Schools Caught Passing On Sexual Waste, Not Cleaning It Up * WorldNetDaily * by James Varney. Real Clear Wire

Third in a series
Part 1: Forbidden Fruit and the Class
Part 2: You, the Taxpayer, Are Responsible
Related: Sexual abuse suspect lured into a trap by his alleged victim

Michael Allen was, at first glance, a respected high school coach in the small community of Little Axe, Oklahoma. He was a caring, charismatic leader who guided the star players on his girls’ softball and boys’ baseball teams.

That all changed in 2002 when Allen and his fellow coaches showed up on a spring break trip by Little Axe High School students to South Padre Island, Texas, about 750 miles to the south.

Ashley Terrell, a 17-year-old senior, and a friend were lured to the coaches’ hotel room, where an alcohol-fueled party left Ashley unconscious. She awoke to find Allen lying in bed with her, while her boyfriend called out to her from the bathroom, claiming she had been assaulted by another coach. Frightened and confused, the girls fled the room.

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Ashley quickly told her mother and school officials, including a school security officer she mistook for a police officer. They assured her the matter would be handled. But Allen was never arrested or charged with a crime. He quietly resigned from Little Axe in 2002. In the years since

“By passing around trash, we have created a gang of mobile molesters in our nation’s schools,” Miller said. “And we won’t know about it until a brave person or bystander steps forward.”

Several explanations have been offered for the system’s frequent failure to stop predators, ranging from bureaucratic inertia to contracts that protect teachers or administrators. Whatever the cause, Amos Guiora, law professor at the University of Utah, believes that the failure to address sexual misconduct at its source, which allows child abusers to reoffend, is at the heart of the problem.

“All of these incidents could have been prevented from the very beginning if the perpetrator was not protected,” he said. “If they know they will or can be protected, the pattern will continue. No matter how bad the perpetrator is, without the enabler he cannot operate.”

Guiora said the problem is especially frustrating because school staff categorized as mandatory reporters, meaning they are required to alert authorities in cases of abuse. Currently, however, violating the mandatory reporter requirement is a criminal offense, usually with a one-year statute of limitations, meaning prosecutors rarely prosecute such cases.

“Worse still, in addition to the initial assault by the abuser, the child is then attacked again by others who seek to protect the abuser and the institution: bystanders, teachers, principals, special interests, government bureaucrats, and politicians,” Guiora wrote in a 2022 article in the Texas Tech Law Review. “It is a sea of ​​laws and social forces that re-harm survivors of childhood sexual abuse. For the child, it is a sea of ​​destruction.”

The way K-12 predators have maneuvered through the system has led some to conclude that the vocational education institution is more concerned with its own well-being than with protecting children.

“What you have is people who are protecting the reputation of an institution instead of the safety of children,” said Republican Sen. Shane Jett of Oklahoma. “Instead of exposing something that’s going on, they’re aiding and abetting the bad guy because what matters most to them is making sure everybody has a job.”

Jett pointed to lobby groups, the teachers unions and an Oklahoma organization called the Center for Education Law, which represents many school boards there as enablers. RealClearInvestigations sought comment from the center, as well as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, but none responded to questions.

Others also pointed to the collective bargaining agreements that districts enter into with teachers’ unions, or favorable contracts for administrators that protect workers and make it harder for future employers to learn from past misdeeds. Union contracts have long forced school systems to keep paying people even after allegations have forced them out of the classroom.

Some are taken out of the classroom and placed in so-called “rubber rooms.” In one infamous example, New York City taxpayers paid $1.7 million to an alleged sexual predator and groper as he sat idly by for two decades.

Federal law already requires states to pass laws against systemic elements that contribute to “waste passing” — nondisclosure agreements, separation agreements, or employment agreements that allow for the deletion of files when someone leaves the school.

According to SESAME President Miller, the federal mandate stems from a provision in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act that federal regulators have not made mandatory.

In 2022, the Department of Education said SESAME’s proposed legislation should serve as a model for state lawmakers seeking to crack down on repeat offenders. To date, however, only seven states have passed the legislation, and only nine states in total have such laws on the statute books, Miller said.

But the pattern of failing to act when credible allegations are made against an employee can also be rooted in simple convenience or ignorance. Predators are aware of this kind of built-in shield and use it to their advantage, experts in the field say.

“They very, very often get away with doing the wrong thing, and very often the wrong thing makes everyone happy,” says Melanie Blow, executive director of the Stop Abuse Campaign. “Parents often don’t know what to think either. Mom and dad are in too much of a crisis, they go to the principal and assume the school will do the right thing.”

According to advocates and advocacy groups, predators not only take advantage of entrenched bureaucracies, they also work diligently to build their nests within a school. In short, the bad guys don’t just work on their victims: In addition to the careful work they put into identifying, isolating, and then exploiting students, predators also use their own positive reputations to protect them when the flags are raised.

“They could be grooming adults,” said Roger Dreyer, a Sacramento attorney. “These guys can be very sophisticated.”

In June 2023, Dreyer was the lead attorney in a $52 million settlement reached by Sacramento schools over repeated sexual abuse at an elementary school. For three years, an after-school aide, Joshua Vasquez, covered the windows of his room with black garbage bags and abused multiple children. School officials ignored this and other warning signs about what Vasquez was doing to children, leading to an apology in addition to the money after Vasquez was sentenced to 150 years in prison.

Dreyer and other trial attorneys said predators are often seen not as “trash” but as figures students trust and respect, and that helps sustain their criminal careers. This is especially true when school employees are trained to only notice possible signs of abuse at home, and not in the workplace.

“They’re not trained to deal with this,” Dreyer said. “Their training sells them on the idea, ‘Oh, it’s weird, Uncle Harold’s home,’ and then they ignore all the red flags. A lot of times you hear the district say, ‘We’re lucky to have him,’ and they blame everybody but themselves.”

All of this can leave the victim both confused and hurt. Michelle Denault was sexually abused for years by a teacher at New Berlin High School in Illinois. She thought they were in love and would live happily ever after; like many victims, it took years for her to process what happened to her in high school.

Today, however, Denault has no illusions about the inappropriate nature of what her teacher did starting in her freshman year of high school. He then went on to victimize more people, she says.

“These are things that make us uncomfortable – “We just don’t feel comfortable with the idea of ​​teachers or coaches attacking our children,” she told RCI. “We defend the ‘occupation’ as a whole. But silence and complicity are huge in institutional settings. The damage is done by those who turn a blind eye: how can you understand that good people didn’t help you?”

Rolen said she encountered elements of all of this when, spurred by the case of Nassar and U.S. Gymnastics, she went public with her ordeal in 2020. After appealing to the state Department of Education, she began closely monitoring Allen and the other coaches who had been to South Padre Island. ((RealClearInvestigations was unable to locate Allen for comment on this article.)

She learned that Allen had impregnated a student at another school and eventually married her, but he was never arrested or charged in connection with the K-12 misconduct. After hearings by the state Department of Education, he agreed to surrender his teaching license last month. The teaching license of the coach who allegedly abused Rolen’s boyfriend that night is scheduled for a state hearing next month.

“I had to do the research and that was almost worse than the rape,” Rolen said, “I wanted to die inside.”

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

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