New York Daily News

HS didn’t report sex attack

- BY BEN CHAPMAN, JOHN ANNESE and ANDREW KESHNER

BULLIES AT a Brooklyn school tried to sexually assault a freshman in the boys locker room — and the school never told cops, police sources said.

Authoritie­s are looking into the possibilit­y there are more victims at the It Takes a Village Academy, and the city Department of Education has ousted the school’s principal, Marina Vinitskaya.

The 14-year-old victim told investigat­ors a group of boys had been targeting him in the locker room after gym class since the beginning of the school year.

The horrifying harassment reached new levels on Friday, the teen said.

The tormentors pinned the boy to a wall and tried to stick their fingers into his buttocks, sources said.

The teen told school administra­tors, who suspended the alleged attackers, sources said. But police were never alerted. When the boy’s shocked mom learned on Monday that the East Flatbush school hadn’t called cops, she did herself, sources said.

Police “should have been called right away. There’s no gray area,” one source told the Daily News.

Four more boys have come forward to say they were groped, and police are working on the number of attackers, sources say. So far, no one has been arrested. An Education Department spokeswoma­n called the claims “deeply troubling” and said the department is working closely with police.

Vinitskaya didn’t respond to a request for comment. She’s been reassigned pending the investigat­ion.

Bullying allegedly led to bloodshed in the Bronx earlier this fall. High school junior Matthew McCree, 15, was killed and another student was injured in a knifing at the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservati­on on Sept. 27.

The suspected stabber, Abel Cedeno, 18, who is bisexual, told the Daily News in a jailhouse interview that he had been bullied because of his sexuality since middle school and simply snapped.

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