty was a $5,000 fine and nothing else.
- $1,533,221 the total her husband's company has billed New York City schools since 2023 — New York Post / public records
- $32,525.16 purchase orders taken from three schools in the districts she was expressly barred from — Conflicts of Interest Board
- $5,000 the fine imposed. No removal, no suspension, no referral — Conflicts of Interest Board
- $241,635 Van Ess's own DOE salary in 2024 — roughly 48 times the fine — New York Post
The company is Excellence in Every Thread. Edward Van Ess owns 50 percent of it. It sells into city schools through a subsidiary called The Modern Day Man, which runs mentoring programs for boys at $16,000 an engagement.
Part of what that $16,000 buys is clothing — brightly colored suits priced at $650 each, made by Edward Van Ess’s business partner, the fashion designer Ilbert Sanchez. Under city guidelines, a spouse’s ownership interest is imputed to the city employee. On paper, the superintendent owns a piece of a company selling into the school system she works for.
The City Charter gives an employee in that position two clean exits: divest, or disclose to the Conflicts of Interest Board. In June 2023, at the request of then-Chancellor David Banks, the Board took a third route. It let Van Ess keep the stake, with a boundary drawn around it: no business in Queens districts 27, 28, and 29.
That is a workable rule. It does not ask her to give up the family income; it asks her not to sell into the schools she personally supervises. The whole waiver rested on that single line holding.
It did not hold. The Board’s own finding is specific: in 2024, Excellence in Every Thread obtained purchase orders totaling $32,525.16 from three Department of Education schools in Districts 27 and 28 — two of the three districts the waiver had fenced off.
“In 2024, Excellence in Every Thread obtained purchase orders totaling $32,525.16 from three DOE schools in Districts 27 and 28.”
New York City Conflicts of Interest Board · finding
This is the part that separates the story from an ordinary conflict-of-interest complaint. The city did not fail to see the problem. It saw it in 2023, wrote a rule for it, and then watched the rule get crossed inside a year.
Van Ess was ordered to pay $5,000. No removal. No suspension. No referral for further action. She earned $241,635 from the Department of Education in 2024 — the fine is roughly one week of that salary, set against a company that has billed the school system more than $1.5 million since 2023.
The Department of Education declined to say which schools in her districts had done business with the company, or whether it will keep working with the DOE in the coming school year. A department spokesperson said only that officials had reviewed the Board’s findings and were taking steps to ensure continued compliance with ethics requirements. Van Ess declined to comment.
“There are more and more administrators engaging in self-dealing, self-promotion, and various types of waste, fraud and abuse… the penalty here is disproportionately low.”
A New York City Department of Education official, to the New York Post
The waiver landed in a system already under scrutiny at the top. Chancellor Kamar Samuels, named to the job by Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D), signed a $180,000 contract in 2023 with a vendor not on the DOE’s approved list while he was superintendent of District 3. According to the Post’s account, payments were split between the vendor’s two companies.
It surfaced the way these things usually do — through the consequence, not the paperwork. The vendor sent a teacher who had been barred from working for the DOE into two city schools for months. The Special Commissioner of Investigation opened a probe, and its final report assigned the blame to Samuels’s then-deputy, Mariela Graham, recommending she be fired. She was promoted instead.
Josephine Van Ess — Superintendent, Queens South High Schools. Fined $5,000 by the Conflicts of Interest Board after her husband’s company sold into districts her waiver barred. Still in post.
Kamar Samuels — Chancellor, appointed by Mayor Mamdani (D). Under investigation over a $180,000 contract with a non-approved vendor. Not charged.
David Banks — Former Chancellor, appointed by Mayor Eric Adams (D). Asked the Conflicts of Interest Board to grant the Van Ess waiver in June 2023.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) — Has resisted calls for procurement accountability and, per the Post, stonewalled the City Council’s attempt to audit $13 billion in DOE contracts.
New York City saw the conflict coming, wrote one rule to contain it, and imposed a $5,000 fine when the rule was broken — against a company that has billed its schools $1,533,221 since 2023. The ethics system worked exactly as designed. That is the problem.
