A high school teacher at an elite private school in the US has tendered her resignation after being accused of sexually abusing a former student. According to the New York Post, 50-year-old Mara Naaman resigned four days after Dalton School received a letter regarding the alleged misconduct. The letter was written on behalf of a former student claiming the English teacher abused them between 2020 and 2022.
The school also held an assembly to inform high schoolers of the investigation and sent an email to parents warning them that there may be other victims.
''We are only providing the name of the teacher so anyone with relevant information can provide such information. Our priority is determining the veracity of these claims and determining whether there are other allegations of abuse from other members of the community, '' an email from principal Jose De Jesus stated.
The school also said it filed a police report and hired a firm specializing in harassment and sexual abuse to conduct an investigation.
Notably, Ms Naaman, a mother and former Fulbright scholar who described herself as a ''writer, scholar, humanist'', was a tenured Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Williams College in Massachusetts where she spent seven years before joining the school in 2017. Her work has appeared in various journals, including the Journal of Arabic Literature.
She taught English literature to grades nine through 12 at the school, which costs $61,000 a year to attend. She was also appointed a 'house advisor', responsible for ''creating a safe space for conversations around personal responsibility'', according to the school's website.
This is not the first time the school has courted controversy. In 2018, former headmaster Gardner Dunnan was accused in a federal lawsuit of sexually abusing a 14-year-old student who was living with him and his wife in 1986.
The school, which has several celebrities as its alumni, also gained notoriety during the trial of Jeffrey Epstein when it emerged that the billionaire paedophile had worked there as a physics and math teacher in 1973.
