(NY)
New York Times [New York NY]
December 10, 2024
By Katherine Rosman
The elite Brooklyn school commissioned an investigation after the arrest of Winston Nguyen, who is now accused of soliciting lewd photographs from students.
Top administrators at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn knowingly hired a felon to teach math and then “shamed” teachers, students and parents who expressed discomfort with his conduct “as racist or not progressive,” according to a scathing report released on Tuesday.
The teacher, Winston Nguyen, is now accused of soliciting lewd images from students and faces 11 felony charges, including using a child in a sexual performance, promoting a sexual performance by a child and disseminating indecent material to a minor.
But the report said that while its students were facing a barrage of online requests for naked pictures and videos, the school was treating Mr. Nguyen as a valued employee whose unusual behavior was ignored or explained away.
“In some instances,” the report said, administrators “prioritized teachers including Nguyen over the concerns of students and their families about the teacher’s background or behavior.”
The elite private school — famed for what the report calls its “systematically asystematic” culture, celebrity parents and alumni, high Ivy League matriculation rate and unusual hiring practices — has been hobbled by scandals in recent years. It is unclear how the report will affect its reputation among parents of prospective students and fund-raising efforts.
Three of the administrators named in the report are no longer employed by Saint Ann’s, and the school’s current leaders did not reply to requests for comment. But in a statement posted on the Saint Ann’s website, two members of the board of trustees said, “We take seriously our responsibility to provide governance and accountability.”
Saint Ann’s commissioned the investigation, conducted by the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, after Mr. Nguyen was arrested near the school in June.
The 39-page report was released one day after The New York Times published an account of Mr. Nguyen’s tenure at Saint Ann’s and of his personal history. The law firm’s report adds numerous details from inside the school.
It describes Mr. Nguyen’s peculiar behavior — including often sleeping overnight at the school — and his attempts to curry favor with students through gifts and food.
The report says that its investigators found no evidence of inappropriate “physical interaction” between Mr. Nguyen and his students but that throughout his tenure, he “pushed boundaries” and “violated the school’s policies” with his “overly familiar and excessive interactions with students” that “were designed to ingratiate himself in order to gain trust and access.”
It shines a particularly harsh light on school administrators who hired Mr. Nguyen without a rigorous look into his past beyond a pro forma background check. Those same administrators shielded him from the scrutiny of parents and provided insufficient oversight of a teacher who had recently been in jail for fraud, the investigators wrote.
And it describes school leaders’ limited response to the online solicitation of students.
The report, authored by two lawyers, Helen Cantwell and Arian June, noted repeated failures by administrators to communicate to Saint Ann’s families and teachers — both about Mr. Nguyen’s criminal record and about the efforts of an online “catfisher” to entice students to share sexually explicit images of themselves.
After learning of the solicitations, “Saint Ann’s administrators decided that communication about the issue would draw unwanted attention to the catfishing victims,” the report said. “Thus, information that some Saint Ann’s students were being targeted by an unknown Snapchat account was not shared beyond a small group of administrators.”
Further, the school “worked with some families who made a report to law enforcement, but it was not otherwise in touch with the District Attorney’s Office,” the report said.
The decisions of three top administrators are repeatedly cited: Vincent Tompkins, who was the head of school and has since retired; Melissa Kantor, who was the dean of faculty until she became the assistant head at Trinity School this fall; and Maureen Yusuf-Morales, who was the head of the upper middle school and who recommended that the school hire Mr. Nguyen.
Ms. Yusuf-Morales left her job at the school this summer. She is now working at a charter school in Brooklyn, according to her LinkedIn profile. She did not respond to a request for comment, nor did her lawyer.
“Tompkins and Kantor decided to hire Nguyen, in part, because of their view that Saint Ann’s as an institution ‘believes in second chances,’” the report said, “and hiring someone with a criminal record was an opportunity to act in accordance with what they saw as the school’s values.”
The report also noted that “Kantor told investigators that she viewed Nguyen as a risk to the School, but not a risk to children, although we know of no efforts taken to confirm that Nguyen’s interactions with students were appropriate.”
Ms. Kantor declined to comment. In an email sent last week, Mr. Tompkins said, “Winston Nguyen’s alleged actions are abhorrent and reprehensible, and they contravene the core values of Saint Ann’s School.” He did not provide further comment.
Mr. Nguyen, 38, served a four-month jail term a year before he was hired by Saint Ann’s. He had pleaded guilty to a scheme in which he defrauded an elderly couple of more than $300,000. He also pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of an incompetent or physically disabled person.
In 2020, the school hired him to help manage the logistical needs of hybrid learning created by the Covid-19 pandemic. He alerted the school’s senior leadership that he had been convicted of a crime, and a background check showed a felony fraud conviction. The school did not investigate further. (The Times reported that at least one employee argued unsuccessfully against hiring a felon.)
In 2021, Mr. Nguyen was promoted to math teacher.
In June, Mr. Nguyen was arrested near Saint Ann’s and “school leadership learned for the first time that Nguyen might be connected to the Snapchat” solicitations, the report said.
Last week, a prosecutor from the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said a plea deal was in the works. In court this week, Mr. Nguyen’s lawyer, Frank Rothman, said Mr. Nguyen would face a sentence of at least five years in prison. On behalf of his client, Mr. Rothman declined to comment.
The cloud that the law firm report places on Saint Ann’s is just the most recent in a string of controversies at the school.
In 2023, it was sued by parents of an eighth-grade student who died by suicide three months after learning the school would not allow him to return for ninth grade. (The lawsuit blames school policies for the boy’s death. The school denies what it calls the suit’s “inaccurate and misleading allegations.”)
A few years earlier, an administrator had resigned after hosting parties for students and recent graduates at his home. The school also issued a report in 2019 that documented a history of faculty sexual misconduct from 1970 to 2017.
Katherine Rosman covers newsmakers, power players and individuals making an imprint on New York City. More about Katherine Rosman