It’s Pass the Trash, Not Catch the Trash

(RealClearInvestigations)—To outward appearances, Michael Allen was a revered high school coach in the tiny community of Little Axe, Oklahoma — a caring, charismatic leader who mentored star athletes on his girls’ softball and boys’ baseball teams.

All of that changed when Allen and fellow coaches showed up at a 2002 spring break trip by Little Axe High School students to South Padre Island, Texas, some 750 miles south.

Ashley Terrell, a 17-year-old senior, and a friend were coaxed to the coaches’ hotel room where a party with alcohol led to Ashley blacking out. She woke up to find Allen in bed with her while her friend cried out for her from the bathroom, alleging she had been abused by another coach. Scared and confused, the girls fled the room.

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

“Passing the trash has created a pool of mobile molesters in our nation’s schools,” said Miller. “And we won’t know about them until some brave person or bystander comes forward.”

Multiple explanations have been given for the system’s frequent failures 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 failing to address sexual misconduct at its source, and thus enabling predators to offend again, lies at the heart of the matter.

“All of these incidents would be preventable after the very first instance if the perpetrator were not protected,” he said. “If they know they will or might be protected, the pattern will continue. Bad as the perpetrator is, without the enabler, he can’t operate.”

Guiora said the problem is particularly infuriating because school employees are categorized as mandatory reporters, meaning they are required to alert authorities in abuse cases. At the moment, however, violation of the mandatory reporter requirement is a misdemeanor usually with a one-year statute of limitations, meaning prosecutors rarely pursue such cases.

“Even worse, in addition to the initial attack by the molester, the child is subsequently re-attacked by others whose aim is to protect the perpetrator and institution: bystanders, teachers, principals, special interest groups, government bureaucrats, and politicians,” Guiora wrote in a 2022 Texas Tech Law Review article. “It is a sea of laws and social forces that work to rebrutalize survivors of childhood sexual assault. For the child, it is a sea of destruction.”

The ways in which K-12 predators have maneuvered through the system has led some to conclude the professional education establishment is more concerned with its own welfare than protecting kids.

“What you have is people protecting the reputation of an institution rather than the safety of children,” Oklahoma Republican State Sen. Shane Jett said. “Instead of exposing something that is ongoing, they aid and abet the bad guy because what’s most important to them is making sure everyone is employed.”

Jett pointed to lobbying groups, the teachers’ unions, and an Oklahoma organization called the Center for Education Law that 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 of them responded to questions.

Others also pointed to the collective bargaining agreements districts make with teachers’ unions, or favorable contracts for administrators that offer protections for employees and complicate the ability of future employers to learn of past misdeeds. Union contracts have long forced school systems to keep paying people even after allegations have taken them out of the classroom.

Some are taken out of the classroom and put into so-called “rubber rooms.” In one infamous example, New York City taxpayers paid an alleged sexual harasser and toucher $1.7 million as he sat idly for two decades.

Federal law already mandates that states pass laws against systemic elements that contribute to “passing the trash” — confidentiality agreements, separation agreements, or employment contracts that allow for the scrubbing of files when someone leaves a school. 

The  federal mandate stems from a clause in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act that federal regulators have failed to mandate, according to SESAME President Miller.

In 2022, the Department of Education said SESAME’s proposed legislation should serve as the model for state legislatures seeking to combat repeat offenders, but to date only seven states have passed it, and all told only nine have such laws on the books, according Miller.

But the pattern of failing to act when credible allegations are raised 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 said.

“Very, very often they get away with doing the wrong thing, and lots of times the wrong thing will make everybody happy for a short time,” said Melanie Blow, executive director of the Stop Abuse Campaign. “It’s common to see parents don’t know what to think, either. Mom and Dad are kind of in too much of a crisis, they go to the principal, and they assume the school will do the right thing.”

Predators not only benefit from entrenched bureaucracies, they also work assiduously to build their nest within a school, according to attorneys and advocacy groups. In short, the bad guys aren’t only working their victims: In addition to the careful work they put into identifying, isolating and then preying on the students, the predators are also nurturing their own positive reputations to protect them when flags are raised.

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

In June 2023, Dreyer was a lead attorney on $52 million in settlements the Sacramento schools reached over repeated sexual abuse in an elementary school. For three years, an after-school aide, Joshua Vasquez, covered the windows of his room with black garbage bags and proceeded to abuse multiple kids. School officials ignored this and other warning signs about what Vasquez was doing to kids, 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 viewed not as “trash” but as figures students trust and value, and that helps perpetuate their criminal careers. This is especially true when school employees are trained to spot possible signs of abuse only at home, not in their workplace.

“They’re not trained to handle this,” Dreyer said. “Their training sells them on the idea, ‘oh, it’s weird Uncle Harold at home,’ and then they’ll ignore all sorts of red flags. Often, you’ll hear the district saying ‘we’re lucky to have him,’ and they’ll blame it on everyone but themselves.”

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

Today, however, Denault is under no illusions about the improper nature of what her teacher did starting inher freshman year, and he went on to chalk up other victims, she said.

“These are things we’re uncomfortable with — we just aren’t comfortable thinking about teachers or coaches assaulting our kids,” she told RCI. “We defend the ‘occupation’ as a whole. But silence and complicity are huge in institutional settings. The damage is caused by those who turn a blind eye: How can you understand how good people didn’t help you?”

Rolen said she encountered elements of all this when, prompted in 2020 by the case of Nassar and U.S. gymnasts, she went public with her ordeal. After addressing the state’s education department, she began painstakingly tracking Allen and the other coaches who had been on South Padre Island. (RealClearInvestigations could not locate Allen for comment for this article.)

She learned that Allen had gone on to impregnate a student at another school, eventually marrying her, but he has never been arrested or charged in connection with K-12 misconduct. After hearings by the state’s education department he agreed to surrender his teaching license last month. The teaching license of the coach who reportedly abused Rolen’s friend that night is scheduled for a state hearing next month.

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