By AL BAKER and TIM STELLOH
Published: February 11, 2012
Enlarge This ImageA day after a teacher’s aide at a prestigious Upper West Side elementary school was arrested on charges that he sexually abused an 8-year-old student, anxious parents were readying to pepper school officials and prosecutors with questions about the aide’s troubled past.
Scores of parents of students at Public School 87 were furiously exchanging e-mails on Saturday as the aide, Gregory Atkins, 56, was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on charges of sexual abuse, attempted criminal sex act and endangering the welfare of a child.
“Who knew what, when?” said Kevin L. Krim, 37, whose daughter attends kindergarten at the school. “They have to be held accountable for this.”
On Monday, the schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, along with P.S. 87’s principal, Monica Berry, and the head of the child abuse unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, are to meet with parents to answer questions and explain what steps to take if they suspect Mr. Atkins had inappropriate contact with their children, officials said.
In an e-mail to parents, the co-presidents of the school’s parent association, Rachel Laiserin and Rebecca Levey, said that an Education Department “crisis team” would also be at the school on Monday. “We know that parents have a lot of questions, and we hope to get answers,” the message said.
The central questions, according to Mr. Krim, will revolve around an episode in 2006, when Mr. Atkins, working then at Middle School 322 in Upper Manhattan, was accused of inappropriate behavior with a male student.
The Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation for schools recommended Mr. Atkins be disciplined after the student’s mother came forward to say that her son was given gifts, including a jockstrap, by Mr. Atkins.
The special commissioner’s report did not say if the police were notified in 2006, and it remained unclear on Saturday if anyone at P.S. 87 was aware of Mr. Atkins’s past when he began working there in November 2008.
The latest set of charges came to light to school officials on Feb. 3, according to a letter that was sent home with children on Friday and signed by Ms. Berry. On that day, the school notified the police and the special commissioner of the accusations against Mr. Atkins, and he was reassigned to a central office, away from students.
A week later, he was arrested.
At least four times on Feb. 2, Mr. Atkins took the boy to a bathroom and had him undress in a stall, according to court papers. He touched the boy and turned his body around, saying he was looking for bruises, the papers said. On that same day, Mr. Atkins took the boy to the auditorium and told him to open his pants, the court papers said.
Virginia Lopreto, a lawyer for Mr. Atkins, said that the boy has a disability and that it was Mr. Atkins’s job “to be with the child, day in and day out.”
Mr. Walcott visited P.S. 87, on West 78th Street, on Friday, three days after visiting P.S. 243 in Brooklyn, where an aide was accused of videotaping sexual acts with students.
At Mr. Atkins’s apartment building on West 148th Street in Harlem, a police detective was seen removing a computer. Neighbors said Mr. Atkins had lived there since he was a child. Some said he struck them as cordial, but remote. A few neighbors said different young men had stayed with him over the years.
Peggy Saunders, 47, said that a boy named Danny lived with Mr. Atkins when she moved to the six-story brick building 19 years ago. She said she was never sure whether Danny, or any of the other boys she saw, was a relative, but that Danny joined the Army.
“I never saw him again,” she said.
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