School sex complaints to federal agency rise — and languish
HOUSTON >> Hector and Itza Ayala sat in a conference room at Houston’s prestigious high school for the performing arts, clutching a document they hoped would force administrators to investigate their 15-yearold daughter’s claim of a classroom sex assault.
It had been four months since the girl reported being attacked by another student. School district police had been notified, but administrators said they could do nothing else to protect her from the boy, who was still in school. Frustrated, Itza, a teacher in the district, scoured the internet for help.
A Google search led her to the website of the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
“As I read more and more,” she said, “I thought, ‘This is exactly what happened, this is exactly what they’re not doing. Somebody can help me!’”
Three years earlier, the office had issued detailed guidance on what schools must do upon receiving reports of student sexual violence in K-12 schools. An elaboration on years of legal and regulatory precedents, the guidance specified that a police investigation did not absolve a school from conducting its own review of whether a student’s right to an education free of sex discrimination had been violated.
That 2011 guidance triggered a conservative backlash but also a rise in the number of sexual violence complaints reaching OCR, as the office is commonly known. It did not, however, lead to widespread reforms.
Short-staffed, underfunded and under fire, the office became a victim of its own success as it struggled to investigate the increase in complaints and hold school districts accountable. An Associated Press analysis of OCR records found that only about one in 10 sexual violence complaints against elementary and secondary schools led to improvements. And nearly half of all such cases remain unresolved — the Ayalas’ among them.
“The critique is that we’ve gone too fast. The reality is that we’ve gone too slow,” said Catherine Lhamon, the former head of OCR. “I am painfully aware of the kids we didn’t get to reach.”
UNEXPECTED BLOWBACK
One month after Donald Trump was elected president, about 200 government employees, lobbyists and advocates gathered at the Education Department to reflect on the civil rights legacy of the Obama administration. The mood was a mixture of pride, nostalgia and apprehension.
Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, praised the department’s Office for Civil Rights — responsible for enforcing a half-dozen civil rights education laws — as among the most effective in federal government. But she warned of “some real bad days ahead.”
Many worry the Trump administration and, especially, its education secretary will not support the department’s focus on combatting sex assault in schools .
“It is very likely that Title IX sexual assault requirements will be cut back very seriously and probably even eliminated,” said John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University.
Best known for ensuring gender equity in federally funded sports programs, Title IX became the government’s tool for cracking down on sex assaults in schools. In 2009, OCR began tracking sexual violence as a distinct category of the sexual harassment it already was monitoring.
“We felt a sense of urgency because of the sheer tragedy of the complaints we were learning about,” said former OCR head Russlynn Ali, noting a gang rape outside a high school homecoming dance in California in October 2009.
In consultation with the Justice Department, Ali and her staff attorneys spent 18 months talking to counselors at school districts and universities and researching the breadth of their authority to find ways to prevent and respond to school sex assaults.
The result was the 2011 guidance , which specified that elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities must conduct their own investigations of student sexual violence and take “immediate action” to prevent it or address its effects.
The guidance said school administrators should train staff in Title IX and use a preponderance of evidence as the burden of proof in investigations rather than the beyond-reasonable-doubt standard applied in criminal cases.
In 2014, the White House created a task force on student sex assault and launched a website with prevention strategies and legal advice. OCR issued a new round of guidance, reiterating that all public and private elementary and secondary schools, school districts, colleges and universities receiving federal funds must comply with Title IX.
Schools under investigation were publicly identified, and reform agreements were posted online.
The backlash was fierce, especially in universities. Opponents charged that the education department was trampling the due process rights of the accused and subverting Congress by making new law. OCR said it was simply explaining how to apply existing law to school sexual violence cases.
“We hadn’t exactly expected the flood of complaints, or the blowback,” Ali said.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ private foundation is helping fund a lawsuit aimed at dismantling the department’s sex assault guidance. During her January confirmation hearing, the billionaire Republican was asked whether she would support continued enforcement.
“It would be premature for me to do that today,” she responded.
Education Department spokesman Jim Bradshaw said OCR officials were not yet ready to comment on the agency’s future direction.
INCREASING COMPLAINTS
Unlike the furor in Congress and on college campuses, the 2011 guidance received far less attention in the offices of elementary and secondary schools. Some schools, the AP found, weren’t even aware of it.