Ex-Brick Administrator Had OK To Work Despite Drug Arrest, Investigator Says

When Andrew J. Morgan filled out his application to work for the Brick Township School District, he did not report his 1990 conviction on heroin and cocaine charges.

And while those charges do appear in the FBI database, his record also has a notation that says he has been approved to work in a school district, according to an investigator for the state Department of Education.

Morgan, 65, was charged May 7 along with Brick Schools Superintendent Walter Uszenski and Uszenski’s daughter, Jacqueline Halsey, in a scheme that supplied Halsey with full-time day care for her preschool child paid for by the Brick Township schools, with official misconduct and theft by deception, said Al Della Fave, spokesman for the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office.

At Thursday’s Board of Education meeting, Board President Sharon Cantillo told the audience she spoke with investigators at the state Department of Education, which handles all criminal background checks for districts across the state.

The investigator told her that while Morgan’s conviction was indeed in his file, the information also included a notation that Morgan had been deemed fit to work in a school district -- so the conviction was not reported to the district.

The investigator confirmed that information for the Patch.

“His prints have been run 10 or 12 times and he has always been cleared to work” because of that notation, which the investigator said was because the commissioner of education at that time approved the appeal.

“There used to be a process where someone could appeal if they could show they had been rehabilitated and be deemed acceptable for school employment,” the investigator told the Patch.

That means that while Morgan’s criminal convictions are in the system, he is marked as employable. Even now, the investigator said, the office that handles the background checks would be required to say he was approved. However the pending charges would result in a caveat on that approval, he said.

The process to appeal to have a criminal conviction excused to return to work in a school district no longer exists, the investigator said, but he wasn’t sure when it was halted.

“There aren’t too many of those people still around,” he said.

>> RELATED: Brick Schools Superintendent, Two Others Arrested, Charged In Day-Care Scheme

According to a 1989 report in the New York Times, Morgan was arrested and charged with selling cocaine on five occasions, in amounts ranging from a half-ounce to more than 3 ounces, to undercover detectives assigned to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s investigation unit.

Morgan -- who taught English to 9th and 10th graders in a special education program at Canarsie High School -- also was charged with possession of cocaine, as well as with conspiracy to sell heroin, in which he is said to have agreed to travel to Thailand to buy heroin for undercover agents posing as drug dealers. The heroin was supposed to be brought into this country concealed in disposable diapers, the authorities said.

Morgan later was convicted of felony drug charges, though a follow-up article in the New York Times does not specify the exact counts. Morgan, who had worked for the school for 20 years, was fired but later won a civil case against the schools over the firing, despite his conviction.

Morgan, whose wife Lorraine Morgan is the district’s academic officer, was hired in March 2013 by the Brick Board of Education, at the request and recommendation of Uszenski, to conduct an “audit” of the Brick schools special services section. Uszenski and Morgan knew each other and had worked together before 2013.

The audit sparked a plan that resulted in moving a number of the district’s special needs students from one school to another. That move was assailed by parents of Brick special needs students, who opposed the disruptions in their routine and questioned the speed at which the project was moving.

Morgan resigned from his position on Dec. 31, 2013. He received in excess of $60,000 in compensation from the Brick Board of Education between March 1 and Dec. 31, 2013, Della Fave said.

After his departure from the Brick school district, Morgan owned and operated Morgan Associates for Children with Special Needs, from the couple’s home in Edison, according to Lorraine Morgan’s state Department of Education School Ethics Commission disclosure statement filed April 30.