Unbelievable!

A cover-your-backside moment in Huntsville

Newspapers, any local journalist will admit, publish stories of varying levels of news value. Even on a national or international scale, not every story can be a shocker like Watergate, but they’re generally important. At the local level, stories can be about unexpected revelations, but they can also be about mundane but important decisionmaking. A rezoning might not be exciting, but residents need to know what bigger projects are happening around them.

Still, every now and then, an eye-popper comes along. And there was a doozy last week — just the latest — involving the horrible hazing that went on at Huntsville’s middle school.

“No charges for Huntsville school staff,” the headline advised.

The story related how Washington County Prosecuting Attorney Matt Durrett, based on information provided by the local sheriff’s office, had determined the school officials who became aware of accusations of sexual abuse on the junior high school basketball team were not required by law to call the Arkansas Child Abuse Hotline.

Educators are unquestionably mandatory reporters, under state law. They must file a hotline report when there is “reasonable cause to believe that a child has been subjected to child maltreatment,” Durrett said. What’s child maltreatment? It’s defined as abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, sexual exploitation or abandonment.

The conclusion reached in the Huntsville case was that the locker room acts by some basketball players of holding down several eighth- and ninth-grade fellow teammates, then placing their exposed genitals on the faces of the restrained teammates — several times during two basketball seasons — didn’t meet the definitions of abuse, sexual abuse or sexual exploitation.

Say what?

That finding is baffling. It’s astonishing. And if the prosecutor’s finding is valid, it’s yet another example of poorly drafted state law.

Let’s consider this for a moment: What if these boys had done the exact same thing in the locker room to members of the girls basketball team? How comfortable would everyone be with the idea that it didn’t amount to abuse, sexual abuse or sexual exploitation? Or with the sheriff’s office finding that “no sexual gratification was involved?” Exactly what’s the test for that conclusion, and when does flopping one’s private parts in someone’s face move from locker room antics to sexual gratification?

This was just boys being boys, right? That’s certainly seemed to be the attitude in Huntsville throughout this nasty episode, as punishments for the aggressors were reduced by the School Board and improper meetings attempted to keep news of what happened from going public.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s accept the information in Sheriff’s Office Capt. Russell Albert’s report and Durrett’s intense examination of legal definitions and scrutiny of the meaning of every word. Even if through some convoluted hoop-jumping, there is no legal case to be brought against the mandatory reporters, are we to believe that absolves them of responsibility?

Alberts’ report verified that Head Coach Caleb Houston, Superintendent Audra Kimball, Athletic Director Tommy McCollough and High School Principal Roxanne Enix all qualify as mandatory reporters. It is extremely unlikely that any of them, faced with the revelation of horrendous behaviors among their student-athletes, went through an intense, extraordinary legal analysis of state laws to determine whether they should fulfill their duties as mandatory reporters.

Indeed, the reason such mandatory reporting exists is to simplify decisions for, in this case, educators who might be conflicted by other motives — protecting student privacy, trying to keep players on a team, avoiding controversy, not wanting to be the one who upsets an apple cart. And it’s hard to believe that any mandatory reporter, learning of claims that teenage students had subjected other students to unwanted violations involving their genitals, wouldn’t see such actions as abuse, sexual abuse or sexual exploitation.

In Great Britain, police often advise citizens who witness something that just doesn’t seem right to “see it, say it, sorted.” In other words, speak up and let the trained authorities sort it out. In the United States, it’s often “See something, say something.”

Throughout this controversy, the priority in Huntsville has been to make sure word of these abuses didn’t get out and then, after it did, to protect the kids. That sounds noble, unless that protection prioritizes the aggressors over the victims. Or, of course, it prioritizes protecting the school district and those who chose not to fulfill what was at least their moral duty to speak up through the Arkansas Child Abuse Hotline.

This heavy dose of legal Twister has resulted in no criminal charges for failure to report, which may lead some of the public school officials to absolve themselves of wrongdoing in this extreme example of cover-your-backside school politics, but they are wrong.

We understand why there are laws on the books that seek to protect minors, but too often those laws are also used to provide cover for public officials who have failed those minors.

If Arkansas’ laws really did not require educators to report such nasty conduct from a junior high locker room, Arkansas lawmakers haven’t gotten it right. Any child subjected to such behaviors ought to be able to rely on the adults in the education system and our state laws to both protect them and to ensure accountability when abuses do happen.

Huntsville schools get an F on this assignment.