Eleven former students at a top-ranked public high school in Philadelphia accused their former chess coach of sexual misconduct, alleging he routinely “spooned” them while sharing beds during trips and plied them with alcohol before making sexual advances toward the teens.
The allegations, reported Friday by Philly.com, come after an exclusive report last month by the website on sex abuse claims lodged against Stephen Shutt, who taught scholastic chess and math for two decades starting in 1971 at Frederick Douglass Elementary School in North Philadelphia before transferring to Julia R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School, considered one of the best college-prep public high schools in the nation.
One former Masterman student, now 41, told the website that Shutt, 76, regularly “spooned” him while sleeping in the same hotel bed while traveling for chess tournaments and often rested his hand atop his crotch.
“I had to literally sleep next to this man with his arm around me for years,” the man said, adding that Shutt’s hand would often linger on his genital area. “There are times when I never slept. I’m literally trying to reconcile, ‘How did I get here? How did I get chosen?’”
The alleged sexual misconduct got so intense that the man said he intentionally performed worse in class so he couldn’t continue attending the school beyond its storied middle school program.
“My only escape, I felt, was to flunk out of Masterman, to get out of there as fast as possible,” he told the website.
Decades later, the man, who now works as an entrepreneur, said he still questions what his life could’ve been.
“I always wonder: If I stayed at Masterman, where could I have gone?” he asked.
Richard Woolf, 60, one of Shutt’s former students, said the creepy teacher started grooming him in the early 1970s, shortly after he started teaching in Philadelphia. Both were living in Bucks County at the time when Woolf, then 14, visited Shutt’s apartment. Shutt was roughly 29 at the time, according to Woolf.
“He would latch onto kids around 13 or 14 years old,” Woolf told the website. “[He] kept asking me to take my pants off and I wouldn’t do it. Finally, he got frustrated, shut the film off, and took me home.”
The new allegations follow an Oct. 19 report by Philly.com in which three former students said they either endured or witnessed Shutt sexually abusing preteen and teenage boys in his Fairmount home during the 1980s.
Shutt denied the allegations last month, saying, “No, that did not happen.” He’s now referring questions to his attorney, Lloyd Long, who did not immediately return a request for comment by The Post on Friday.
“We have only recently been made aware of these decades-old allegations against Mr. Shutt and have begun a careful investigation into the claims,” Long told Philly.com.
Police in Philadelphia also launched an investigation into the allegations by former students at Frederick Douglas Elementary School, including a then-11-year-old boy who said Shutt performed oral sex on him.
The school district had only one complaint on record related to Shutt, which allegedly included skinny-dipping during a 2012 trip he took with Masterman graduates, according to spokesperson Lee Whack. District officials later determined that “no inappropriate conduct” took place.
No records are available for Shutt’s time at Douglass.
“We recognize the serious nature of the allegations that have been brought to our attention,” Whack told Philly.com. “All of the allegations, if true, reveal conduct that is inappropriate and unacceptable by a District employee or volunteer. We continue to encourage anyone with knowledge of this type of conduct to contact the Philadelphia Police Department.”
