The elite private school affiliated with the UN that caught eighth-grade students scrawling swastikas and other hate imagery into yearbooks last week has kicked out a handful of the offenders, The Post has learned.
The United Nations International School sent an email to all parents on Thursday after it concluded its “thorough and deliberate” investigation into the “yearbook incident” that it had said affected more than 30 yearbooks and potentially involved as many as 15 kids.
“All students found to have participated in this incident have been held accountable,” wrote head of school Dan Brenner in a letter sent to parents Thursday.
“Each case was viewed individually with a range of imposed consequences, including students not returning to our community. All the students involved and their families have been informed in individual meetings.”
The yearbook flap “stands in direct opposition to our mission to educate young people to make the world a better place and to foster understanding, respect, empathy, and global citizenship,” Brenner added in the letter. “Accountability is not separate from that mission; it is part of it.”
UNIS spokesperson Lupe Todd-Medina refused to say how many kids were booted, but told The Post that disciplinary action also included counseling and probation for the “fewer than 15 kids involved.”
A Jewish dad at UNIS told The Post that “this needed to be done.”
The pre-K to 12 school “made the correct move — they became educators again. It’s the first step towards change to kick a few kids out. I would do the same,” he added.
But a Manhattan private school consultant told The Post the “investigation” is a sham. “The school doesn’t care. They don’t care because antisemitism is bad ––and that’s the problem. They only care because they got caught.”
It’s become “the laziest private school in the city,” said the expert of the elite school that caters mostly to diplomats’ kids. “It goes down a little bit every year.
“It’s kids of UN workers. All they want to do is get through this school and go to the Sorbonne.”
The Turtle Bay school was in the news in February when a longtime Jewish teacher filed a discrimination suit alleging administrators ignored her complaints of Jew hatred and retaliated against her for speaking out.
