Axed ‘flirt’ teach suing
A Brooklyn teacher phoned a teen student more than 700 times, spent hours on the line with him in the wee hours and allegedly flirted with him in school.
Keri Twente, an Englishas- a- second- l anguage teacher at John Dewey HS in Gravesend, admits she went overboard in tutoring the 19-year-old immigrant but insists their relationship was never romantic or sexual.
“I was constantly helping kids. I had a line out the door,” Twente, 29, told The Post. “If they needed me, I was there.”
Fired for “gross misconduct” after five years on the job, Twente has filed suit in Manhattan Supreme Court seeking to overturn her termination.
Besides touting her teaching successes, she is armed with an audiotape she says proves agents of the Special Commissioner of Investigation’s Office lied and withheld exculpatory information.
When city investigators questioned the teen in July 2017, he secretly recorded the interview and later turned the tape over to Twente. On it, he flatly denies any “kissing or sex” with the teacher.
“No, that’s disgusting,” he told investigators Miguel Ruiz and Noemi Martin. But Ruiz, who told the youth he would close the case because “nothing happened,” omitted those statements from his notes, final report and hearing testimony.
Twente also caught Ruiz rummaging through her home mailbox. Ruiz admitted in testimony that if no one answered the door, “We pulled the mail just to confirm that the person lived there” and put it back.
Twente, who earned a master’s degree in sound design at Yale University, joined the Department of Education through the NYC Teaching Fellows program, focusing on older immigrant kids who lacked credits. The youth came to the US from Russia at age 18, speaking no English. He was in Twente’s class in 2015-16. The next year, while assigned to other teachers, he kept returning to Twente for help.
Phone records that school year show he called Twente’s phone 650 times, and she called him 720 times at all hours. About half the calls were only attempts to reach him, not actual conversations, she said.
Twente said she often called the student at 7 a.m. to wake him for school. They also connected after midnight, while she did graduate studies and he did homework after a restaurant job. “We would just call each other and leave the phone on speaker while we did our work,” she told The Post. “He was learning English. I was studying Russian. We would correct each other’s grammar.”
One teacher reported seeing Twente and the boy in her locked classroom with the lights out.
After a 10-day administrative trial, hearing officer James Brown found Twente “obsessed” with the student. The city maintains Ruiz’s alleged misconduct “had no bearing” on the case.
Twente seeks to vacate the termination for a lesser penalty.