The Department of Education deserves credit for shining a national spotlight on a crisis that schools and regulators have often ignored: the sexual abuse of children in America’s classrooms.
Secretary Linda McMahon’s July Dear Colleague letter lays out the staggering reality. Decades of research shows that nearly one in 10 students has experienced sexual misconduct by an educator.
There would be a national outcry if this happened in any other setting.
Yet for decades, school systems have responded not with transparency and accountability, but with concealment and self-preservation.
Schools open investigations but quietly abandon them. Complaints disappear into bureaucratic black holes. Predators are allowed to resign before disciplinary proceedings conclude, permitting evidence to be buried and records to be sanitized. Administrators pass dangerous educators from one district to another in the shameful practice known as “passing the trash.”
I’ve represented hundreds of survivors of sexual abuse. My firm has litigated against school districts throughout California and beyond. What we have uncovered is not mere negligence. It is an institutional culture that repeatedly protects teachers and other school employees at the expense of children.
Consider the Los Angeles Unified School District.
In 2007, a student at South East High School reported that she had been sexually abused by her forensic science teacher, Jesus Saenz. Under California law, school officials had a clear duty: Report the abuse immediately and protect the student.
Instead, according to police reports, Principal Jesus Angulo and Assistant Principal Maria Sotomayor detained the girl for hours and subjected her to a degrading interrogation. They demanded graphic details about the abuse, threatened that her allegations would become public, and falsely claimed that Saenz possessed evidence proving she was lying. The victim succumbed to their pressure and withdrew her allegations.
Months later, police spoke with the victim and Saenz was arrested for sexual assault and pleaded guilty.
What happened next exposes the rot at the heart of the system.
The two school administrators who forced the victim to recant – Angulo and Sotomayor – were charged and pleaded guilty to violating California’s mandatory-reporting law. But just eight days after their arrests, Los Angeles Unified returned both administrators to campus. Despite criminal convictions stemming from their failure to protect a child, both remain employed within the Los Angeles Unified School District.
This institutional support of school employees guilty of misconduct is sadly a nationwide phenomenon. Just this past month, the Portland Press-Herald reported on a Maine educator who got hired twice after two separate resignations over sexual harassment allegations.
As a condition of receiving federal funds, states are required to prohibit schools from helping an employee obtain a new position “when there is knowledge or probable cause to believe that the individual engaged in sexual misconduct involving a student.” Likewise, Title IX requires schools to respond appropriately to address claims of sexual harassment. These laws are in place to prevent bad behavior, but states continue to ignore them.
Secretary McMahon’s letter correctly observes “a troubling and recurring pattern” of schools placing employees ahead of children. The Department of Education’s announcement noted that 20 school districts are now under investigation for possibly not “addressing staff on student sexual misconduct appropriately.”
Every institution encounters bad actors. The scandal is that school districts repeatedly choose to protect their employees instead of children.
Institutions that fail to comply with federal law should face the loss of federal funding. Congress should convene bipartisan hearings and investigations into sexual abuse and institutional cover-ups in America’s schools. State credentialing boards should be held accountable for allowing dangerous educators to retain their licenses. School districts that conceal abuse should face serious consequences. Administrators who violate mandatory-reporting laws should face personal accountability.
The Department of Education has taken an important first step. Every child deserves to attend school without fear of abuse. Every parent deserves confidence that school officials will act decisively when allegations arise.
