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Brooklyn Tech HS should have known about perv teacher
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By Andrea Peyser
October 3, 2014

Brooklyn Tech HS should have known about perv teacher

It was an open secret among students at prestigious Brooklyn Technical HS that all a pretty girl needed to do to score an A in math or physics was to play ball with teacher Sean Shaynak — who is accused of being the perviest educator ever to stink up a New York City public school.

A mother I spoke with sat down with her Tech student the other night and got the shock of her life.

“She told me that this teacher got friendly with a lot of girls, but she just laughed it off,’’ said the mom, who didn’t want her name revealed.

A licensed pilot, Shaynak ran the Aerospace Club at the school located in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene section. It made him a star.

“He’d always have students come visit him, kids that were not in the club, mostly very good-looking girls, the best looking girls in our school,’’ Alan Chambers, 16, a junior in the club, told The Post.

But if students suspected that Shaynak, 44, an unmarried dad of a 9-year-old daughter, was a twisted sexual piranha, could school administrators have been unaware that he was trouble?

I believe that officials of the highfalutin school, where Mayor de Blasio’s son, Dante, is a senior, didn’t want to know too much. Exposing Shaynak as a bow-tie-wearing beast would hurt Tech’s stellar reputation as one of the country’s leading educational institutions.

Mayor de Blasio and I agree on one thing. “It’s disgusting,’’ he said. “This is someone who clearly should not have been a teacher.’’

How did he even get hired?

Before Shaynak was brought into the school system, a fingerprint check conducted for the city’s Department of Education turned up an arrest on a charge of assault in Maryland, where he once lived, but no conviction, a schools source confirmed. It turned out that Shaynak had a restraining order filed against him by the family of then-11-year-old DeVonte Watson — but no one will tell me if school officials knew about it.

Shaynak, who stands 6 feet, 3 inches and weighs 220 pounds, was accused of punching, choking and throwing the child to the ground after, a neighbor told The Post, the boy threw rocks at Shaynak’s house as his baby daughter slept on the porch.

And still, Shaynak was hired in New York a substitute teacher in 2008 and joined Tech’s full-time faculty the next year.

I reached the school’s principal, Randy Asher, who tersely referred me to the Department of Ed. There, a spokeswoman released a butt-covering statement, saying that officials were working to terminate Shaynak.

Shaynak, who was arraigned in Brooklyn Supreme Court Tuesday, faces a 36-count indictment, a battery of charges including sexual abuse, forcible touching, kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a child. He pleaded not guilty. If convicted of the most serious charges, he could be sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Shaynak, who lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was removed from the school — but still collects his $52,744 annual salary — after he was busted in August on charges including disseminating indecent material to a minor for, allegedly, sending a picture of his penis to a 16-year-old girl. Investigators then discovered thousands of text messages, photos and videos on his computers and phones that suggested he had sexual contact with at least seven girls, ages 13 to 19, over the last three years.

Among other outrages, he is accused of supplying minors with booze and cigarettes, and taking a female student to an out-of-state gay-themed sex club where she watched him get “serviced’’ by men, according to prosecutor Joseph Mancino.

He took a 15-year-old girl to a nude beach in New Jersey, plied her with booze, tried to talk her into having a lesbian relationship with another underage student and told her about his dabbling in threesomes and gay sex, the prosecutor said.

But he reserved sexual intercourse for two students ages 18 and 19, so he could not be accused of statutory rape, said the prosecutor. The age of legal consent in New York state is 17.

The creep rewarded one girl with grades of 100 “even though she turned in work with no answers,’’ said Mancino. He allegedly stored pornography on his computer, which included images of acts of bestiality, including sex between people and horses, dogs and goats.

One of Shaynak’s female accusers has told detectives that the disgraced teacher may have victimized male students at the school as well as females, law-enforcement sources said. This means he could be hit with more criminal charges.

If he’s guilty, Shaynak should burn. But school officials can’t dodge the question forever: What did they know, and when did they know it?

Why was Sean Shaynak welcomed into the school in the first place? And why was the accused predator allowed to infest classrooms for so long?

©2007-2025 Andrea Peyser and andreapeyser.com; No Reuse without permission.
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