Ryan Eng, Julia Maciejak, and Jasmine Palma are seniors at Townsend Harris HS in Queens and editors-in-chief of The Classic, a student-run newspaper that publishes Monday to Friday without censorship. The Classic has covered many controversial issues, and has run a series of articles on teacher sexual misconduct.
Last spring, we got a phone call that rattled us: A Townsend Harris graduate described the pain she still felt years after graduation because she was “groomed by a predator” — one of her teachers who showered her with gifts, alcohol and intimate text messages.
“I had to undergo around six years of therapy to come to terms with it and move on in life. I haven’t yet felt like I’ve fully recovered from that nightmare,” she told us.
We felt compelled to act by helping tell her story.
Over the past two years, our school newspaper has interviewed six students who alleged sexual wrongdoing by three Townsend Harris teachers. We proposed training for students on educator sexual misconduct.
But school administrators, the PTA, and our alumni association offered no plan to address this terrible pattern. The Department of Education gave a generic response that it takes such allegations seriously, conducts investigations, and follows up with disciplinary measures and “social-emotional support.”
No one said, “There is a problem here, and we will fix it.” The training we hoped for never happened.
That’s because the DOE’s policies for dealing with sexual predators are deeply broken, leaving students vulnerable.
Teachers can be returned to schools after complaints are investigated and substantiated. And administrators are forbidden to talk about the offenders because of legal restrictions.
The three accused teachers are no longer in the school, but no one told us why. This only led to rumors, and became an open secret spread among students.
Now we’ve learned of a fourth teacher who investigators described as someone who “threatens the wellbeing” of our students, but was returned to the school in September. We want to know why, and have started working on our next article.
Our newspaper will never let this story go — not until we receive an answer to the question we’ll ask those in power: What will you do to ensure our students are safe?
