An 11-year-old girl was attacked in another videotaped Queens school assault — but administrators never removed her assailants from class, her father told The Post.
Marco Rosero, 42, said he was forced to pull his traumatized daughter from MS 217 in Briarwood after administrators, cops and Department of Education anti-bullying staffers blew off his pleas for help.
“Something has to be done about what is going on in these schools,” the furious sanitation worker said. “No one cared. No one helped. My daughter was too scared to go back to class but the kids who attacked her were right back in their seats.”
Rosero’s outrage comes amid mounting parental and teacher worry in nearby District 26 over school safety and a perceived lack of administrative interest in addressing student misconduct.
In another beating captured on tape earlier this month, a student at MS 158 Marie Curie was assaulted in a school cafeteria. That girl’s mother raged that the attacker was never removed from class despite administration assurances that she had been.
Rosero said he was left with no choice but to remove his daughter from the District 28 school and enroll her in Our Lady Queen of Martyrs in Forest Hills.
Footage of the attack, which was initially posted to social media and obtained by The Post, shows Rosero’s child being repeatedly hit and thrown to the ground by a student while others cheer.
Rosero said a dean initially called his wife after the Nov. 25 assault but minimized the incident and pledged to handle the matter internally.
The father called police and school administrators to demand accountability.
He noted that one of the culprits captioned her version of the video: “Almost got suspended, lol.”
Rosero said a school dean told him that the attackers would be given detention and that the matter would be addressed.
“They expected my daughter to immediately go sit next to the kids who did this to her,” Rosero said. “I called and left messages for the principal and he never called back. I never talked to him. Not once.”
With his frightened child marooned at home and frustrated by the school’s response, Rosero said he called a number for a school safety liaison provided to him by his local police precinct.
“I must have called 30 times,” he said. “There is no answering machine, it just rings and rings. I never got anybody to pick up.”
Rosero said he also emailed a DOE anti-bullying office on Nov. 26 and was provided an automated complaint number and a promise to respond.
After more than two weeks of silence, Rosero emailed the DOE’s Bullying Complaint Manager Stefan Bilanych, Director of School Culture and Climate Kenyatte Reid, and Director of Youth Support Services Jolan Nagi on December 14 to ask about his case.
Bilanych replied on Dec. 16 in a one-sentence email and promised Rosero that someone would be reaching out to him.
But other than a few additional promises of action from Bilanych over the next month, Rosero said his pleas for assistance vanished into DOE servers.
“I can’t believe that all this time has passed and you or someone from your office is too busy to follow up with my complaint what does it take to get something done!” the exasperated dad wrote to Bilanych on January 7.
DOE spokesperson Miranda Barbot said that district officials left a phone message with Rosero that he didn’t return the call — a claim he denied
“Students deserve to be safe in school, and this incident was immediately reported and addressed with both students,” she said.
Rosero said he was shocked by what appeared to be systemic indifference to his daughter’s plight.
“They make the process like this so you are forced to give up and they don’t have to do anything,” he said. “When I was a kid and you did something wrong there were consequences. The kids who attacked my daughter, what message are we giving them when they’re able to laugh about what they did?”
Rosero also pushed back on Carranza’s recent claim that critiques of his administration are largely rooted in bigotry and anti-Hispanic racism.
“I’m Hispanic myself,” he said. “He’s making up excuses. We’re just parents who want answers about our kids who are being bullied in school. I don’t see what that has to do with where he is from.”
Citing racial disproportionality in suspensions and negative outcomes for kids who are suspended out of school, the DOE has embraced mediation and “restorative justice” practices instead of harsher punishments.
The DOE and schools Chancellor Richard Carranza have insisted that misconduct in city schools is steadily decreasing while some teachers and principals anecdotally argue the opposite.
