What a country!
A group of immigrant high-school students got a senior prom that could happen only in America. When the yacht “Fantasy” set sail for a three-hour cruise around Manhattan last June, the liquor started to flow and bartenders served drink after drink to the chaperones — including some 15 teachers and the principal of International HS at Lafayette, a Brooklyn public school.
As it neared midnight, several attractive young faculty members, loosened by booze, boogied with the kids.
Finally, a buxom chemistry teacher, 25, wrapped herself around a boy as they danced slowly. They locked lips.
“Look at that!” partiers murmured and pointed.
“They were making out,” said a student who witnessed the shocking scene.
It wasn’t only a spectacle on the upper-deck dance floor, students told The Post. A large TV screen projected the action on the lower level, as stunned classmates, teachers and principal Michael Soet watched.
But, so far, only the dirty-dancing teacher, Lindsay Dunaj, has faced the music. She quit in December amid an ongoing probe by special schools investigator Richard Condon. She did not return calls and e-mails for comment.
Dunaj, who grew up in Wilbraham, Mass., was yanked from the classroom in September after Condon’s agents interviewed another student, Dmitry Prokofyev, a soccer star and A student whose e-mail chats with Dunaj were discovered by other students and turned in to the principal, The Post learned.
Prokofyev, who declined to comment, told investigators he had a romantic relationship with Dunaj, his chemistry teacher, months before the prom, when he was 18 — a year over New York’s legal age of consent, a source confirmed.
The boozing that set the probe in motion is “also under investigation” by the city Department of Education, said spokeswoman Margie Feinberg. Alcoholic drinks are forbidden at any school-sponsored event or trip attended by minors, she said.
Feinberg could not say when the DOE learned about the chaperone carousing or whether parents were informed or explain why the probe is still not complete seven months after the prom.
She also could not say whether school or DOE funds paid for the boozing.
Students said the bartenders were strict about not serving kids — though some kids tried to pass as adults and order drinks. Some snuck sips from teachers.
Principal Soet remains at the helm of the school, which serves 300 recent immigrants to New York City who speak little or no English when they enroll.
The school is one of 10 in the city supported by the Internationals Network for Public Schools, a nonprofit whose motto is “Opening doors to the American dream.”
Officials at the network did not return calls, and Soet declined to discuss the prom.
“I have no comment,” he repeated when asked why alcohol was served on his watch.
School staffers blasted Soet, blaming him for the shipboard shenanigans.
“How can you trust the judgment of a principal who would throw an alcohol bash at a senior prom?” one asked.
It was the school’s first graduating class, with 77 seniors, and first prom since it opened in 2005 in the Lafayette HS building in Bensonhurst.
Additional reporting by Sarah Ryley