An epidemic of sexual abuse in schools

Shoddy investigations, quiet resignations, and a culture of secrecy have protected predators, not students

Authored by: Matt Drange

Dec 21, 2023, 5:18 AM CT

The documents began arriving last fall, first in a trickle, then a flood. Emoji-filled text messages from teachers, handwritten complaints from students in the rounded script of teenage girls, type-written transcripts from HR investigations. Eventually, thousands of pages from disciplinary files of educators investigated for sexual misconduct made their way to my desk.

They documented grooming and groping, the sharing of dick pics and porn, sexualized comments in classrooms, oral sex in bathrooms, and statutory rape that in some cases continued for years. In case after case, from San Francisco, California, to Enosburg Falls, Vermont, the documents conveyed an unsettling story: school administrators across the United States catastrophically failing to prevent abuse.

In April 2019, administrators at Utah's Salt Lake City School District learned that a language-arts teacher had been arrested and charged with seven felonies involving sexual abuse of a 17-year-old student. Records show they responded promptly, putting the teacher, Sterrett Oney Neale, on paid leave.

But more than a year before the arrest, in August 2017, an administrator at the school, West High, had reported seeing Neale alone with the student in his classroom before the start of the school year, according to subsequent court testimony. When administrators told Neale to stop spending time alone with her, the teenager said in court, she defended him — something a trained investigator would know is common in cases of grooming. In the records released to me by the district, there's no documentation of a formal investigation at that time.

The student's testimony, offered during a preliminary hearing in Neale's ongoing criminal trial, made clear that the classroom encounter was a red flag. She described how Neale had been a source of support as she was grieving the death of her grandmother and how he'd helped her report abuse she'd experienced at the hands of another teacher during summer camp. How Neale directed her in school plays and even advised her on a research paper about the psychological effects of child sexual abuse. And how he then kissed and touched her in that same classroom, which led to months of sexual encounters at his home.

The district allowed Neale to voluntarily resign at the end of the school year — and paid his salary through the end of his contract that August. (Neale's attorney declined to comment.)

I came across another disturbing case from several years ago in Durham County, North Carolina. There, a student at Neal Middle School said her chorus teacher, Troy Logan Pickens, had groped her. (She only disclosed later, in high school, that he'd raped her.) An interim principal, James Key, didn't open an investigation until the child's mother got involved, and even then, according to a subsequent civil suit that settled out of court, failed to report the groping allegation to law enforcement or child protective services, as required by state law. Instead, Key allowed Pickens to resign, paving the way for him to continue teaching.

Months later, Pickens applied for another teaching job, in nearby Wake County. He landed the job thanks in part to a positive review from Key, who, according to the civil suit, shared nothing about his misconduct investigation. (Key did not respond to requests for comment.)

Before long, Pickens sexually abused a student at the new school. The methodical assaults in a school bathroom, detailed in court records, included digital penetration and forced fellatio. The student only came forward about the abuse two years later, after Pickens was arrested for raping the student back at Neal.

Just as in Durham County, the Wake County district allowed Pickens to resign.

Hundreds of Rosemeads

Earlier this year, I explored how the culture of a single Southern California high school — my alma mater, Rosemead High — became a stalking ground for child predators. I spent years trying to get to the heart of what went wrong there, first with an investigation into my former journalism teacher Eric Burgess and then, after receiving a flood of tips about other Rosemead teachers, by detailing 40 years of sexual abuse and misconduct. The more I uncovered, the more I began to wonder whether Rosemead was unique. Or whether a broader lens would reveal similar patterns of behavior elsewhere.

No federal agency tracks teacher sexual misconduct. So I requested disciplinary records and severance agreements from the 10 largest school districts in all 50 states, as well as license revocations from every state's department of education.

Opposition to disclosing these records was fierce. In several states, including Alabama, Iowa, and Virginia, their largest districts refused to release any records. Many districts demanded prohibitive sums of money to fulfill requests. The Hawaii Department of Education asked for $75,060. The Katy Independent School District in Texas wanted $125,352. Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska invoiced $243,836.

Other districts never provided records, even places such as Alaska's Bering Strait School District, where multiple teachers have been criminally convicted in recent years for abusing students. "Nothing is digital, so it is tedious research," a district official told me. Some, such as Springfield Public Schools in Massachusetts, argued that releasing records would be an "invasion of the teachers' privacy outweighing any possible right of the public to know."

In the end, we received more than 800 disciplinary files from 85 school districts in 34 states. Many of the records were partially redacted or incomplete, but 388 files included enough detail to determine they were related to sexual misconduct with students. We also obtained more than 3,700 teacher severance agreements. We supplemented these documents with teacher union contracts, court and law-enforcement records, a database of news coverage of educator arrests, and a review of employee policies from the largest school districts in every state to see what behavior they do — and don't — prohibit.

Taken together, the tens of thousands of pages of records, combined with interviews with school administrators, state investigators, liability-insurance reps, lawyers, and academic experts, indicate that there may be hundreds of Rosemead Highs across the country — and provide a window into how abuse has been allowed to fester.

A national panic about child "groomers" has dominated public discourse in the past two years, sparking hundreds of school book bans targeting LGBTQ content and a dozen state bills criminalizing drag performances for children. But only four state legislatures have taken steps during the same two years to block documented predators from continued access to children.

The scope of the problem is larger than previously known. At least 1,895 teachers have had adverse action taken against their credential by state education licensing boards from 2017 to 2022 for sexual misconduct, according to data collected by the nonprofit National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, or NASDTEC. The figure, provided exclusively to Business Insider, is almost certainly an undercount, as many states do not report details of why a credential was suspended or revoked.

We also analyzed a database of local news stories collected by Billie-Jo Grant, a leading researcher on sexual abuse in schools, and her students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and found that at least 3,045 school staffers have been arrested since 2017 following allegations of sexual misconduct involving students. This includes both licensed teachers and noncredentialed staff, from janitors to teachers' aides.

Despite the frequency of the abuse, we found a fragmented approach to accountability that leaves oversight largely in the hands of administrators at each of the 13,000 school districts in the United States. They are in turn governed by a patchwork system of state laws.

The documents we obtained lay bare the life cycle of sexual abuse in schools, documenting how administrators and policymakers have failed students at every turn:

• A third of districts we examined have threadbare policies that bar sexual misconduct but do not prohibit widely recognized sexual grooming behaviors.

  
  

• District officials often conduct cursory investigations, sometimes interviewing only the accused educator before finding claims unsubstantiated.

  
  

• Districts routinely mete out mild sanctions such as reprimands or suspensions, and they often allow teachers who engaged in abuse to resign or retire. Only 15% of the cases we analyzed resulted in termination.

  
  

• Legislators have failed to keep abusers from moving on to other schools; only 17 states and Washington, DC, require districts to disclose information to prospective employers about an allegation, investigation, resignation, or termination related to teacher sexual misconduct.

  
  

• A culture of silence dominates, with widespread use of nondisclosure clauses in severance agreements and strict union confidentiality language protecting teacher personnel files.

  
  

• The only national database that tracks teachers who've lost their license in the wake of sexual misconduct is voluntary and nonpublic; state credentialing agencies all participate, but just 2% of school districts opt in.

  
  

"The bottom line," Grant said, "is that we've collectively valued the reputations of teachers over the safety of students."

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