A 12-year-old girl in Baltimore County, Maryland, complained to her teachers, her guidance counselor, and her middle school principal when a boy wouldn’t stop harassing her. He leered at her in class, and, she says, touched her out on the playground in a way state law classifies as a sexual offense. The principal, she tells me, told her he would be removed from her classes and be accompanied by a teacher at all times—but he wasn’t. And nothing changed. The next semester, they were even placed in the same group for sex-ed class.
Sadly, the ordeal she describes and her school’s inaction aren’t isolated, local anomalies. In Oklahoma, an ongoing civil suit alleges a 14-year-old student was sexually assaulted and threatened by classmates over the course of a year and half while school officials, aware of the attacks, did nothing to help. In Colorado, a school district was recently exposed for declining to report dozens of in-school sexual assault complaints to the state department of education. And in yet another harrowing case, at Lincoln High in San Diego, a disabled teen raped a more severely disabled, non-verbal classmate in a bathroom stall during summer school. The victim’s mother didn’t find out until the following year, while the school mislabeled her son’s rape an “obscene act” and concealed the perpetrator’s history of violence: 13 instances, several of them sexually abusive in nature, which were known to school officials and recorded in an internal file recently obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Parents, teachers, and students who’ve watched helplessly while public schools neglect to discipline students for violent and sexual offenses—jailable offenses by laws that govern adult society—brought these cases and dozens more testimonies to the Department of Education Wednesday morning. Their witness comes when Secretary Betsy DeVos is poised to reconsider a 2014 regulation spearheaded by former Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The regulation, in practice, has discouraged the reporting and punishment of violent acts committed by disabled or minority students in K-12 schools. To discourage reporting and punishment, communities have learned, is to encourage violence.
It was the Obama-era Education Department’s data-driven determination that these identity profiles—minority students, disabled students—were systematically disadvantaged, set on the school-to-prison pipeline, by an unfair disciplinary structure. They sold the policy as a civil rights intervention. And to defend it, they drew on disproportionate suspension rates, which tell a compelling story about teachers and administrators perpetuating cruel stereotypes and condemning children to lives of crime, poverty, and prison.
Violating the “guidance” would prompt costly investigation and risk federal grant money schools dearly need. Districts and schools relaxed their discipline policies and suppressed reports of violence to prevent the appearance of an imbalance. While data “improved,” classrooms deteriorated. And in many cases, the same “vulnerable students” the policy claimed to protect suffered without recourse.
In Baltimore County last year, Nicole Landers’ 17-year-old son reported a classmate for bringing a knife to their public high school. When the boy came to school the next week threatening retaliation, Landers took her son to the police station instead of the principal’s office. “Two officers took me aside with my son and said, ‘If something like this happens again in school you should not go to the administration but walk outside and dial 911,'” Landers told me in a recent interview. “‘But if you call us directly, we can come in and then we can document,’ they said. I thought, Well, jeez, that’s just strange.” Strange got stranger: When Landers asked administrators to remove the boy who’d threatened her son from his bus route, “They told me that if my son was afraid he could find his own way to school, because ‘the other student has rights, too.'” It was a sad but useful education.
Landers would hear the same refrain when her 12-year-old daughter, along with two other girls, reported they’d been sexually harassed multiple times by a boy in their class. When her daughter told the adults she was meant to trust with her safety that this boy had touched her inappropriately out on the playground, that his behavior toward her was frightening, they promised he’d be removed from her classes—but he wasn’t. Landers flew into action: “I went up to the school and confronted the principal unannounced. I said, ‘You’re conditioning my daughter to sexual aggression.’ I said, ‘When you ask my daughter to stay in a class with the perpetrator, you’re teaching her to tolerate sexual aggression.’ And she said, ‘Ms. Landers, the other student has rights.'”
Seeking intervention at the district level, she found that she and her children were caught in a sadly common situation. Baltimore County school board member Ann Miller helped her connect the dots. “We’ve come to realize that it’s really an issue on a federal level,” Miller told me in a recent interview. “And that’s not evident right up front. I think most people don’t realize that it’s not a local issue.”
Principals and administrators respond to pressure from the federal level, Miller explained, and they pass that pressure onto the teachers to make sure that their suspension numbers and discipline reports are acceptably even among fully-able white students and disabled or minority students. Miller has heard cases of escalating behavioral violence from school to formerly safe school in her role on the school board. She looks to the 2014 regulations’ “faulty core premise” that racial disparities in discipline automatically prove institutional discrimination. Her testimony is among those Landers brought to the LBJ building Wednesday, along with the accounts of 44 teachers, parents, and principals—many of whom have withheld their names for fear of retaliation. These teachers, Miller and Landers explain, testify that if you are perceived as a whistleblower, you will be targeted for performance review and quite likely fired. “It’s coercion at every level,” Miller says.
“Teachers and administrators are frustrated that even students who have chronic behavior issues or who have acted in a way that endangers others are returned immediately to their classrooms,” writes one recently retired Baltimore County teacher and counselor, whose testimony Landers delivered to DeVos Wednesday. “Students have the impression that they will not be suspended,” and consequently exhibit “more acting out and aggressive behavior.”
An anonymous Maryland educator who serves as an instructional coach recounts teachers’ concerns: “Their administration has requested that they use an alternate reporting method as opposed to the formal reporting methods to document student behavior and discipline.” As a result, the teacher writes, “These schools, all known to have some of the most significant behavior and safety issues in the county, are not being accurately represented in the data.”
“I have firsthand knowledge of teachers, including me, who have been put under administrative pressure to not report or pursue criminal charges for injuries that occurred following student assaults,” the teacher adds. At least one School Resource Officer, the teacher writes, has resigned in protest “as a result of being pressured by
administration to suppress data and investigations related to student offenses.”
State regulations mirror these federal guidelines, which DeVos may soon rescind. Reversing the 2014 discipline rule would lighten pressure on school administrators to relax their schools’ discipline policies—but rescission wouldn’t remove that pressure altogether. Schools like San Diego’s Lincoln High, which earned its reputation for institutional laxity long before Duncan’s guidance, only found fresh incentive to avoid documenting and responding to student-on-student abuses when the federal rule took effect four years ago.
Lincoln had been under investigation already last summer when a teenaged boy with special needs followed a more severely impaired, non-verbal classmate into the restroom and raped him. An aide who found the boys together in a bathroom stall drew up a detailed report—but the school classified the assault as a lesser offense, an “obscene act,” which the victim’s mother, Eileen Sofa, believed for more than a year was a far milder indignity than what had really been done to her boy.
It took a devoted teacher of her son’s, Nate Page, to expose the truth. When he learned what had happened, that the rapist was not expelled and the police failed to follow through, “Nate was livid,” says Nicole Stewart, a former Lincoln High vice principal who resigned in protest. “He is the entire reason that [Channel 7 reporter] Wendy Fry and Eileen Sofa know, or knew that anything had happened.”
But past the point of exposing the school district’s inaction and publicizing the case, Page found he couldn’t ignite the outcry Sofa’s son deserved. “He put together teams of people willing to talk about bad practices at Lincoln, specifically talk about the rape case. He had professors, he had doctors, he had lawyers,” Stewart recalls. But with a non-verbal victim and an unwilling school administration, justice eluded them. “Nate was so defeated, he committed suicide in September.”
Eileen Sofa has two daughters, too. Together they’ve struggled to understand what their brother suffered in so many months’ silence, and his torment’s terminal toll on his teacher. “They keep asking questions, hoping one will have the answer to why their brother went through such a thing, how the school, school police, and the SDPD covered it up, and did not report it to the DA’s office for prosecution,” Sofa writes, in the statement she’d prepared for DeVos. “Why didn’t anyone listen to Mr. Page, why is he gone? They cry almost every day,” she says of her daughters, “while talking about it.”
Whatever spark of policy reform arises from Wednesday’s meeting will, no doubt, ignite a fierce debate between stubborn partisan camps. Opponents to the 2014 guidance are racist, its proponents will argue, even while devastating testimony exposes the deep rot set in place by its flawed premise. And this time, the data are on discipline’s side: Since 2014, forced sexual offenses have doubled in New York City following a shift in school discipline policy in response to the same national statistics that inspired Duncan’s guidance.
Nicole Stewart carries out Nate Page’s mission to tell the highest authority what Sofa’s son wordlessly suffered. And from the Baltimore suburbs, Landers will speak for hundreds of public school parents who like her worry what sort of a world their kids will inherit. “They’re being taught that the rules don’t apply to the rule breakers, and the system is not going to protect them when harm comes. It can’t have a good outcome as young adults coming into society,” she says. Society rewards brute strength, these students will learn—and if your peers fear you, you’ll get your way. Recently the same case that started Landers family’s cold education in the new lawlessness on campus resurfaced in her work as an advocate for other parents. “I just got a call,” she tells me, about the student who brought a knife to school, who threatened her son and was defended by a fearful principal. “We just got a referral call from a mom whose autistic son was assaulted this year by the same boy,” this time more gravely than Landers’ son had been. This other mother’s son, “he was brutally beaten.”
