Reacting to the indictment yesterday of Tracy Denise Queen, the head of a company supplying special education tutoring to Baltimore City Public School students, officials issued the following statement.

“City Schools does not tolerate fraud in services to our students. When City Schools was alerted to the alleged fraud in November 2009, we immediately terminated the contract with Ms. Queen, sought repayment, and have worked with the State Prosecutor over the past year, providing over 80,000 pages of documents. We will continue to make staff available to support the investigation and look forward to whatever assistance the State Prosecutor can provide in identifying fraud by Ms. Queen. We also look forward to using the results of these proceedings to assist our efforts to recover any funds that are due to us.”

The statement does not specifically address allegations by State Prosecutor Robert A. Rohrbaugh  published in The Brew yesterday that school officials were uncooperative and at first refused to produced documents, resulting in a months-long legal battle that hampered their efforts to assemble the case.

Schools spokesman Michael Sarbanes’ comments in The Baltimore Sun late yesterday make some additional points.

He said the school system’s own investigation was able to verify $44,000 in allegedly fraudulent billing from Tracy Queen’s 2009 contract. He also told The Sun he was unable to confirm Queen’s claim online that she worked for ten years for Baltimore City Public Schools as a teacher and overseeing special education services.