How political correctness let an alleged pedophile join elite $60,000-a-year school for celebs’ kids

With its majestic limestone facade, Saint Ann’s School is a top choice for New York City’s left-wing power couples to give their children an arts education, a shot at Ivy League schools, and careers in the arts and entertainment.

Lena Dunham, Jennifer Connelly and Jean-Michel Basquiat are among the creatives who walked through the ornate wooden doorway as youngsters in Brooklyn Heights, the swankiest zip code in the borough.

Now the $60,000-a-year private school is embroiled in its latest scandal: hiring a convicted and formerly incarcerated fraudster as a teacher, who was later busted for allegedly sharing lewd messages and porn with students on social media.

What really hurts the school’s reputation is how its Vietnamese-American teacher, Winston Nguyen, became something of a purity test for Saint Ann’s progressive values ​​and its support for immigrants, people of color, and criminals.

Parents and teachers were afraid to question Nguyen’s record and strange behavior at school “for fear of being labeled as not sufficiently progressive,” says a scathing new report on the case.

Some feared their children would lose a place at one of the East Coast’s most exclusive and prestigious schools, which would no longer be a “good fit” for the liberal-artsy A-list, the document said.

It’s too early to tell if Saint Ann’s will recover from this latest scandal; the K-12 school did not respond to DailyMail.com’s requests for comment.

But it may already be clear that celebrity parents eager for admission — which in the past have included Matt Damon, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke — might think twice before applying today.

Jeff Korek, a Manhattan attorney who has investigated allegations of abuse at the school in recent years, said administrators and teachers typically follow a playbook to keep the frequent scandals under the radar.

“Circle the rows, circle the cars, and less information is better than more information,” Korek says.

The new report shows how Nguyen, 38, the child of Vietnamese immigrants, began working at the school in mid-2020 amid Covid-era staffing shortages, before his background check was completed.

He told school bosses he had been convicted of a crime, for which he served a four-month prison sentence in 2019.

He had pleaded guilty to defrauding an elderly couple in his care out of about $300,000. He also admitted endangering the welfare of an incompetent or physically disabled person.

Still, the principals hired the well-groomed, charismatic go-getter, who had attended a top school in Texas, attended Columbia University and been a champion on the game show “Jeopardy!”

In 2021, he was promoted to math teacher.

Staff reportedly ignored early warning signs about Nguyen’s erratic behavior, the report said.

The alleged child predator regularly slept overnight at school, used gifts and food to gain “trust and access” to students, and met his teenage charges outside of class, the report said.

The bigger problem with Nguyen came to light on June 6, when he was arrested by police on the street near Saint Ann’s.

Beginning in late 2022, a group of students from Saint Ann’s and other private schools in Brooklyn received lewd requests on Snapchat from what appeared to be another teenager.

The user of accounts like @HunterKristoff and @HaircutBongos encouraged girls and boys between the ages of 13 and 15 to share nude photos and videos of themselves.

Police had identified Nguyen as an alleged predator disguised as an adolescent.

Prosecutors charged him with 11 felonies, including using a child in a sexual performance, promoting a sexual performance by a child and distributing indecent material to a minor.

One video, sent to a student about 14 years old, showed a teenage boy “masturbating and ejaculating on a bed,” according to a criminal complaint.

The school has since placed and subsequently fired Nguyen on administrative leave.

He is largely confined to his Harlem apartment and is expected to take a plea deal that will put him behind bars for at least five years. The New York Times.

At the time, the school condemned Nguyen’s alleged “profound breach of trust.”

Saint Ann’s acknowledged that it had failed to “create an environment where our students are safe and supported.”

The board called in law firm Debevoise & Plimpton to find out what went wrong.

Their 39-page report, written by two lawyers, Helen Cantwell and Arian June, and released this month, paints a devastating portrait of Nguyen’s hiring and the resulting crisis.

It places much of the blame on three top administrators: Vincent Tompkins, the head of school, Dean of Faculty Melissa Kantor, and Senior High School Principal Maureen Yusuf-Morales.

They have all since left school.

Administrators had decided to withhold Nguyen’s criminal record from parents, to give him a “second chance,” the report said.

Nguyen and other people of color who worked at the school were considered “protected,” it added.

Those who objected to the hiring of a convicted fraudster “were afraid to speak up for fear of being labeled as not sufficiently progressive,” the report said.

The parents of a student who raised concerns about Nguyen felt ashamed for not supporting restorative justice, it added.

School officials also allegedly tried to sweep the catfishing of students on social media under the rug.

For months, Nguyen allegedly sent lewd comments to students under pseudonyms.

Only the affected students, their parents and a ‘small group of administrators’ were aware of the filth.

The school kept the messages hidden to avoid “unwanted attention to the victims of catfishing,” the report said.

The scandal over Nguyen’s hiring is just the latest in a series of controversies at Saint Ann’s.

In 2021, eighth-grader Ellis Lariviere committed suicide after being kicked out of school because he was struggling academically.

The boy’s parents sued the school last year, blaming its policies for their son’s death. The school denies this.

In 2018, an administrator resigned after hosting parties at his home for students and recent graduates, where weed and booze were available.

The school released a report in 2019 detailing its history of teacher sexual misconduct from 1970 to 2017.

Korek, the attorney representing Lariviere’s parents, says the Nguyen scandal makes a mockery of the school’s high-minded talk.

“Saint Ann’s decided it was acceptable to hire someone with a criminal record who abused vulnerable people and put him in a situation with vulnerable children — and that Ellis, a kid with a stellar record, was disposable,” Korek said .

“There’s no point.”