An elite private school connected to the United Nations has expelled several eighth-graders after students were found last week drawing swastikas and other hateful images in classmates’ yearbooks, The Post has learned.
The United Nations International School informed parents by email Thursday that it had completed what it described as a “thorough and deliberate” review of the “yearbook incident,” which officials previously said affected more than 30 yearbooks and may have involved up to 15 students.
“All students found to have participated in this incident have been held accountable,” head of school Dan Brenner wrote in the Thursday letter to families.
“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.”
Brenner said the yearbook misconduct “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.” He added, “Accountability is not separate from that mission; it is part of it.”
UNIS spokesperson Lupe Todd-Medina declined to specify how many students were removed from the school, but told The Post that discipline for the “fewer than 15 kids involved” also included counseling and probation.
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One Jewish father with a child at UNIS told The Post the school’s response was necessary, saying, “this needed to be done.”
He said the pre-K through 12th-grade 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.”
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.
