Girl possibly raped on bus to inner-city school
McClintock Junior High incident ignored by CMS Management
CMS has history of tolerance for crime and rape (see 3-2005 article)
Tolerating bad behavior in the "moral sewer" becomes epidemic
Were boys classified as "disabled"?
Will disability be used as an excuse to return them to class?
http://clnlb.us.publicus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051116/CHANEWS07/511160328/-1/CHANEWS
Citizen Servatius - Creative Loafing Charlotte
Just Another Bus Ride?
Rosa Parks would be outraged
By Tara Servatius
Published November 16, 2005
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 a hold 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.
Creative Loafing Charlotte03.09.05
Discipline By George
Yes, There Are Rapists in Our Schools
BY TARA SERVATIUS
Thank you, George Dunlap. Mr. Dunlap did us all the favor of capturing, in hair-raising clarity, the twisted bureaucratic mindset that is returning rapists and other violent offenders to our classrooms. In an editorial in The Charlotte Post two weeks ago that every parent should read, Dunlap, a school board member, wrote that he gets calls all the time from citizens who ask, "Did one student really get suspended 31 times?" and "Do we actually have rapists in our schools?"
"The answer to both of these questions is 'yes,'" Dunlap wrote. "What the media and others in the community don't explain is why."
Dunlap goes on to explain that contrary to public perception, most of which has been created by arch-conservative Larry Gauvreau who claims the school system can expel anyone, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools must allow these kids to return because of provisions in the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
"In fact, the law requires it," Dunlap wrote. He went on to claim that 10 attorneys with whom CMS recently consulted have backed him up on this.
Dunlap's version of this story is being asserted by about half the school board , either out of ignorance or a desire to fool the public or both. Gauvreau, meanwhile, accuses them of hiding behind the law to keep these kids in school when they could be expelled, which adds to the confusion.
The reality is that both Gauvreau and Dunlap are right, says CMS Associate General Council Michele Morris. And, although she wouldn't say it, both men are also wrong.
Among the crucial facts that Dunlap didn't mention is that IDEA applies only to kids with documented physical, learning, mental or behavioral disabilities. The majority of the kids in our system aren't disabled and thus are not covered by IDEA. If the school board believes that a non-disabled kid poses a danger to other students or teachers, state law says he can be expelled. That student then has the right to apply for re-entrance every six months, although the system isn't required to re-admit him if the school board and school officials decide against it. Despite this, School Safety Director Ralph Taylor told me in December, the system does not permanently expel students, which quite frankly is frightening.
Dunlap is right that kids to whom IDEA applies cannot be expelled. By law, the school system has to continue to provide educational services to them, even if they are incarcerated for a violent crime or wish to resume their education after committing one on campus.
IDEA gives school systems who want to hide behind it huge leeway to put emotionally and behaviorally disabled kids back in the classroom. But even Morris agrees that the system can place a dangerous child who qualifies for IDEA protection in an alternative, or more secure, setting if the team of educators managing his case agrees that it meets his educational needs. If the same educational team decides that an IDEA student's violent or disruptive behavior was not due to his or her disability, they have even wider latitude to discipline the student or remove him or her from the classroom.
Although violent students who fall under IDEA cannot be permanently expelled, contrary to what Gauvreau claims, the bottom line is that if Dunlap and his colleagues wanted to keep truly dangerous kids from having contact with the mainstream student population, they could do it. If they wanted to permanently remove chronically disruptive students from mainstream classrooms, they could do that, too.
Instead, these kids, both IDEA and non-IDEA, spend brief periods in alternative schools or boot camps — when they are removed at all — and are recycled back into mainstream schools, and in the case of the second group, mainstream classrooms.
That's how a sex offender I've been following who committed his crime in a bathroom at North Meck later turned up at West Meck where his presence terrified students and teachers alike. Like Dunlap said, it happens all the time. But it doesn't have to. After this paper spent a few months raising holy hell about it, the system began educating the sex offender at home.
So far, all CMS has offered to do is expand two short-term programs for students who display bad behavior, and to expand — by how much they haven't said — the Derita Graduation Program for chronically disruptive students, which requires that they and their parents meet certain criteria before returning to their regular school.
Translation: we'll add a few more seats here and there in our behavior management programs, but in the end, we plan to recycle violent and chronically disruptive kids back into the classroom.
Adding a symbolic handful of security guards to deal with kids who shouldn't be there in the first place, as CMS did last week at Hopewell and North Mecklenburg high schools, isn't the answer, and it won't fool parents in the long run.
But thanks to Mr. Dunlap, we now know one thing for certain. There are rapists in our schools, where they are no doubt "preparing for greatness."
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com.
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