Closing a loophole
Bill to make schools report sex abuse cases heading to Gov. Cuomo’s desk.
A bill that would force the state’s private schools to report incidents of sex abuse by teachers or other staffers to the police has been sent to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s desk, where it will be signed or vetoed in coming days.
The measure would put private schools, which educate nearly 500,000 of the state’s approximately 3 million K-12 students, on the same footing as public schools, which have for nearly two decades faced the same reporting requirements.
“This is a big loophole that needs to be closed,” said Mary Pulido, executive director of the New York State Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
“People just took for granted that when abuse occurred in a private school it had to be reported,” she said.
When the current law went through in 2000, private schools were not included.
The push to close that loophole has been ongoing for several years, noted Long Island Republican Assemblyman David Mcdonough, who started the effort after reading news accounts about sexual abuse of students in some well-known private schools across the state.
“You’ve got a kid in school and you are paying like $20,000 or more and you never hear about it,” Mcdonough said.
The current version of the bill is sponsored by Democratic Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan of Queens and by western New York Republican Pat Gallivan in the Senate.
Parochial school officials say they are squarely behind the measure.
“This bill is a no-brainer and a critical tool in protecting children. The Catholic Conference urges the governor to sign it immediately,’ said conference spokesman Dennis Poust.
“The proposed legislation only affirms our existing practices and procedures in handling such matters,” added Giovanni Virgiglio Jr., superintendent of the Albany Catholic diocesan school system.
A representative from the state Association of Independent Schools couldn’t be reached for comment.
Like Mcdonough, Steve Forrest, director of government relations at the NYSPCC, said that the spate of stories about exclusive private-school scandals several years back highlighted the fact that those institutions aren’t required to report such problems to police.
Some of the stories centered on abuse of students at New York City’s Horace Mann School as well as Connecticut’s Choate Rosemary Hall.
In the Capital Region, students and alumnae of Emma Willard School were shocked in 2017 with a 96-page report detailing how faculty members, male and female, for years had illicit and improper affairs with students at the all-girls school in Troy.
The legislation also comes amid growing pressure to increase the age at which child abuse victims can sue their per-
petrators in civil court. That proposed legislation, known as the Child Victims Act, would be beyond the education law, which covers the reporting requirement.
That has prompted worries by leaders of religious groups such as the Catholic Church and ultra-orthodox synagogues that they could be crippled financially by a f lood of lawsuits.
Interest in the Child Victims Act has also increased this year in light of two new developments.
Earlier in the year, a grand jury report in Pennsylvania described allegations against more than 300 Roman Catholic priests who had allegedly abused more than 1,000 youngsters over seven decades. And in New York, the state Senate in November flipped from Republican to Democratic control. In past years, the Child Victims Act had moved forward in the Assembly only to be blocked in the Senate over concerns voiced by religious officials.