Former Poly Prep Football Coach Phil Foglietta

The decision comes amid rumblings that a group of former Horace Mann students, who have accused the Bronx private school's faculty of sexual abuse during the 1970s and 80s, had hired attorney Gloria Allred to pursue legal action against the school.

Poly Prep argued to have the case against former football coach Phil Foglietta dismissed on the grounds that the statute of limitations for his accusers --which include 10 former students and two day campers, according to The New York Daily News--had expired after those students turned 23:

"Central to plaintiffs' claims in the present case are their allegations that Poly Prep engaged in an affirmative course of conduct during the period of limitations to deceive the plaintiffs into believing that they had no claim against Poly Prep because the school had no knowledge of Foglietta's wrongdoing…Foglietta was consistently portrayed to the plaintiffs as a reputable and esteemed football coach throughout the limitations period (1966-1991)," Block wrote in Tuesday's order.

Mr. Foglietta was accused of molesting students at Poly Prep from 1966 to 1991. In the ruling, the first complaint against Mr. Foglietta came in 1966 from a student (and his family) alleging several instances of abuse.

Per The New York Times:

The family was told that an investigation was conducted, that the student's claims were not credible and that the student would face "severe consequences" if he continued to make such allegations, according to the ruling.

Horace Mann has been grappling with allegations of sexual abuse by its former faculty members following a June New York Times Sunday Magazine profile which detailed the alleged incidents.  The three professors highlighted in the story, including the former chair of the arts and music department, are all dead.

While the statute of limitations was long thought to be a roadblock for adults who were seeking litigation against their former schools for actions that took place decades ago, one attorney with experience trying these kinds of cases said plaintiffs could still accuse their schools of conspiracy and fraud.

“They’re concealing this information they should be revealing, and then they are hiding behind the statute of limitations, saying, ‘Oh, you should have sued us,’” the attorney added. “It’s an absurd and asinine construction, asking kids who could not possibly have any idea that the school had knowledge of this activity to have to sue the school by a certain time, while the school is still fervently engaged in a coverup to minimize its own culpability and its own knowledge,” the lawyer said.

After Mr. Foglietta retired in 1991, Poly Prep held a celebratory banquet at the Downtown Athletic Club in his honor, and set up a memorial fund in his name after he died in 1998. Such measures depicted Mr. Foglietta as a celebrated coach, despite the allegations from former students at the time.

Judge Block described Poly Prep's actions as "deceitful conduct" by claiming ignorance of Mr. Foglietta's actions and allegations.

From the NY Daily News:

Block dismissed claims the plaintiffs made against the elite private school based on the anti-racketeering statute known as RICO. But he will allow RICO claims made by two plaintiffs, Philip Culhane and Philip Henningsen, to proceed against former and current Poly Prep officials because they said they would not have donated money to the school if they had known that Poly Prep officials knew about the alleged abuse as early as the 1960s.

drosen@observer.com 

Like Penn State and Poly Prep before it, Horace Mann was grappling with the aftermath of serious accusations of sex abuse made by its graduates against former faculty members, and Mr. Friedman and headmaster Tom Kelly had called the meeting to address the terrible matter that had brought the school much ignominy and negative press.

A Protester Outside Horace Mann (photo credit: Peter Brooks)

The impetus for this meeting had come in the form of a nearly 10,000-word New York Times Magazine cover story written by Horace Mann alum and playwright Amos Kamil that was published in June.

The story painted three popular teachers as sexual predators during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: Johannes Somary, a former chair of the arts and music department, who was accused of molesting students in his car, in hotels during glee-club trips and during sojourns in Europe; Stan Kops, who resigned following strange behavior during a 7th grade orientation trip in 1983; and Mark Wright, who was described as “performing fellatio” on a young student inside an art studio in 1978.

In 1993, Horace Mann student Ben Balter sent a letter to then-headmaster Phil Foote about Mr. Somary’s “grossly inappropriate sexual advances” toward him, which had “persisted for several months now.” He added, “The purpose of a school such as Horace Mann is to provide a safe and comfortable learning environment. This goal is clearly made impossible by the inappropriate actions of teachers such as Mr. Somary.” Nonetheless, the teacher remained on staff at Horace Mann until he retired in 2002. Mr. Balter killed himself in 2009.

Now all three of the accused teachers are dead, one of the many complications the board was faced with when deciding on a course of action, Mr. Friedman told the Alumni Council.

Members of the two alumni organizations born out of Mr. Kamil’s article, the Horace Mann Action Coalition and the Horace Mann Survivors, did not think the matter was especially complicated: The school should finance an independent investigation similar to the one that produced Louis Freeh’s damning report on Penn State’s handling of football coach Jerry Sandusky, they said. And the school should also offer an unconditional apology, along with compensation, to its victims.

Perhaps displeased with the administration’s handling of the situation, the Horace Mann Survivors group hired Gloria Allred as its attorney last week, The Observer has learned. The Survivors deferred all interview requests to Ms. Allred, who declined to comment for this article. 

Meanwhile, despite Mr. Friedman’s contention that there is no rule book for handling such situations, Horace Mann has no shortage of recent examples to follow.

The countless transgressions of predatory pedophile Sandusky single-handedly destroyed the legacy of once-legendary coach Joe Paterno and the public university that employed him. In his findings, Mr. Freeh blasted Penn State for its “total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims by the most senior leaders.”

At Poly Prep, former students sued the school and its top officials over the alleged sexual abuse of at least nine students between 1966 and the 1980s, damning the legacy of a popular football coach while also staining the seemingly indestructible image of the Brooklyn prep school. Attorneys for Poly Prep have filed a motion to dismiss the case.

At Syracuse University, two former ball boys for the men’s basketball team accused assistant coach Bernie Fine of molesting them. Both accusers are being represented by Ms. Allred, who recently called on state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to investigate Syracuse’s handling of these allegations.

Johannes Somary, one of the accused teachers (photo: JohannesSomary.org)

But at Horace Mann, the board of trustees was being slow and careful in its approach to the accusations, Mr. Friedman said in the meeting.

“They believe the rules apply to public institutions like Penn State, or less prestigious Brooklyn institutions like Poly Prep, but they don’t apply to us,” said Robert Boynton, the director of NYU’s Literary Reportage concentration and a 1981 graduate of Horace Mann. “That has always been the Horace Mann way.”

The school did take immediate steps following the publication of Mr. Kamil’s article. Horace Mann partnered with The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to “audit current administrative procedures and policies that encompass child protection issues,” among other new directives. It has met regularly with the Horace Mann Survivors and the Horace Mann Action Coalition (CORRECTION: the Horace Mann Action Coalition wrote to say that it has not met regularly with the school). It has cooperated with the NYPD’s and the Bronx district attorney’s independent investigations into the allegations of sexual assault.

Meanwhile, in August, board member Joe Rose set up the Hilltop Cares Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to “assist those affected by the issues arising from allegations of abuse at the Horace Mann School and to study related issues in the broader community,” he wrote in an email to The New York Times. Hilltop Cares Foundation is believed to have raised $2 million already.

Some have knocked the Hilltop Cares Foundation as a ploy to protect the school from damaging litigation by creating a separate entity to compensate victims while legally insulating the institution itself, which can thereby avoid taking any direct responsibility for the crimes. As several observers noted, a similar structure was developed by the manufacturing company Johns Manville, which set up a trust in the 1980s to settle asbestos claims by former employees, successfully protecting the company from bankruptcy.

“What [Joe Rose] is doing is the school’s attempt at an arm’s-length solution,” said one former Horace Mann student who has been active in the discussions between the school and the new alumni organizations and who declined to be named for the article.

“It is our understanding that funds being raised are intended for therapy/counseling for self-described ‘survivors’ who report that they were abused by teachers who are no longer at the school,” a Horace Mann spokeswoman wrote in an email to The Observer. She stressed that the Hilltop Cares Foundation is “not affiliated with the school and have their own respective boards and counsel.”

“It provides Horace Mann deniability,” Mr. Boynton said.

The Horace Mann board of trustees is made up of several members who attended or graduated from the school around the same time as Mr. Kamil, including Mr. Rose, secretary of the board Robert Heidenberg and Regina Kulik Scully. Mrs. Scully, a 1981 graduate, executive produced the 2008 documentary Boyhood Shadows, which detailed the lasting effects of child molestation on male victims. One victim featured in the documentary was Glenn Kulik, Mrs. Scully’s brother.
Mrs. Scully did not respond to an email requesting comment. Phone calls to several members on the board of trustees, including Mr. Rose, were not returned.

On June 14, the school set up a hot line to Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson’s office to report any inappropriate behavior by Horace Mann staff members. That hot line has since received “at least 20” reports from former students, according to a spokesman for the Bronx District Attorney’s Office.

The Horace Mann Action Coalition protesting outside Horace Mann during the Alumni Council Meeting (photo credit: Peter Brooks)

Questions remain: Can victims claim that the school, having been made aware of allegations against Mr. Somary, engaged in a coverup by letting him stay on staff for another nine years? And if so, is Horace Mann potentially looking at a cascade of lawsuits that do lasting damage to the institution?

Whether police are investigating the possibility of a coverup could not be determined. Questions to Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Paul Browne were not answered. An interview request with Deputy Chief Michael Osgood, commander of the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit, was denied.

As for the independent investigation, Mr. Friedman said in the meeting that the board was opposed to it for several reasons:The firm theoretically hired to handle the independent investigation would not have subpoena power. And the cost of such an investigation, in the ballpark of the $12 million price tag for Louis Freeh’s Penn State report, would be prohibitive.

When asked if a more affordable option could be pursued, Mr. Friedman told those in attendance that the Freeh report was the gold standard and anything less would be inadequate, according to a person who was present at the meeting.
Horace Mann’s recent troubles mirrored those of St. Paul’s, the New Hampshire prep school that was slapped with allegations of sexual abuse by way of a 2006 Vanity Fair article written by Alex Shoumatoff, a former student there.
A St. Paul’s alumni group led by Arizona attorney Alexis Johnson presented the board with more than 10 instances of sexual misconduct by former faculty members, a report that was initiated after one former student reported that a teacher had exposed himself to her.

The purpose of the report, said Mr. Johnson, was not to pursue legal action, but to bring these allegations to a “recalcitrant private institution” that had been perceived as more interested in safeguarding its image than in addressing serious violations.

“People hate to think about child abuse when they are trying to raise money for a library,” said Mr. Johnson. St. Paul’s class of 1975 would eventually give a sizable donation to the school, one that provided, among other things, “boundary” training to teachers.

Back at the Alumni Council meeting, Mr. Friedman refuted rumors that board members were “lawyering up.” Addressing the idea of an apology letter, one member of the Alumni Council brought up a 2008 letter sent to students at the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, a private school in Cambridge, Mass., by headmaster Rebecca Upham. In that letter, Ms. Upham apologized for the school’s handling of a teacher who was fired in 1987 for sexually inappropriate behavior, adding that even 20 years later the school “failed to respond to those awful events in an appropriate way.”
“Dr. Kelly has communicated with his peers at [Buckingham Browne & Nichols] and other schools, who have given insights and advice on what worked and what didn’t work when they went through similar situations,” said one attendee at the Alumni Council meeting.

Buckingham Browne & Nichols paid out $70,000 to settle a civil suit, and in 2009 was threatened with $1 million suit by a 1989 graduate of the school.

While New York State’s statute of limitations and the deaths of the accused teachers limit the possibility for any criminal charges, one attorney with experience handling similar cases said that the statute of limitations should not thwart those claiming to be victims from pursuing legal action.

“What’s happening in this case is that the schools are basically concealing from kids information that they have regarding sex predators amongst the schools’ faculty,” said the attorney, who spoke about sexual abuse in schools in general and who asked not to be named.

“They’re concealing this information they should be revealing, and then they are hiding behind the statute of limitations, saying, ‘Oh, you should have sued us,’” the attorney added. “It’s an absurd and asinine construction, asking kids who could not possibly have any idea that the school had knowledge of this activity to have to sue the school by a certain time, while the school is still fervently engaged in a coverup to minimize its own culpability and its own knowledge,” the lawyer added.

“It’s so incredibly draconian, it’s not even funny.”

drosen@observer.com

According to Forbes' 2010 assessment, five of the nation's top 10 prep schools are located in New York City. Cultivating the nation's next crop of Ivy Leaguers, bankers, lawyers, and Senators, these institutions are calling all Tiger Moms and Proud Papas to invest in the future of their little ones.

Let's not forget about the boarding school set. Even after suffering through the initial application process in kindergarten, some masochistic parents feel the need to do it all over again in the eighth grade. Every autumn, city kids are shipped off to quaint New England towns with solid names like Andover, Exeter, Groton and Deerfield.

And then there's the price tag. With boarding school tuition rivaling the nation's best colleges, and private day schools in New York costing over $30,000 per year (several closer to $40,000), parents are keen to know as much about their children's schools as they knew about their first spouses. Probably more.

At every school, there are certain people every parent should know. The head of school is a good place to start. Namedropping the headmaster in your interview is mandatory if your child has any chance of being accepted.  But oftentimes there are other bigwigs operating behind the scenes. Be it the admissions director, the head of college counseling or the president of the board, these schools are rife with movers and shakers who, ultimately, will have a palpable effect on your child's future.

Here is Observer's list of the top two dozen people you need to know as the private school application season comes to a close.

eknutsen@obsever.com

But why stop at colleges, and graduate programs? Sensing an opening, Forbes has published a list of the nation's top prep schools. You will be relieved to learn that a large number are in New York.

Trinity and Horace Mann take the top two spots; Brearley comes in fourth; and Collegiate, Spence, Chapin, and Dalton all place in the top twenty. St. Ann's, which the Wall Street Journal ranked number one in the country just a few short years ago, is nowhere to be seen. Presumably it has suffered some kind of calamitous decline.

An unnamed source "close" to the Trinity School said that 45 families have already announced that their children won't be returning next year, while parents at both Trinity and Horace Mann are suddenly demanding financial aid. 

“We are committed to our students and families through the year,” Horace Mann official Bernice Hauser told the magazine. “If anyone is in crisis, they are free to speak to someone here.”

On the UrbanBaby message boards today, one user wrote: "about 2 weeks [sic] I heard from a friend that his boss mentioned to him that 30% of dalton families were asking for financial aid for this year. seemed high to me when i hear it, but you never know." Another user said that Dalton has been doling out more financial aid for a while now--not just this year--to increase racial and socioeconomic diversity. 

But what does this news really mean for the notoriously competitive New York private school landscape? Well, we doubt that the real moneyed families are part of the group already dropping out of elite private schools. As society chronicler David Patrick Columbia told us regarding gala and benefit attendance, "The rich are still very rich." But there must be a few middle-class families that have been able to stretch budgets to send their children to Dalton or Spence or Chapin. Until now, that is. These parents should not forget about Vanity Fair editor Aimee Bell's Greenwich Village High School, which is accepting applications until January, when it will handpick its inaugural class of 45 ninth graders.

With backing from names like Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter; New School president Bob Kerrey and his wife, television and film writer Sarah Paley; actor John Leguizamo; and Scholastic Inc. president Richard Robinson, the school is able to offer its $34,729 tuition on a sliding scale for the sake of "diversity," with a few lucky parents paying only $1,000.  (Ms. Bell and her co-founder Sara Goodman, great-granddaughter of Bergdorf Goodman founder Edwin Goodman, have not yet revealed what kind of incomes will make a family eligible for a tuition break.)

Then again, if you absolutely must downgrade to a public school, it might not be all bad. As the author of Schooled and former Dalton teacher Anisha Lakhani told us a few months ago, the world of private schooling is not always the best education as that is often where students learn how not to do their own work. (Ms. Lakhani's novel was inspired by her many years of tutoring privileged children who expected her to do their homework for them.)

"It's also a story about how certain children on a certain island are getting through schools seemingly magically, but maybe not so," Ms. Lakhani said of her novel. "I never went into teaching thinking that I was going to write a book about this. But slowly I started into the world of tutoring and I found it funny in a grotesque kind of way."

One of these boys lived in my hall, and halfway through the first year he was caught cheating. This seemed very scary to me. Having gone to public school, I envisioned a catastrophic fate for the young man: his parents arriving with tear-stained cheeks and baseball bats, Britney and Ally backing out of their dates to the formal, social banishment, expulsion, early death.

Instead he stuck around, attended many, many sorority parties and ended up at New York University Law School, then and now the No. 4 law school in the country. He was back where he belonged, just a ways downtown from his teenage alma mater, the apparent foundation of his character, Horace Mann.

Who else besides this cheater went to Horace Mann? Eliot Spitzer, Jay Cantor, Robert Caro, Alan Furst, E.J. Kahn, Jack Kerouac, Ira Levin, Kenneth Pollack, James Salter, William Carlos Williams, Roy Cohn, the Fonz, a Murdoch, a Newhouse … lots of guys. And writers! Some very good writers. Then there’s Roy Cohn, and the media people. But like most good schools, all in all, an estimable lot.

Into the mix, throw Andrew Trees, a 37-year-old Horace Mann history teacher and the author of Academy X, a novel billed as a “devilish satire of the culture of power and privilege at a New York City private school.” Mr. Trees was known as “Anonymous” while Academy X was in galleys, possibly because he didn’t want to get fired, more likely to stir up a succès de scandale. His identity was dramatically revealed in conjunction with the release of the finished book.

Now that we know who he is and where he teaches, it seems silly that the book isn’t called Horace Mann—someone might mistake the school for Dalton!

(In The New York Sun, Mr. Trees denied that his fictional “academy” is in fact Horace Mann, but admits that “it definitely draws on my experiences here.” He himself attended Deerfield Academy.)

Publicity scam aside, it’s natural to expect good things from an insider’s account of private-school life. These places, such as Spence and Fieldston and Trinity, are notoriously hard to crack, so protective are administrators of their disturbingly sophisticated youngsters and the institutional policies that enable their dysfunction. And only someone like Mr. Trees, who is witness to the everyday goings-on, can get beyond the clichés. Money, youth, competition, parental insanity, immorality, bad romance, drugs, lost innocence—what does it really sound like in those halls? Are elite private-school parents any more corrupt than the small-town folks who sweet-talk the football coach from the sidelines?

Probably. But Academy X isn’t the book that will prove that point. It’s the predictable story of a sad-sack English teacher named John Spencer who finds himself embroiled in a battle of wills and morals between the administration, his comely students and their comely parents. Caitlyn, a beautiful student in ill-fitting clothes, plagiarizes an essay; parents and deans alike come to her defense, with bribes; Mr. Spencer almost loses his job trying to win hearts and minds, all while lusting after the librarian.

Mr. Spencer’s world is “an ethical wonderland in which up is down, and right is wrong. Where it is not who you are but who you know, not what you do but what you have.” At his school, “things are not so simple here for children—or for parents, many of whom treat the education of their children as a competitive sport.” And: “love may make the world go round, but in New York the axis it turns on is money.” The staleness of these observations has the unintended and unsettling effect of suggesting that perhaps these schools aren’t so bad after all. Or maybe I’ve lived in New York for too long.

Dazed, perhaps, by dreams of Nanny Diaries–style success, Mr. Trees relies too much on his potentially bankable gimmick. He gives us easy caricatures rather than hard-won details about the real life parading in front of him in baby tees.

Speaking of the Baby Gwyneths, there are a few things to learn from Master Trees. One is that male teachers, especially those just a few years shy of legally dating these girls, suffer deeply in this hormone hothouse. I’ve often wondered about this, and it’s true: They can’t help but think about sex all the time, poor things. Mr. Spencer, for example, must desperately focus on a poster of Freud whenever Caitlyn speaks. Forget the crazy parents—what torture to be a grown man in school!

The other revelation—not news, but still a shock—is this: Private school costs $27,000 a year. New Yorkers, still suffocating in the real-estate bubble, will reflexively ask the 21st-century question yet again: Where, dear God, is all the money coming from?

But here’s some consolation. Caitlyn, the rich, hot plagiarist, desperately wanted to go to Princeton. Her father’s love depended on it. With a late burst of wicked accuracy, Mr. Trees condemns her instead to the University of Pennsylvania.

Suzy Hansen is a senior editor at The Observer.

One of these boys lived in my hall, and halfway through the first year he was caught cheating. This seemed very scary to me. Having gone to public school, I envisioned a catastrophic fate for the young man: his parents arriving with tear-stained cheeks and baseball bats, Britney and Ally backing out of their dates to the formal, social banishment, expulsion, early death.

Instead he stuck around, attended many, many sorority parties and ended up at New York University Law School, then and now the No. 4 law school in the country. He was back where he belonged, just a ways downtown from his teenage alma mater, the apparent foundation of his character, Horace Mann.

Who else besides this cheater went to Horace Mann? Eliot Spitzer, Jay Cantor, Robert Caro, Alan Furst, E.J. Kahn, Jack Kerouac, Ira Levin, Kenneth Pollack, James Salter, William Carlos Williams, Roy Cohn, the Fonz, a Murdoch, a Newhouse … lots of guys. And writers! Some very good writers. Then there’s Roy Cohn, and the media people. But like most good schools, all in all, an estimable lot.

Into the mix, throw Andrew Trees, a 37-year-old Horace Mann history teacher and the author of Academy X, a novel billed as a “devilish satire of the culture of power and privilege at a New York City private school.” Mr. Trees was known as “Anonymous” while Academy X was in galleys, possibly because he didn’t want to get fired, more likely to stir up a succès de scandale. His identity was dramatically revealed in conjunction with the release of the finished book.

Now that we know who he is and where he teaches, it seems silly that the book isn’t called Horace Mann—someone might mistake the school for Dalton!

(In The New York Sun, Mr. Trees denied that his fictional “academy” is in fact Horace Mann, but admits that “it definitely draws on my experiences here.” He himself attended Deerfield Academy.)

Publicity scam aside, it’s natural to expect good things from an insider’s account of private-school life. These places, such as Spence and Fieldston and Trinity, are notoriously hard to crack, so protective are administrators of their disturbingly sophisticated youngsters and the institutional policies that enable their dysfunction. And only someone like Mr. Trees, who is witness to the everyday goings-on, can get beyond the clichés. Money, youth, competition, parental insanity, immorality, bad romance, drugs, lost innocence—what does it really sound like in those halls? Are elite private-school parents any more corrupt than the small-town folks who sweet-talk the football coach from the sidelines?

Probably. But Academy X isn’t the book that will prove that point. It’s the predictable story of a sad-sack English teacher named John Spencer who finds himself embroiled in a battle of wills and morals between the administration, his comely students and their comely parents. Caitlyn, a beautiful student in ill-fitting clothes, plagiarizes an essay; parents and deans alike come to her defense, with bribes; Mr. Spencer almost loses his job trying to win hearts and minds, all while lusting after the librarian.

Mr. Spencer’s world is “an ethical wonderland in which up is down, and right is wrong. Where it is not who you are but who you know, not what you do but what you have.” At his school, “things are not so simple here for children—or for parents, many of whom treat the education of their children as a competitive sport.” And: “love may make the world go round, but in New York the axis it turns on is money.” The staleness of these observations has the unintended and unsettling effect of suggesting that perhaps these schools aren’t so bad after all. Or maybe I’ve lived in New York for too long.

Dazed, perhaps, by dreams of Nanny Diaries–style success, Mr. Trees relies too much on his potentially bankable gimmick. He gives us easy caricatures rather than hard-won details about the real life parading in front of him in baby tees.

Speaking of the Baby Gwyneths, there are a few things to learn from Master Trees. One is that male teachers, especially those just a few years shy of legally dating these girls, suffer deeply in this hormone hothouse. I’ve often wondered about this, and it’s true: They can’t help but think about sex all the time, poor things. Mr. Spencer, for example, must desperately focus on a poster of Freud whenever Caitlyn speaks. Forget the crazy parents—what torture to be a grown man in school!

The other revelation—not news, but still a shock—is this: Private school costs $27,000 a year. New Yorkers, still suffocating in the real-estate bubble, will reflexively ask the 21st-century question yet again: Where, dear God, is all the money coming from?

But here’s some consolation. Caitlyn, the rich, hot plagiarist, desperately wanted to go to Princeton. Her father’s love depended on it. With a late burst of wicked accuracy, Mr. Trees condemns her instead to the University of Pennsylvania.

Suzy Hansen is a senior editor at The Observer.