Say officials didn’t protect son from sexual harassment A Prince George’s County couple is suing their son’s public school principal and the county school board for failing to protect their 11-year-old from two years of sexual harassment on school grounds.
The plaintiffs — who filed the $2 million lawsuit anonymously on Thursday — are charging Kathleen Schwab, principal of the Robert Goddard Montessori School in Seabrook, and the Prince George’s County Board of Education with negligence and a civil rights violation.
The lawsuit, filed in county Circuit Court, says the victim, who is unnamed, was in the fourth grade in 2008 when he told his parents a male student was harassing him with sexually explicit language.
The victim’s parents alerted school officials, who said they would investigate, according to the lawsuit.
Months later, the victim told his parents that he was bullied into touching the other student’s exposed genitals daily, and the plaintiffs reported the incidents to the Prince George’s County Board of Education.
The Washington Examiner was not able to reach Schwab or school board members by phone or email Thursday.
In fall 2009, the victim and his aggressor were again placed in the same classroom and the harassment escalated.
“On one occasion the harasser attempted to climb into [the victim’s] stall, forcing [the victim] to run out of the bathroom to escape,” the lawsuit reads. “In February 2010, [the victim] became increasingly anxious and began soiling his clothing. He told his mother he did not want to use the school bathrooms because they were ‘nasty.'”
The plaintiffs say they “begged” school officials to take action. They say Schwab and the school board ignored their complaints, failed to protect their son and obstructed his right to a public education.
In June 2010, the plaintiffs discovered sexually explicit texts and voice messages from the other boy on their son’s cell phone, the suit says. The incident prompted their son to reveal that his harasser forced him to perform sexual acts in the school bathroom and classroom library on “several occasions.”
The plaintiffs removed their son from Goddard Montessori and took him to a health specialist and psychiatrist, where he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
