Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s brazenness in bilking a district buckling under major financial strain made her crime much worse, Judge Edmond Chang said at the sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court in Chicago.
A tearful Byrd-Bennett apologized in court before learning her punishment, saying: “What I did was terribly wrong. … I’m ashamed and I’m sorry.”
The 67-year-old Byrd-Bennett and her co-schemers have further eroded public confidence in a city with a long history of corruption, Chang said. It was vital to impose a punishment that can deter other officials tempted to accept bribes and kickbacks, he said.
“It’s distressing that Chicago has not and seems to be unable to shed its image of public corruption,” he said.
The scheme, Chang added, had diverted money from students who relied on education to help them escape poverty and crime. He cited emails to co-defendants where Byrd-Bennett expressed an eagerness to make money, writing in one: “I have tuition to pay and casinos to visit.” Such “casualness” and “humor” about corruption suggested she never thought she’d be caught, the judge said.
Before being tapped to lead the Chicago district ‘” the nation’s third largest with 400,000, mostly low-income students ‘” Byrd-Bennett held top education jobs in Detroit, Cleveland and New York. As a young woman, she worked as a teacher in low-income neighborhoods in New York City near where she was raised, and later became a “superstar” in the world of education reform, prosecutor Megan Church told the court earlier Friday.
But she succumbed to “naked greed” and a sense of entitlement as she took the Chicago post in 2012, Church said.
“She thought she was owed something more for what she did in the past,” Church said. “And Chicago was the place to get it.”