We often read about individual cases of sexual misconduct by teachers in schools, but new reports are revealing the shocking extent of this problem in the nation’s public school system.According to James Varney of Real Clear Investigations, out of the 50 million students in K-12 public schools across America, statistics show that millions of students are victims of sexual misconduct by school employees every decade.
Varney interviewed Terri Miller, head of the advocacy group SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation) who cited research from Hofstra University that found roughly 1 in 10 students (an estimated 5 million) in K-12 schools who have suffered “some form of sexual misconduct by an educator,” calling the number of victims “staggering.”
“The rate of educator sexual misconduct is 10 times higher in one year’s time than in five decades of abuse by clergy,” Miller said, noting that in 2021 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reported it had received nearly 4,300 sexual abuse allegations. “Another striking contrast is we are not mandated to send our children to church; we are mandated to send them to school.”
Calling it the “the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history,” Varney's investigation delves into the reasons why these atrocities remain under the radar for most Americans. These reasons range from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability. Elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have also fought to keep the truth hidden from the public.
“In any given year they have failed to report thousands of these situations, and instead they’ve papered them over, acted like it’s not an issue,” former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told Varney.
After reading a 2018 Chicago Tribune investigation that found 523 incident reports of sexual misconduct by employees of the city’s schoolsduring the past decade, DeVos initiated a new process to keep track of these incidents by including specific questions about such cases in the Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection. Previously, the Office for Civil Rights asked only general questions about sexual misconduct incidents, without a breakdown of alleged perpetrators.
Unfortunately, when Trump left office, “The Biden administration initially sought to remove those questions, saying it wanted to avoid data duplication, but it backtracked after fierce criticism it was doing so as a sop to teachers unions,” Varney reports. “Consequently, the question will be included on future questionnaires, but, as of today, the Department of Education ‘has no data,’ a spokesperson told RCI.
How can this be when a review of news reports uncovered plenty of data for just a single month.
For example, California students filed a lawsuit against a male music teacher who taught at three different schools in the San Jose area and was currently serving prison time for previous convictions in sexual misconduct cases with students. In New Jersey a female middle school teacher was arrested for an ongoing sexual relationship with a student. In Texas, a male teacher was arrested for having a sexual affair with a 12-year-old student. In Illinois, a female substitute teacher faces charges of “grooming and predatory criminal assault” for an alleged relationship with a sixth-grader.
A 2023 City Journal report written by Larry Sand, a retired teacher, and president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network corroborates Varney’s findings about the extent of the problem and offered an inside look at other reasons why this abuse continues without resolution. For example, union contracts and, in many cases state laws, protect the privacy of employees. This means that even if credible allegations of sexual misconduct are leveled against an employee, unless authorities are called in or an arrest made, the alleged perpetrator is often free to leave one school and work in another.
Offenders are also shielded by the fact that many school districts are under no legal obligation to notify parents or to record these incidents in employee’s personnel files. Collective bargaining agreements between teachers’ unions and school districts allow for this scrubbing of personnel files that leaves no record of abuse after an offender leaves the system. This explains how the practice of covering up these abuses in schools and allowing offenders to just move on to another school has earned it’s own ugly little nickname: “passing the trash.”
“DOE does not and never has tracked sexual misconduct committed by adults against students,” said Billie-Jo Grant, a professor at California Poly State University who is one of the nation’s top researchers on the topic. “DOE has never aggressively worked to stop teachers' unions and administrators from passing the trash. DOE does not hold accountable the many enablers who have created a pool of mobile molesters in our schools nationwide. Your questions should include why? Why? Why?”
This lax and politically motivated policy has resulted in horrendous suffering of children in US public schools. A text book example of what can happen to innocent children under these careless practices involves a teacher named Mark Berndt who was employed for years by the Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles. As Sand reports, even though he was busted for inappropriate behavior in 2012, the District’s remedy was to just stop him from teaching some offensive lessons. But he already had a track record of perversity dating back to 1983 when he dropped his pants on a class trip, which he attributed to “baggy shorts.” In 1992 students claimed he was masturbating in class and another student accused him of touching her inappropriately. In 2010, investigators from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department discovered some of Berndt’s photos which showed children gagged and bound and in what Sand describes as “horrifying situations.”
“Due to official apathy and incompetence, and union mandates that make it almost impossible to fire any teacher—no matter how perverse they are—the school district couldn’t get rid of Berndt without going through a lengthy appeals process costing over $300,000,” Sands reports. “So, when his crimes were exposed, Berndt gamed the system by accepting a $40,000 bribe and retired—but only after racking up another year of credit toward his pension. The ensuing lawsuits against L.A. Unified over Berndt alone cost the district some $200 million. When added to four other sexual-abuse cases in Los Angeles, the cost to the district was $300 million.”
Sadly, Sand says many people involved with government-run schools have come to the conclusion that public education is too often more about the adults than the kids.
“All too often, a small group of inept or debased (or debauched) adults—district administrators, state legislators, school board members, and union honchos—is in charge of an increasingly corrupt system that doesn’t protect innocent children, but instead supports or ignores the perverse adults who prey on them.”
Although the sexual abuse of children in schools also takes place in private and charter schools, the numbers are not nearly as high as those occurring in the nation’s public schools. The good news is that parents are pulling their children out of public schools and choosing other education opportunities.
According to this report by NBC News, public school enrollment dropped from 90.7 percent in 2021 to 87 percent with states like Kentucky seeing a decrease of 8 percent of public school enrollments. Alaska saw a decrease of 7 percent and South Carolina’s rolls dropped by 7.4 percentage points. This is due in large part to the increase in the number of policies known as “school choice” which make private, charter and homeschooling options more available to families. In 2023, at least 146 school choice bills were introduced across 43 states, the majority by Republicans, according to statistics gathered by FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank. As of this writing, nineteen school choice laws were enacted last year in 17 states.
It’s bad enough that parents have to contend with a public school system run by progressive ideologues who are more worried about proper pronouns than math scores. But having to deal with the cover up of the sexual molestation of their children is a step too far and will likely see this decline in public school enrollment continue well into the future.
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