By:  Benyamin Davidsons

A retired high school teacher who suffered an illness only months after the 9/11 attacks, is blaming the head of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, for pushing to reopen the Lower Manhattan school soon after the attacks.

As reported by the NY Post, Gary Brandwein, who taught at Stuyvesant from 1984 through 2002, says he developed an atrial fibrillation that ultimately “destroyed my life” months after the 9/11 terror attacks.  “She’s a criminal,” Brandwein said referring to Weingarten, the then-president of the United Federation of Teachers. “She looked at being a hero over the interests of her faculty.”

“She pushed to get that school open – it was up to Randi and [then-Stuy principal Stanley] Teitel,” said Brandwein, now 81.  He recalls arguing with the administration over the return to campus, while they were at the Brooklyn school where Stuy held interim classes before the reopening. “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 did decide to stay away from the school, telling The Post back then that the dust-filled air in the building was making him sick.  Brandwein, who had been an avid runner, ended up  suffering a stroke, endured two “experimental” heart operations, skin cancer and lost his peripheral vision. “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, referring to the EPA all-clear. “They were measuring large particles, not small particles that killed everybody.”

The school, situated only a block from the World Trade Center, was officially reopened on Oct. 9.  Lila Nordstrom, who was in the senior class at the time, described the reopening of the school in her 2021 memoir, named “Some Kids Left Behind.”  “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,” Nordstrom wrote in her book.  “We coughed. It reeked like a burning chemical plant. I’ve never smelled anything like it before or since.”

The Board of Education had finally agreed to clean out the ventilation system at the Stuyvesant high school in June 2002, after finding concentrations of lead that were 30 times higher than federal guidelines.  Brandwein claims that in the years to follow some 27 teachers died from 9/11-related illnesses.  “I had to stop going to funerals,” he said, recalling 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.”

On Monday night, Weingarten denied a role in re-opening Stuyvesant High School.  “I am so sorry for Mr. Brandwein and the thousands of others whose lives were forever changed by 9/11 and who have suffered so much,” Weingarten said in a statement.  “The decision on when to reopen downtown school buildings was made by the DOE and Mayor Giuliani. The UFT pushed to relocate Stuy to Brooklyn immediately after the attacks, and when the city wanted to reopen we worked with DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] on ventilation protocols to ensure kids and teachers stayed safe.”