Stop Asking Me for Alumni Donations

A rant about graduating from Townsend Harris. TW: pedophilia, grooming, sexual abuse

At the risk of exposing just how dorky I looked as a teenager to people who had the good fortune not to know me back then, this is what I looked like when I was in high school. I think this photo is from junior year, but even when looking at my graduation photos, I’m struck by how young I was. I was not even 18 yet when I graduated. I was a child.

All of my classmates back in Townsend Harris were children. That’s what we were first of all. Children. Not scholars or whatever pretentious term the school used to describe us. Children.

We were teenagers, children, and Townsend Harris High School did not protect us. It could not protect us from the predators within its own environment. It did not even try.

I woke up this morning to a news story about a Townsend Harris teacher who had been returned to school even after an official city investigation had confirmed he preyed on multiple female students. He was finally fired after student journalists from our school paper broke the case, but it’s too late. Even when I was a student, it was an open secret that this teacher crossed boundaries and had engaged in relationships with students in the past. He then went on to do so again.

I wish he was the only one. I can name four other teachers off the top of my head who had a reputation when I was a student there. Some are gone, some I don’t know the fate of. Even the ones that are removed from the school never faced proper consequences. I stalked one on LinkedIn, he works in a private school in New Jersey (I think it might even be an all-girls school). Another teaches at Queens College, only a few feet away from the school full of students he used to prey on.

I’m sure there are more teachers I don’t know about. There was something in the water there.

To be clear, I was never directly preyed upon by a Townsend Harris teacher or inappropriately touched, and I was hesitant about writing this because I don’t want to take up space from actual survivors. But I’ve been thinking over the past few months about how damaging it was to be a female (or someone perceived as female) student in that school at all, even if nothing directly “bad” happened to you.

Being a female alumna of Townsend Harris is a series of retrospective “there but for the grace of God, go I” moments. My very first teacher at my very first class in the school was an English teacher known for his inappropriate comments towards female students, but he never made a comment to me. There but for the grace of God, go I.

Two months after starting my freshman year, I was cornered in the hallway by a greasy-looking man who asked me detailed questions about my haircare routine. When he tried to touch my hair, I ran. I thought he was a random creep that had snuck into school but I later found out he was one of the chemistry teachers. I narrowly avoided having him the next year. There but for the grace of God, go I.

Another teacher grew close with me during my last two years and actually kissed me on the cheek right before I graduated. I chalked it up to him being Italian. There but for the grace of God, go I.

It makes me sick to think about what could have happened if one little thing had been different. It makes me sick to think about the students that it did happen to. It makes me sick to think that maybe I could have done something even though it’s not my responsibility because I was a child and we were all children that did our best to protect each other with whisper networks and advice because we knew that the adults in the room were not going to protect us.

It makes me sick to think about how even though a little feeling in the pit of my stomach recognized the favoritism that many of the male teachers showed towards some of their female students was wrong, along with many of my peers, I craved their attention. We were told that our academic success was the most important thing in our young lives, and wouldn’t being a teacher’s favorite be a sign that you were the best, that you were the smartest, that you were special?

My first English teacher was one of the first teachers fired for inappropriate conduct. I learned about his misbehavior my second month of school when an older student warned me about inappropriate comments he’d made to her classmates. But I still desperately craved his approval because he had a reputation as being one of the toughest graders and often bragged about how he was going to make us real appreciators of literature, not just robots like the other teachers wanted us to be, and I thought that if I could impress him, that meant I would succeed. I tried raising my hand in class and I poured my heart into my essays and although I got decent grades, he never quite seemed to remember I exist. I wanted to get his approval so, so badly, and I felt so confused when some other girl in my class would say the exact same thing I did and he would praise her, not me.

I realize now that the issue isn’t my intellect (not to toot my own horn but I’m pretty damn smart and pretty damn good at literary analysis and expressing myself through words). I just wasn’t interesting to him because I was a late bloomer and didn’t properly get tits until I was 18.

Even back then, I knew on some level that the reason I wasn’t getting his approval had more to do with physical factors than my intellect, but I was 14 and I wanted him to like me so badly and now that I think about it, I feel sick even though I was 14 and it wasn’t my fault.

I’ve been trying to figure out what is it about Townsend Harris that meant there was such a disproportionate amount of pedophiles on staff, and I think that the school’s culture formed a perfect storm that enabled these men. All teenagers crave external validation and approval, even though we front like we’re rebellious, and that gets magnified at an institution such as THHS where there is such immense pressure to succeed academically. When you’re told that the only thing that matters in your life is your grades and a teacher suddenly starts praising you as brilliant and mature beyond your years, you’re going to take that as proof that you’re special, that you’re actually worth something according to the system of value you’ve been told matters the most. You’re not going to see the snake lurking underneath.

When nobody says something is wrong, you’re going to assume that means it’s acceptable, especially at a school that is such a stickler for rules. Looking back, some of the relationships that certain teachers developed with students were noticeably inappropriate even if you didn’t know anything that was happening outside of school, but since no other adult did anything, as a student you began to think that was okay.

The infamously strict dress code, which targeted female students, definitely played a part. When you’re a girl in an environment that constantly polices your body, you don’t feel like a person or a student, you feel like a whore on notice. You feel guilty until proven guilty, as if it is your fault when anything happens, if anything happens. I know this is a factor in the culture of harassment because one of the teachers I alluded to in this essay would explicitly reference the dress code, telling female students “don’t tempt me” if they wore clothing he deemed was revealing. When you’re already prepped to feel ashamed, you’re not going to take an inappropriate comment from a teacher as a sign that he is a creep and an awful human, but as confirmation that the school’s institutions were right and that there is something deeply, deeply wrong with you.

The teachers that had sexual relationships with students are getting most of the attention (and rightfully so) but the other, minor instances of misconduct by other faculty members really drive home how toxic the culture of Townsend Harris High School was (and probably still is). The male teachers that maybe never touched a student, but visibly gave female students they found attractive preferential treatment. The teachers that bullied their students. The faculty members that were verbally and emotionally abusive, but got away with it because when you knew other teachers were sleeping with students, it felt “not so bad.” Even as an adult I catch myself making excuses for some of these verbally abusive teachers because at least I could wear a V-neck to their classes without worrying about getting ogled, only to remember that I left that class in tears at least once a week and I’m sorry, but if you are a grown adult regularly making teenagers sob you are NOT NORMAL.

I recently saw a few of my former teachers posting on social media about Simone Biles and I had to go for a rage walk. It is easy to care about Simone Biles, she is a convenient survivor and you can just share a Facebook post and wash your hands, but what about the girls in your classes? What did you do to protect them?

I am still unpacking the emotional consequences of going to a school that normalized grooming, sexual harassment, and bullying from teachers and students alike. I’m just now starting to get comfortable in my own skin again. It took me two years of college before I could comfortably remove my cardigan in a sweltering lecture hall if I was wearing a sleeveless top underneath because I was terrified of my professors’ reactions (they didn’t care. Of course not). For years I’ve tolerated inappropriate behavior and harassment, sometimes from men much older than myself, and some of that is due to my personal traumas outside of Townsend but I wonder how much the school played a part in it as well.

Obviously the consequences are so much worse for the students whose lives were ruined by these men. I hope they find peace eventually, the kind of peace that certain teachers at Townsend should never get to experience in this life or the next.

The weight of how bad the culture of Townsend Harris was didn’t sink in for me until I became a teaching assistant myself. I was 23 when I stepped into the classroom, and many of my students were close to me in age because I was teaching kids about to graduate from the local high school. But to me they were children, adorable children still figuring out their place in the world. I was hyper-conscious about how I interacted with them, careful to gently shoot down any time one of them tried to treat me like a peer. After I had to leave unexpectedly due to the pandemic and reached out to a few of my favorite classes, encouraging them to stay in touch, I agonized over whether or not I was crossing a boundary by giving them my contact information.

I wish certain teachers at Townsend had paid half as much attention as I did.

The school does not protect us. The school protects itself as a closed ecosystem churning towards higher and higher places on the US News & World Report ranking. Anything that threatens its rise is dealt with. Anything that threatens its students? Not so much, unless you can prove it will impact your grades and SAT scores because we have a reputation to uphold.

A few times I’ve been told or it’s been implied to me that I should be grateful to have gone to Townsend Harris. Grateful to have gotten the resources that I got, grateful that I got a better education than I would have gotten at most public schools in NYC (ignoring the role that the school itself plays in maintaining that segregated system). The only thing I’m grateful for is that my own chunk of psychic damage is comparatively lower than it is for others, although it breaks my heart to see what the school did to my friends and peers.

I’m not grateful for shit. I would give it all up—the awards, the AP honors classes, even the place in the prestigious college—if it meant that my peers would have been safe. Clearly, the administration of Townsend Harris High School and the DOE were not willing to do the same.

Shame on you. Shame on everyone involved in making that place the perfect ecosystem that allowed multiple predators to thrive.

And don’t you fucking dare ask me for alumni donations.

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Bourdain newsletter is in the works and will hopefully go up later this week. I just needed to get this off my chest. I hope you understand.