Corina Knoll and Eliza Shapiro

In a letter sent Monday to parents, employees and alumni, school leaders said witnesses in interviews identified 19 former Saint Ann’s faculty and staff members who had potentially engaged in sexual misconduct or inappropriate behavior with students over the span of three decades.

Some of those cases were known to Stanley Bosworth, the eccentric headmaster and iconic figure who guided the school and was both beloved and controversial.

In one instance, the letter said, Bosworth himself was alleged to have “rubbed the leg of a female high school student during a one-on-one meeting in his office.”

A plaque commemorating Bosworth, who died in 2011, hangs outside the school building, which sits on a handsome block in Brooklyn Heights.

The findings are the latest revelation in the recent movement of established private schools reckoning with their histories of sexual abuse or misconduct, which accelerated in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

But Saint Ann’s has long prided itself on being different from its elite brethren. Considered one of the most progressive private schools in the city, it offers puppetry and printmaking classes and eschews letter grades, instead issuing long written evaluations of each student.

Tuition for the K-12 school, which serves just over 1,000 students, costs about $40,000 a year for preschool and goes up to roughly $47,000 for high school.

Considered an unconventional path to a top-notch college, Saint Ann’s takes pride in being innovative and edgy. It counts Jean-Michel Basquiat and Zac Posen among its alumni.

But the school’s current headmaster, Vincent Tompkins, has taken a traditional route to dealing with recently surfaced sexual harassment claims.

When allegations about misconduct at the school appeared on Facebook in 2017, Saint Ann’s leaders hired an outside investigator. Emails were sent to the school’s community, requesting that anyone with information step forward.

The investigation, conducted by T&amp;M Protection Resources, a New York-based firm, included interviews with 47 witnesses who reported misconduct from the 1970s through 2017.

“None of the witnesses appeared to be exaggerating or embellishing facts and all seemed genuinely concerned about being as precise as possible when answering the investigators’ questions,” the school said in its letter.

The letter detailed the actions of six male faculty members whose alleged misconduct included having sexual contact with a high school senior and then sexual intercourse after graduation, engaging in sexual contact with a student at an off-campus party, unwanted kissing and inappropriate physical contact. None of the teachers were named, the letter said, because the school found that in some cases the evidence was “not clear and convincing.” All six of the teachers had left the school before the investigation.

“What we tried to make clear in the letter was these were the six instances where the investigator made a judgment that the evidence he was able to compile met the appropriate evidentiary standard,” Tompkins, who became headmaster of the school in 2010, said in an interview.

Tompkins said that the school hired outside investigators to ensure that the results would be impartial and wanted to distribute the findings as broadly as possible “in a reflection of our commitment to transparency and accountability as part of the process.”

The letter stated that the school would meet “obligations under state and local law to report suspected abuse to law enforcement authorities” and outlined the ways in which Saint Ann’s had changed its protocols to better respond to inappropriate sexual behavior, including consent workshops and background checks on new faculty.

Created in the basement of a church in the 1960s, Saint Ann’s was built on the idea that the children of poets and playwrights, most of whom happened to be quite wealthy, could be catapulted into Ivy League schools while still enjoying a freewheeling school culture that took a lax approach to drugs and sex, especially in the school’s early years.

Bosworth, a charismatic figure who was known for giving prospective students IQ tests, created the school and led it for four decades. For years, he wrote personal reference letters for each graduating senior.

The inappropriate incident that at least one witness alleged about Bosworth was included in the school’s letter with the caveat that it could not be corroborated by investigators.

Bosworth’s 2011 death at 83, from complications of dementia, was mourned by alumni who saw him and the school as the road to their success.

“RIP Stanley Bosworth — you built Saint Ann’s, the magical school that raised so many little weirdos. I’ve never felt safer. Thank you,” actress and writer Lena Dunham wrote on Twitter.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9a7be027-b97d-46ca-b4be-77c92649acba" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/nyregion/st-anns-school-sexual-misconduct.html">The New York Times</a>.

Report alleges sexual misconduct at prestigious Brooklyn private school

NEW YORK — A yearlong investigation has found allegations of sexual misconduct, including male teachers having sex with students, at Saint Ann’s School, a Brooklyn private school known for its experimental educational approach and artistic culture.

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Corina Knoll and Eliza Shapiro

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Report alleges sexual misconduct at prestigious Brooklyn private school