Upper West Side parents are not taking the news that there may have been a pedophile working at the highly-regarded P.S. 87 well. After fuming all weekend over the arrest of teacher's aide Gregory Atkins, 56, nearly 500 parents took to the school yesterday to assail Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott over the mess. "Are our kids safe here?" one father reportedly demanded to know. When told they were he retorted, "How do you know?"
The major issue for many parents seems to be how Atkins even got to 87, considering he had been investigated for an inappropriate relationship at another school (a mother got worried when he gave her son a jockstrap, among other irregularities). The problem was, because no charges were actually filed and Atkins was only warned verbally, the principal of 87 was not informed about the incident. Which, whoops! While parents fret though, the Department of Education is emphasizing that so far "only one child had made an allegation against Atkins, and that the child was not physically harmed." Further, because Atkins only worked with specific students, he did not have access to the whole school.
According to the charges against Atkins, he led a boy to a bathroom stall four times on February 2nd, forcing the child to undress and touching his body while saying he was looking for bruises. He also, on the same day, reportedly told the boy that he wanted to lick the boy's genitals. He remains in custody with a $250,000 bail.
But with two teacher's aides in a week being charged with sexual misconduct the Department of Education is desperately trying to deal with the issue. "If there are mistakes we’ll talk about them and about how those mistakes will not be repeated," Walcott said. "My goal is to make sure we protect our children and not have anyone going after our children in any way, shape or form."
Walcott also says he is looking into hiring practices to try and assure this doesn't happen again. "I have to look at our policies," he told reporters yesterday. "Moving forward, we will provide as much information as we can to our principals so they can make hiring decisions." He then added that parents "have a right to be on my ass" about the alleged abuse.
