Since 1887, the insanely expensive Horace Mann School in The Bronx has educated rich and fabulous budding masters of the universe, from future Pulitzer Prize winners to the boy who grew up to be known as former Love Gov Eliot Spitzer.
But after a sex-abuse scandal plus a series of outrages, from sex parties thrown by kids to the arrest of an employee for allegedly threatening his ex-girlfriend, Horace Mann is losing its mojo. Many parents want nothing to do with the school.
Two years ago, a top Manhattan firm that guides parents through the indigestion-provoking private-school application process steered about 500 hopefuls to Mann. But for the 2014-15 school year, the company has seen the number of Mann applicants dwindle to one. And that kid’s parents, from Taiwan, decided to send their kid to another school.
How did one of the country’s premiere educational institutions wind up scrounging for attendees like a cut-rate strip club?
“No parent wants to deal with a school that has this much weird stuff going on,’’ Amanda Uhry, owner of Manhattan Private School Advisors, which helps place kids in hard-to-get-into schools, told me.
“It’s more than just the sex-abuse scandal,’’ said Uhry. Those infamous episodes, dozens of students who attended Mann, possibly from the 1960s to the 1990s, have said they were molested by teachers and staffers who were protected from punishment by the administration, a pattern of horror first revealed by The New York Times magazine in 2012. Some victims have received cash settlements from the school.
Lately, Mann has gone out of control.
In November, The Post reported that kids threw wild parties in which boys tried to have sex with “randos’’ — a code word for unattractive, drunken girls.
Efforts by Mann administrators to convince rabidly social parents to stop their darlings from attending these sick soirées fell on deaf ears. Apparently to some adults, having a kid fit in is more important than schoolwork.
Last month, a 16-year-old whose parents are worth more than $100 million asked her peers to empty their closets of used Gucci and Prada clothes and accessories, and sell them to raise money for the therapy sessions of sexually abused Mann alumni.
“Is this the tone-deaf way that Horace Mann can begin to take responsibility for what has happened there?” alumnus Robert Boynton, a spokesman for the Horace Mann Action Coalition, said to The Post. The coalition wants a major investigation into sex crimes rather than the services of shrinks.
Then last week, Mann’s head of college counseling, Canh Oxelson, 42, who also performs as an impersonator of golfer Tiger Woods, was arrested after he allegedly threatened to ruin the life of a nurse who dumped him by sending her naked pictures to the woman’s bosses, The Post’s Tara Palmeri reported.
With a student body of about 1,800, Mann charged an eye-popping $41,150 for tuition this school year. All that to educate kids as young as 3 who attend Mann’s full-day program in Manhattan, all the way up to educating 12th-graders who take classes on the leafy campus in the affluent Riverdale neighborhood in The Bronx.
Parents go positively cuckoo trying to install their kids in New York’s top-tier top-tier private schools. Manhattan Private School Advisors charges each of its 1,500 clients from $15,000 to $30,000 to help increase a young one’s odds of getting accepted into schools, from preschools to colleges, starting from age 1. “One client came to see us at six weeks pregnant. Can you imagine?’’ said Uhry.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the serial crises are taking a toll. One mom who’s looking for a place to park her baby girl told me she’s not considering the school.
“It seems like every day, we hear about something new,’’ she said. “I don’t need the aggravation.’’
Mann’s administrators won’t say what’s going on. The director of admissions told me he doesn’t talk to the press. Thomas Kelly, the head of school, did not return a call.
And still, Uhry tries to get her clients to apply there.
“It’s really a great school,’’ she said. “But parents won’t hear about it.’’
It’s time for Horace Mann to clean up its act.
Hizzoner has a bad case of ‘spring’ fever
It pays to be a friend of Mayor de Blasio.
Hizzoner made a late-night phone call to a high-ranking police official this week, asking about the arrest of a pal who faced a night in jail. And Pastor Orlando Findlayter of Brooklyn, who helped deliver the black vote during de Blasio’s mayoral campaign, was freed.
When Findlayter was pulled over for failing to make a left-turn signal, cops discovered he had two outstanding warrants.
Would de Blasio make a call on behalf of nobodies like you and me? I doubt it.
Silly art attack
Feminists have lost their minds. A statue erected at Massachusetts’ all-woman Wellesley College depicts a bald man with his eyes closed and arms outstretched, clad only in his tighty-whities. Is this a rapist?
“The Sleepwalker,” by Brooklyn artist Tony Matelli, “has become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for some of our campus community,’’ a student wrote on a Change.org petition, demanding that the administration move the statue into the campus museum. The screed drew 925 signatures.
Girls, relax.
Law of the jungle for giraffes
A healthy giraffe called Marius was murdered last weekend, shot in the head with a bolt-action gun by a worker at a zoo in Denmark. Then, in front of a crowd that included children, the creature’s body was sliced up and fed to lions, tigers and leopards, while part of his carcass was set aside for research. He was 2 years old.
Copenhagen Zoo officials feared that if they let Marius live, he’d pose a risk for inbreeding, which could produce future sick giraffes.
Sterilization was not an option.
“If we just sterilize him, he will take up space for more genetically valuable giraffes,” zoo scientific director Bengt Holst told CNN. Lethal injection would contaminate Marius’ flesh.
“In this case, we would never throw away 200 kilograms of meat,” Holst said.
He’s received death threats.
Now, another Danish zoo is considering slaughtering a 7-year-old male giraffe, also named Marius.
Rest in peace, Marius.
A peek into the head of Hillary
Does 2016 presidential probable Hillary Rodham Clinton harbor a secret anti-woman streak?
The former first lady, New York senator and secretary of state once trashed President Bill Clinton’s favorite intern, Monica Lewinsky, as a “narcissistic loony toon.’’ After Bill’s sexploits with Lewinsky became public in 1998, Hillary beat herself up, saying she was “not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of her own concerns to realize the price he was paying,’’ wrote her best pal, political-science professor Diane Blair.
The mind of Hillary is laid bare in papers collected by Blair, who died in 2000. They were published by The Washington Free Beacon magazine.
Women should be appalled.