Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Leon Campo, a former superintendent in the East Meadow School District, filed a $35 million lawsuit against the district claiming that he was threatened and retaliated against for defending another former administrator.
Campo started with the district in the 1970s, becoming superintendent in 2006. He officially retired in 2008, but the Board of Education asked him to return to his old job for the 2008-09 academic year. Campo was brought back again as interim superintendent between 2015 and 2017.
The lawsuit notes that Campo had already left the district when officials fired another former employee, Arthur Williams, in 2019. Williams is Black, and served as the supervisor for facilities and transportation for the district, as reported by Newsday.
Following his termination, Williams filed a complaint against the state’s Division of Human Rights, asserting the district discriminated against him due to race and age. In the lawsuit, according to Newsday, Campo alleged that during his time as interim superintendent from 2015 to 2017, Pizzo used racist and demeaning language against Williams. Campo supported Williams complaint against the East Meadow school district, and now believes his reputation is being damaged in retaliation .
Campo says district officials falsely accused him at a school board meeting of mismanagement and removed his name from the district’s headquarters — the Salisbury Center — which was formerly named in Campo’s honor.
According to a story published by the Herald last year, at a May 2023 school board meeting, East Meadow’s business and finance assistant superintendent Patrick Pizzo told board members that during his time as superintendent, Campo mismanaged several projects.
When he started with the district in 2008, Pizzo told the Herald he found “boxes piled up” and business employees searching for scraps of paper and “desperately scrambling trying to put pieces together” because paperwork had been filed incorrectly.
Campo, however, in an interview with the Herald, denied Pizzo’s allegations that multi-million dollar building projects were improperly “closed out” — a phrase used to describe the process of ending a project and applying for state aid.
“We went after every nickel we could because that’s the way it was,” Campo said. “To my knowledge, we didn’t lose any aid.”
Pizzo told board members at the meeting last year he discovered on his first day as the facilities and operations director in 2008 there were errors in closing out projects from the early 2000s. During that time, the building aid ratio for East Meadow was 52 percent, according to Pizzo, meaning that the district was eligible for more than half of the project to be paid for by the state.
For more than $55 million of projects, Pizzo alleged, deadlines to receive that aid had passed, resulting in a $29 million revenue loss. His findings were the product of five years of research and review by financial experts, which were then verified by two third-party experts in the field of capital close-outs and financial best practices.
“What he did was gross incompetence,” Pizzo said of Campo.
The lawsuit, filed with the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn on Nov. 19, names the school district as a defendant, along with the district’s former superintendent Kenneth Card, and current and former Board of Education members, including Alisa Baroukh, Scott Eckers, Jodi Luce, Matthew Melnick, Eileen Napolitano, Melissa Tell and Nancy Widman.
Kenneth Rosner, the current superintendent of East Meadow’s schools, said in a statement published by Newsday that the district is aware of the lawsuit filed against Campo, but had no further comment — and said the district does not generally comment on pending litigation.
