Who Protects The Innocent Angels?
By John David Powell (12/17/04)
Question: What is the biggest non-academic crisis facing our public schools?
If you follow the news, you may be tempted to answer Christmas, or the lack thereof. And who could blame you? The recent edition of the Christian Science Monitor (www.csmonitor.com) detailed some of the brouhaha surrounding the banning by schools and cities of Christmas observances and music.
One mother is so upset by what happened in her son’s Scarborough, Maine, school that she and another mother have a web site (www.bringbackchristmas.org) to gather support for their push to bring back Christmas to public schools.
Silencing “Silent Night” is not the problem. The biggest non-academic crisis facing public schools in this country is the silence of school boards and educators regarding sexual predators in the classrooms and locker rooms. And we parents share the guilt, because we choose either to ignore the evidence or fail to hold accountable those we place in positions of trust in our schools.
Evidence of pedagogical pedophiles is there, but sometimes one has to look hard to find it. The Houston Chronicle(www.chron.com) buried among the obituaries a recent story out of the Texas capital. “More educators sanctioned for sex misconduct” appeared on page B9 of the paper’s Oct. 29 edition, next to the death notices of Thurow, Villarreal, and Wright.
According to the story, the State Board for Educator Certification (www.sbec.state.tx.us) sanctioned 103 educators during the 2003-04 fiscal year, versus 19 sanctions a decade ago. The cases included teachers who took students home to fondle, teachers who molested students in classrooms, and teachers who raped students in vehicles. Sanctions ranged from written reprimands to license revocation.
Prosecutors attribute the increase in sanctions to better reporting of incidents, according to the story. In the past, embarrassment on the part of students and unbelief on the part of school officials kept cases from ending up with the proper authorities, said one county prosecutor.
A report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education caused a little stir when released earlier this year. “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature” was prepared by Charol Shakeshaft of Hofstra University and Interactive, Inc (http://preview.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/misconductreview/report.pdf). Shakeshaft’s extrapolation of existing data led her to conclude “more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade.” That number comes to about one out of ten kids between 1991 – 2000.
Most public knowledge of sexual misconduct comes from newspapers, according to Shakeshaft’s report, which cites several stories from Feb. 2003. Included among them were the convictions of a wrestling coach in Nebraska, a basketball coach in Florida, a softball coach in Colorado, and a 42-year-old female middle-school teacher who had sex with a sixth-grade male student in New Jersey
A LexisNexis search for newspaper stories since Thanksgiving returned several hits, including:
Four former teachers in Clark County, Nevada, convicted in separate incidents of statutory sexual seduction of a teen, possession of child pornography, attempted lewdness with a child under the age of 14, and preparing and distributing child porn
A former Dallas, Texas, junior high school teacher sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl
A Vermont man, in prison for having sex with a 13-year-old female student, included in the upcoming edition of “Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers” for being one of the nation’s most respected teachers
The Seattle Times ran a series in December 2003 on coaches who sexually abused students (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/coaches/). School records identified 159 coaches reprimanded or fired for sexual misconduct between 1993 and 2003.
The Shakeshaft report cites the series to show how school administrators and others try to hide the identities of sexual predators. As reported by the paper: “The Bellevue (School District) teachers union organized a districtwide personnel-file review so teachers could go through their files and remove materials. The district says no sexual-misconduct records were removed, but the past president of the union said records The Times asked for were removed in one case.”
A Texas school board deliberately withheld the reason it refused to keep a female junior high school teacher, according to an email received by this writer. The email, purportedly from the teacher’s former husband, describes in graphic detail how he caught his wife having phone sex with a 15-year-old male student.
“The child protective services of Texas, the . . . school district, and the . . . [police department] covered up the matter so effectively that teachers within the jr. high did not even know what happened,” he wrote. “The school offered no counseling for the students in my wife (sic) classes and basically told her to leave and all of this would blow away.”
Minutes of the school board meetings show the board, “in the best interests of the District,” terminated the probationary contract of a teacher of the same name and from the same school cited in the email.
Shakeshaft writes in her DOE report that 94 percent of all children do not tell about sexual abuse by an adult to anyone who can do something about it, and if they tell anyone, it’s a friend. And that brings us back to the Christian Science Monitor story and the mother from Maine.
“Our children are feeling really repressed, they are intimidated about saying ‘Merry Christmas,’” she said.
Such sentiments have their place, but maybe we parents should worry less about singing “Angels We Have Heard On High” in school and more about protecting the angels we send to school each day.
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