A retired Stuyvesant High School teacher who suffered an illness just months after 9/11 is blaming teacher union honcho Randi Weingarten for pushing to reopen the Lower Manhattan school shortly after the attacks.
Gary Brandwein, a teacher at the elite magnet school from 1984 through 2002, says he developed an atrial fibrillation that ultimately “destroyed my life” months after returning to the toxic campus.
“She’s a criminal,” Brandwein said about Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers. “She looked at being a hero over the interests of her faculty.”
Much of Downtown Manhattan was a still-smoldering disaster site when they returned to Stuyvesant a mere four weeks after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Brandwein and others say they were sitting ducks for illnesses when they returned to the campus just a block from the World Trade Center.
“She pushed to get that school open – it was up to Randi and [then-Stuy principal Stanley] Teitel,” Brandwein, 81, said.
The once avid runner later suffered a stroke, endured two “experimental” heart operations, skin cancer and lost his peripheral vision. Brandwein, a former part-time organizer for the teacher’s union, recalled a clash with Weingarten at the Brooklyn school where Stuy held interim classes before the return to campus.
“I viewed it as dangerous and irresponsible to go back. I was very clear that she didn’t know sh– about science – and I said it to her – right in front of the faculty. I told her, ‘How dare you tell this faculty anything about the safety level – you don’t know anything,’” Brandwein recalled.
One veteran teacher stayed away from the school, telling The Post at the time that the dust-filled air in the building was making him sick.
Brandwein said the science did not back up the decision to return to campus.
“I knew it was toxic, that they were measuring the wrong particles. I had friends in the physics department who didn’t want to come back either,” claimed Brandwein of the EPA all-clear. “They were measuring large particles, not small particles that killed everybody.”
Stuy grad, Lila Nordstrom, was a senior when the terror attacks struck her doorstep. She returned with classmates on Oct. 9.
“I walked to school with my classmates — some in dust masks, others shielding their mouths and noses with scarves, most just breathing in the acrid stench,” she wrote in her 2021 memoir, “Some Kids Left Behind.”
“We coughed. It reeked like a burning chemical plant. I’ve never smelled anything like it before or since.”
In June 2002, the Board of Education agreed to clean out the ventilation system at Stuyvesant after finding concentrations of lead that were 30 times higher than federal limits.
Over the intervening years, Brandwein claims 27 teachers have died from 9/11-related illnesses.
“I had to stop going to funerals,” he said of the various brain, breast, uterine, and skin cancers that killed his colleagues. “The skin cancer leached into the brain – every teacher who died of brain cancer started with skin cancer.”
Former students developed cancer and lung disease at very young ages as well, including Michele Lent Hirsch, a Stuy senior during 9/11 who was 25 when she discovered her lung cancer.
Shoshana Dornhelm, who was a sophomore at the time of the attacks, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2016. Also, Stuy grad Catherine Choy, a sophomore on 9/11, died of gastric cancer at age 33 in 2019.
Lawyer Michael Barasch told The Post in 2017 that he repped 12 graduates and nearly a dozen teachers of schools near Ground Zero who have cancer or lung diseases and who have sought medical coverage through the World Trade Center Health Program.
On Monday, Barasch, who estimates 50,000 students and teachers were exposed to post-9/11 toxins, told The Post that his firm represents 52 students and 42 teachers and staff.
The lawyer chalks up the dramatic rise in cases to “much more awareness” and “an explosion of cancers. The numbers went up in the last few years.”
Weingarten did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.