A Reisterstown woman who pleaded guilty to billing the Baltimore school system for more than $150,000 in phantom tutoring services was sentenced Thursday to 10 years in prison, with all but 18 months suspended.
Tracy Denise Queen, 41, will be on probation for 10 years upon release and must pay full restitution to the city school system, which had compensated her for what she claimed were tutoring sessions for 250 students over a three-year period.
A statement issued by the office of State Prosecutor Emmet C. Davitt said the students had been "cheated out of a total of nearly 4,000 hours of tutoring" by Queen and her company, Queen's Mobile Education, which she operated from her home on Bentley Hill Drive.
Prosecutors said Queen submitted false documentation and invoices to the school system for tutoring services for special-education students. Queen's online resume says she worked for 10 years overseeing special-education services for the city system. A Facebook page for her company showed her in pictures with students in classrooms, and said that she provided literacy instruction for an hour and a half each day, four or five days a week.
School officials terminated her contract last year, although they said in November, when Queen was indicted, that they were only aware of problems concerning a 2009 contract that involved about $44,000. Michael Sarbanes, a city schools spokesman, said last year that Queen had signed prior contracts with the system, starting in 2006, but school officials were unaware of any irregularities involving those contracts.
Shelly S. Glenn, a senior assistant state prosecutor, told Baltimore County Circuit Judge John G. Turnbull II at a hearing in April that not only did Queen steal from the school system, but she failed to fully pay at least 14 tutors who had worked for her company.
The prosecutor's office said the scam was discovered two years ago by Joan Jacobson, whose son, now 18, was receiving additional tutoring at home from a woman employed by Queen, Dolores Miller. Four months after the tutoring began, Miller informed Jacobson she might have to stop teaching the boy because Queen had failed to pay her, according to Glenn. After receiving "no meaningful response" from Queen, Jacobson contacted school system officials.
It was then that Queen's scheme began to unravel, Glenn said. Officials discovered that Queen had submitted documentation in the Jacobson case showing that the boy was being tutored by someone named Christie Lopez, although no such person had ever tutored the teen.
In court Thursday, Jacobson confirmed the discovery of Queen's fraud followed her complaint to the school system that her son's tutor was owed hundreds of dollars in unpaid salary. Queen had also neglected to send her son a math tutor, which was required in his education plan.
"After I voiced my complaint to the school system, a school official began reading from timesheets submitted for reimbursement by Ms. Queen, all of which were fabricated," said Jacobson, a former reporter for The Evening Sun and The Baltimore Sun. "The name of the tutor was wrong, my signature was forged and all the dates and times my son was allegedly tutored were false. Ms. Queen even invoiced the city for several days one summer week when our family was actually out of town on vacation."
Jacobson said she was still "waiting to find out what the city school system has done to prevent this theft from happening again."