A high school English teacher at New York’s prestigious Dalton school has resigned after being accused of sexually abusing a former student.
Administrators received the troubling allegation about Mara Naaman in a May 2 letter written on behalf of a student who attended the $US61,000-a-year ($92,026) Upper East Side school, The New York Post reports.
The alleged misconduct occurred between 2020 and 2022, according to a May 9 email from head of school José De Jesús and board of trustees president Aly Jeddy to the school community regarding the “serious matter”.
The school held an assembly the next day to inform high schoolers of the investigation and share information on school resources, the email stated.
“Our priority is determining the veracity of these claims and determining whether there are other allegations of abuse from other members of the community,” the email read.
Ms Naaman, 50, was put on leave once the student’s letter was received and she resigned the following Monday, May 6, Mr De Jesús’s email added.
The school filed a police report and hired a firm specialising in harassment and sexual abuse to conduct an investigation, according to the letter from administrators.
“We are only providing the name of the teacher so anyone with relevant information can provide such information,” it read.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) did not address repeated questions regarding the alleged incident but said it takes sexual assault and rape cases “extremely seriously” and urges anyone who has been a victim to file a report.
“It was a very big surprise,” one former Dalton parent told The Post.
“Everyone has been talking about it but no one really knows what happened.”
Ms Naaman taught English literature to ninth through 12th graders at the K-12 school and was also a “house adviser”, providing academic guidance and social and emotional support to students.
The advisers also serve as “an advocate” and “confidant” for students, building a relationship with them over the course of their four years in high school, according to Dalton’s website.
Ms Naaman’s resignation left many students who were relying on her for college recommendation letters stunned, the former Dalton parent said.
Ms Naaman was among dozens of Dalton faculty members who signed on to a controversial eight-page anti-racism manifesto in 2020. Among its demands were that students of colour be compensated for appearing in Dalton promotional material and for courses to be cancelled if Black students aren’t performing on par with non-black students.
Before starting at Dalton, Ms Naaman worked at Columbia University, at Hofstra University on Long Island, and Williams College in Massachusetts, where she taught comparative literature and Arabic, according to LinkedIn. She was granted tenure (a permanent job) at Williams in 2013.
The Fulbright scholar attended Wesleyan University and got a PhD from Columbia. While pursuing her postgraduate degree, she conducted research in Egypt, at Cairo University’s Arabic department.
Her work has appeared in various journals, including the Journal of Arabic Literature.
Ms Naaman is also a parent and is based out of Manhattan, according to a Facebook profile, and is originally from the state of Michigan.
She did not answer inquiries from The Post. The Dalton School declined a request for comment.
Among the institution’s past faculty was late sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, who taught physics and math there in 1973.
In 2018, former headmaster Gardner Dunnan was accused in a federal lawsuit of sexually abusing a 14-year-old student who was living with him and his wife in 1986.
The girl was working as a “family helper” to Mr Dunnan and his wife, who had just given birth, in exchange for a free education, according to court documents.
This article originally appeared on The New York Post and was reproduced with permission