A Brooklyn educator wrestled with students “on a daily basis” during the 2011-2012 school year, reports by the city’s Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon reveal.
The findings emerged after a probe of Sharon Johnson, a teacher at PS 298 in Brooklyn, who investigators say wrestled a student to the floor — where she “placed her knee between [his] legs and rammed his stomach,” according to the report.
Investigators interviewed the student, who said Johnson “sometimes wrestled the students for play and sometimes did so . . . because the students often were out of control.” He told probers he was not hurt, the report states.
When students would not sit down, Johnson approached the student from behind, “interlocked her arms with the student’s arms, placed her hands on the back of the student’s head and forced the student to bend over at the waist,” the report states.
Johnson, who declined to speak to probers, was fined $2,000, according to a Department of Education spokesman, who said she retired earlier this month.
Another Condon case involved electrical-installation teacher Jose Guerrero — who showed a female student at a Manhattan trade high school two photos of himself wearing a thong. Guerrero was not reassigned as a result of the probe, according to Condon’s office.
And in another case, paraprofessional Emilio Lopez at PS 194 in The Bronx stroked a female student’s hair, rubbed her cheek and told her she was “cute,” the report states. When probers asked Lopez about inappropriate contact, which included tickling a student, he answered, “In her neck, possibly? I’m getting attached to these kids. I got too caught up,” the report states. Lopez was fired last May, according to the DOE.
The cases are among more than a dozen reports from Condon’s office released in the wake of a Post investigation last April that found more than 100 city school staffers engaging in sexual or “inappropriate” relationships with students in the past five years.