Police have arrested a teacher for allegedly throwing a second-grader across a school hall last December. Osman Couey, 53 and a teacher at PS 194 in Harlem, allegedly attacked the 7-year-old boy on December 23rd, after the boy had been kicked out of class and had begun banging on the door to be let back in. Couey is facing charges of assault and acting in a manner injurious to a child.
The boy's mother, Shantel Phinazee, said the incident was captured on surveillance video, but school administrators didn't mention it to her for a month. She has pulled her son out of the school.
"I don’t trust this school," she told ABC7. "Y'all waited a month to tell me, didn’t care at all about what was going on with my son. You kept it from me."
Couey has worked at the school since 1993, and has received slaps on the wrist in the past for corporal punishment, verbal abuse, and "exercising poor judgement." The last finding, by the Office of Special Investigations, was in response to an allegation that he threw a 7-year-old special needs student down a flight of stairs in 2013.
Prior to Couey's arrest, but after Phinazee went public with a National Action Network representative at her side, the Department of Education assured parents that Couey had been "removed from the classroom." He will now be fired.
Phinazee said her son, Ka'veon Wilson, is traumatized.
"My son is scared to sleep in the dark without a night light," she told ABC. "He wakes up in the middle of the night. He talks in his sleep because he's scared. It's ridiculous."
Phinazee told CBS2 she is considering a lawsuit.
Couey makes $102,000 a year, according to the website SeeThroughNY.
PS 194 has been the scene of other alarming incidents in recent years, including an incident where three boys allegedly sexually assaulted a third grader in a bathroom in 2012, an assault on another third grader in 2009, and alleged coverups of those and other incidents.
The institution had frequently appeared on the state's list of "persistently dangerous" schools, but has not made the list for the last two years. Last school year, only 6 percent of students there met state English standards, and only 5 percent met benchmarks for math, according to city Education Department data.
