A Brooklyn couple claims the head of a pricey private school in Bed-Stuy holds séances with problem kids so she can save their souls.
The parents are suing the Brooklyn Waldorf School, accusing its “pedagogic administrator,” Walkyria Machado, of subjecting kids to bizarre candlelit meetings she calls Child Circles.
Machado, 53, “behaved as if she believed that she possessed supernatural powers” and could talk to a child’s “angel,” Emily Hartzell and Leslie Nuchow, whose son was suspended from the school, say in papers filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Dec. 2
They accuse Machado of retaliating against their son for challenging the administration at the school, where tuition hits $19,000 a year.
Machado, they say, painted the boy as a troublemaker and subjected the then-6-year-old to two Child Circles, in which she grilled him on his past “to go fishing for information about [their] personal lives and family relationships.”
And the school allegedly had the child evaluated by a “doctor of anthroposophy,” the philosophy on which Waldorf schools are based. The “doctor” allegedly declared she could measure the boy’s bones and skull to determine whether he was a “young soul” or “old soul.”
If found to be the former, he’d be told to “eat root vegetables” and use a cold washcloth, the family says.
“Machado has been able to create a powerful culture of fear,” the parents claim.
The child of one parent was subjected to 20 to 30 Child Circles, they say.
Hartzell and Nuchow’s child was suspended last year after he was accused of grabbing a boy’s “privates,” an incident his parents say was exaggerated.
They want their tuition refunded and say, “Waldorf Schools have a hidden agenda, indoctrinating children into the occult religion of anthroposophy.”
Machado did not respond to requests for comment. A Waldorf spokesman called the suit “pathetic,” “fictious” and “slanderous” and “a disreputable scheme to extract a tuition refund.”
Other parents laughed off the idea of a Child Circle.