YOU PAY FOR SCHOOL ASSAULTS (Settlements cost city $18.7M over five years)

Taxpayers are getting socked for the hundreds of shocking sexual attacks and other assaults committed against kids in public schools, shelling out $18.7 million to victims over the past five years, according to city records.  There are 110 sex assault cases filed since 1999 that are still pending.  Here are some of the things the $18.7 million spent settling school-attack lawsuits could buy:

- 284 veteran teachers.

- Summer school for 40,000 kids.

- Half-day pre-kindergarten classes for 5,000 kids.

- 180 library books for every elementary and middle school classrooms in the city school system.

- Half of a new 650-seat elementary school.

- Saturday English classes for 81,000 students.

(Source: City's Independent Budget Office)

Here are some recent big payouts made to victims over the past 10 years:

- $425,000 paid this year to a girl who as a sixth grader in 1991 was sexually mauled by two boys in a fifth floor stairwell at PS 67 in Bronx Park South.

- $225,000 paid last year to a freshman girl who was raped in a sound room at La Guardia HS for Performing Arts in 1992.  The teen was victimized again when school authorities told her she had to leave La Guardia because of the furor, said her lawyer, Denise Dunleavy.

- $200,000 paid last year to a girl who charged that she was sexually molested by her teacher at PS 134 in The Bronx between 1994 and 1996.

- $175,000 paid last year to a teenage girl sexually attacked in the basement of Lafayette HS in Brooklyn in March 1998.

- $150,000 paid last year to a girl sexually assaulted in the schoolyard of PS 52 in Brooklyn in June 1998.

(New York)