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A defiant French teacher is still in the classroom after being fired by the Department of Education — crowing that the city “can’t touch me” despite the sexually-charged accusations that got her sacked, including making nearly 30,000 late-night texts to a schoolgirl.
Dulaina Almonte, 33, lost her job at Harry S. Truman High School in The Bronx in 2020 after the Special Commissioner of Investigation substantiated claims of her creepy behavior with teens.
“I can’t be guilty if I’m still a teacher,” Almonte — who now teaches at a Bronx charter school — boasted to The Post this week.
“Still a teacher! Can’t touch me!” she bragged.
“Still a teacher working elsewhere. Like, you really can’t f–king touch me.”
Her audacity comes despite a damning 2022 SCI report which found her “excessive contact and behavior with the students demonstrates that she has no place in the New York City Schools.”
Phone records showed Almonte sent a 17-year-old female student a staggering 28,075 late-night texts over 14 months — 66 messages a day — and traded nearly 1,900 texts with a male 12th-grader.
The NYPD also investigated a Truman HS student’s claim that she and a former pupil were “involved in a sex act” in a classroom, according to a police report.
Almonte denied the accusation — which according to SCI included the allegation that she and a student had “made out and had oral sex all the time in school” — and no arrest was made.
But the incident led to a lengthy SCI probe documenting her thousands of late-night and weekend chats with students, along with encrypted WhatsApp and Snapchat calls, and the teens’ multiple visits to her Bronx home.
The report, the result of a year-long investigation, “was completely false,” Almonte insisted.
Almonte is now teaching Spanish at the publicly-funded, privately-run AECI 2: NYC Charter High School for Engineering and Innovation, where teachers on average earn about $74,000, according to Indeed.com. Her pay in 2019 from the DOE was $71,963.
Brazen New York City public school teachers like Almonte are flouting Department of Education rules forbidding sexual and other “inappropriate” contact with their students — because even if they’re caught, their predatory behavior almost always remains hidden within the DOE, critics say.
And they’re reaping the benefit of a cumbersome city and state discipline process that allows many educational predators to keep on working with kids and teens, even after SCI investigators have substantiated sexual offenses.
While some states maintain public databases exposing proven cases of educator sexual misconduct — in an effort to end so-called “pass the trash” policies that shield problem teachers — New York is not among them, experts told The Post.
“No paper trail follows teachers state to state unless they’re convicted and it shows up in a [criminal] background check,” said Billie-Jo Grant, a researcher and consultant for SESAME, a group which targets educator sexual abuse.
However, fewer than 5% of school administrators nationwide report sexual misconduct to law enforcement, Grant has found. “There’s a lot of motivation to not have it on the front page of the paper,” Grant said.
Over the last five years, SCI has substantiated 254 allegations of sexual or “inappropriate” misconduct by DOE employees and vendors — but only four of those cases, less than 2%, resulted in criminal charges, according to a Post review of the watchdog’s annual reports.
A criminal conviction on sex abuse charges means instant revocation of an educator’s state license. But in the vast majority of sexual misconduct cases, the UFT’s contractual rules require at least two arbitration hearings before a teacher’s state license can be yanked.
Short of that, the DOE shares no incriminating information on a fired teacher with other districts or private, religious or charter schools — and if an offender resigns before he or she can be axed, no trace of the investigation is easily visible to employers outside the city school system.
In Almonte’s case, SCI findings were sent to the state Education Department, which can revoke a license if the person is convicted of a crime or found to be of immoral character. But there is no record of any disciplinary hearing, according to a state website.
Almonte’s state teaching license expired in August 2019, according to the state Education Department.
The educator was terminated by the DOE, according to spokesman Nathaniel Styer, who declined to give more details.
“I’m not going to get into personnel items beyond she was terminated. If others come to us for background checks, we respond,” he said.
Styer didn’t say whether AECI reached out about Almonte.
It’s unclear what kind of background check AECI 2 did before hiring Almonte in 2022.
Derick Spaulding, the CEO of AECI 2, said the school conducts background checks and employees have to pass a “fingerprint authorization.”
“All employees have to get fingerprinted. If there was something in a person’s background that was worthy” of not hiring them, “that would show up” there, he said, claiming, “That’s the state’s way of stating this person’s allowed to work” with children.
Spaulding said he wasn’t familiar with the details of Almonte’s hiring and declined to answer further questions about the teacher’s expired license, the school’s background checks, or whether the school reached out to DOE before hiring Almonte.
The accusations substantiated by SCI would not have been revealed with a fingerprint check because there were no criminal charges.
Some disgraced DOE teachers move out of state.
Daniel Schiels began working as a special education teacher in Stamford, Conn. public schools while SCI was probing him for allegedly grooming a female student over three years, starting from age 15.
Investigators documented Schiels’ suggestive Instagram messages to the girl years after she left his classroom, asking “how big her boobs were now” and “Do you have piercings?”
Schiels, through his attorney, refused to cooperate with the investigation, the report stated. Schiels wasn’t reachable and his mother-in-law hung up on a reporter. Cloonan Middle School in Stamford, Conn., where Schiels said in a January social media post he taught a sixth grade special education class, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Nor did the Stamford Public School System.
Others, like Almonte, stay in NYC but leave the DOE system.
Melanie Roth, a former DOE social worker, took a job counseling kids at the New York City Children Center in November, according to her LinkedIn account.
The NYCCC referred questions to the state Office of Mental Health, which didn’t return a message.
Roth left after the SCI found evidence she hit on an 18-year-old male student with text messages like “I love you” and “I miss you,” and even completed the boy’s tests and assignments for him.
Gilbert Bayonne, Roth’s attorney, said she denied the SCI findings.
“She was never informed of the allegations, nor was she given a chance to defend herself in a hearing,” he said.
Roth is suing the DOE and the state Education Department to regain her school social worker credentials.
With additional reporting provided by Tina Moore and Susan Edelman
