One thing is clear. Something happened on school buses 236 and 251 that shouldn’t have. For two weeks in September, a 13-year-old honors student says she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by two boys who alternately groped and fondled her. It started with verbal sexual harassment, she says. Then it got out of hand.
The girl’s outraged father naturally assumed Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools administrators would do something about the incident, and they did. They allowed the girl to switch buses to avoid the boys. Now, rather than walking a few hundred feet to the bus stop, the girls’ parents have to drive her to another stop a half-mile away.
Meanwhile, no one was punished. After getting the runaround from administrators for more than a month, the girl’s father, Steven, is coming unglued. But his story isn’t new. Last year, I heard similar stories from parents at least once a week. Their children had been repeatedly physically or sexually abused at school by other students; school administrators knew about it, yet they did nothing.
It’s a story that is familiar to readers of this column who followed my eight-month crusade to have a boy who attacked and sexually assaulted a girl in a North Mecklenburg High School bathroom in 2003 removed from West Mecklenburg High School, where the system had temporarily stored him following the incident. He was ultimately convicted and forced to register as a sex offender. In that case, concerned teachers were punished for allegedly divulging details to me about it. CMS eventually gave in and decided to pay to educate the boy at home.
Unfortunately, most of the time parents like Steven don’t have a shred of evidence that an incident ever happened. But occasionally, CMS slips up. Before school officials stopped returning Steven’s calls and e-mails, he managed to get ahold of witness statements his daughter and the boys had written at the request of school administrators.
Steven claims the vice principal at McClintock Junior High said he didn’t plan to punish the boys because the girl had been playing a game with them on the bus called “Nervous,” in which she let the boys fondle her until she said “nervous.” So it was consensual, Steven was told.
The vice principal took the three kids into his office and grilled them about it, Steven says. Though his daughter stuck to her story, the vice principal decided the children had been playing the game.
The boys told a different story. The first boy, in his statement, wrote that he touched the girl in places where he had no right to touch her. She told him to stop, the boy wrote, and “the next day I didn’t mess with her at all.”
But the next day, he was back at it, he admitted. “I was just playing,” he wrote. Eventually, the driver made him sit at the front of the bus, he wrote. The boy’s statement makes no mention of the game “Nervous.”
The second boy claimed that some boys and girls play “sexual contest” games on the bus, but that he didn’t play.
At a minimum, the first boy’s statement is an admission of student code violations that qualify him for a punishment ranging from six to 10 days suspension to expulsion. From the boys’ statements, administrators now know that behavior that is way out of bounds is occurring on the school bus. How could they do nothing? Why couldn’t Steven get answers to his questions?
McClintock interim principal Dean Moore didn’t return our call requesting comment. Regional Superintendant Lisa Stickley responded to the e-mail I sent to both her and Superintendent Frances Haithcock. Stickley said CMS couldn’t comment on anything related to individual students or share information contained within their educational records, because that would be a violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
That’s a cop out. By law, CMS can’t release the names of students or student records — which we didn’t request — but the system can and regularly does comment to reporters on whether children will be disciplined for various incidents that have occurred at school.
In three cases in March and April, after it was reported students brought guns to school, spokesperson Jerri Haigler acknowledged the incidents, divulged details about them and in two cases told the Charlotte Observer whether the student would be punished.
Meanwhile, Steven is considering other options, like filing charges against the boys. It’s a step he doesn’t want to take, but he feels something must be done. At first, it was just about his daughter. Now, the thing that bothers him most, he says, is the lesson the kids have all been taught by the school system’s inaction.
“The kids that are still on the bus are in danger, because the boys have been taught that there are no consequences,” said Steven.
This article appears in Nov 16-22, 2005.
