NEW YORK – Here’s the moral of the story before we even tell it:

Local reporters can make a big difference, if they care to get off their butts, do some old-fashioned investigative reporting and hold government officials accountable.

The evidence comes from New York City, where city education officials finally got around to checking out the disturbing conditions at PS 106, an elementary school dubbed by the media as the “School of No” because it lacks so many things, including books and classroom materials, suitable classrooms for kindergartners, substitute teachers, and a principal who shows up regularly for work.

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The principal, Marcella Sills, showed up for work on Monday, at her regular reporting time of 7:30 a.m., which observers say is a rarity. Her timely arrival might have had something to do with a hastily scheduled inspection by city education officials, who were finally pressured into visiting the school by a series of reports in the New York Post.

What’s wrong with the elementary school in Far Rockaway, Queens? Just about everything, according to the Post and its sources.

Teachers and students still have not received books or other materials related to the new Common Core standards that are challenging (and baffling) teachers and students in schools throughout the nation. Teachers get by with lesson plans they find online, and purchase their own printing paper.

There are no gym or art classes. Students watch movies every day instead.

The school library is described as a “mess” and a “junk room.”

No substitute teachers are hired when a regular teacher is absent. Students in those classes are split up and sent to other classes for the day.

A class with learning-disabled students does not have a legally required special education co-teacher.

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The school nurse does not have an equipped office.

There is no regular classroom space for about 40 kindergartners. They have been dispatched to several dilapidated trailers on school property that smell like “animal urine” and have rats and squirrels running through the walls and ceilings.

Principal Sills

At the center of the mess is Principal Sills.

Or, to be more accurate, she would be at the center of the mess if she bothered to go to work more often.

Sills is a frequent “no show,” according to the Post, who tracked her movements over one recent week:

“Sills did not come to school last Monday,” the Post wrote. “On Tuesday she showed up at 3:30 p.m. On Wednesday The Post found her at home in Westbury, Long Island, all day before emerging at 2:50 p.m. – school dismissal time. Wearing a fur coat, she took her BMW for a spin.

“She showed up at school Thursday, but not Friday.

“When Sills, 48, does go to work, it’s rarely before 11 a.m. – and sometimes hours later, say sources familiar with her schedule.

“A department of education spokeswoman said Sills was required to report her absences and tardiness to District 27 Superintendent Michelle Lloyd-Bey but would not say whether Sills did so last week. Lloyd-Bey did not return a call (from the Post). Sills hung up on a reporter.

“When Sills is out, an assistant principal is left in charge. Yet Sills, who gets a $128,207 salary, also pockets overtime pay – $2,900 for 83 hours in 2011, the latest available records show.”

As one person quoted by the newspaper put it, “she strolls in whenever she wants.”

One extra bizarre note is that Sills reportedly pressures parents to pay more than $200 every year so their tikes can attend an annual “prom” – dressed as brides and grooms.

Is this woman mentally stable?

Sills strolled into the school early Monday morning, according to the Post, after getting word that city inspectors were on their way to check out the things the newspaper was reporting. She was accompanied by her attorney, of course.

Carmen Farina, the city’s new schools chancellor, issued a statement following the inspection, saying “There is significant room for organizational improvement.” No kidding.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has pledged to fight the spread of charter schools because New York public schools are supposedly so great, said “The allegations in the paper were deeply troubling, and we’re not going to see our children not get the finest education.”

The fact is that the city wasn’t seeing much of anything until the newspaper rang the alarm bell.

The media made the difference

The really troubling part of this story is that Sills is in her ninth year as principal of PS 106. Is it possible that conditions at the school have been this atrocious the entire time?

Actually it’s highly likely. That’s because it’s a New York public school, accountable to only government officials. And as government officials in so many cities have demonstrated over the years, they are more than willing to ignore atrocious schools on a permanent basis, particularly if the public doesn’t raise a fuss.

As another source told The Post, “This school is a complete shithole, and nobody in a position of power comes to investigate. No one cares.”

But for some reason the reporters at the Post checked out the situation and exposed it in print. That’s what it took for the city’s Department of Education, with a multi-billion dollar budget, to actually show some interest in addressing this embarrassment of a school.

We were starting to wonder if local mainstream reporters had any interest in doing any work that required them to leave their comfortable desks, ask a few tough questions and upset a few public officials.

Why would we wonder such a thing?

For the past year, EAGnews has been producing a series of reports called “Where Your School Dollars Go.” We choose various school districts around the nation, secure as many spending records as we possibly can, then spend months pouring through them to identify waste.

In the end we issue full reports about huge amounts of money being wasted on items that have questionable connections to student learning.

Before publishing our reports, we typically contact local media outlets, to see if they have any interest in reporting our numbers, and perhaps taking the bull by the horns and digging even deeper into their local schools’ spending records.

The vast majority of reporters we try to contact have no interest whatsoever.

One example comes from a southern state, where we recently contacted a number of local reporters, offering them advance information about an upcoming spending report from a large metropolitan school district.

One reporter emailed back with the following message:

“In case you didn’t know, the (state) Auditor’s Office is currently in the middle of a huge audit of the (school system).”

There you go, Ms. Reporter. Leave it to the government to investigate the government. You are one trusting soul. Besides, to our knowledge, audits only check to see if money was spent the way it was supposed to be spent. They don’t raise questions about the wisdom of the spending.

She went on to write, “I can’t say any of the things you listed are shocking, or even unnecessary.”

Really?

Officials in the district we studied spent nearly $300,000 at swanky hotels around the nation in one academic year. They dropped another $165,000 on travel agencies. They spent more than $100,000 on restaurant and catering tabs. They wasted $2.8 million in payments to staff for unused sick days. They paid their top 10 administrators $1.7 million in salary, all while laying off 41 teachers and raising taxes.

If that reporter sees no room for reporting when it comes to those dollar figures, she’s in the wrong business.