School Uncovers More Abuse
Misconduct Cases Date Back Decades
The exclusive Loomis Chaffee School, having commissioned an investigation in 2016 into past sexual abuse of students by faculty reaching from the 1940s to the 2000s, is now reporting that it has discovered more cases.
School officials, in a letter posted to the Loomis Chaffee community earlier this week, said that after the law firm of Cowdery & Murphy finished its inquiry and submitted a report in January 2017 “additional alumni came forward with allegations of sexual abuse.”
The school said it has reported
these additional allegations to the state Department of Children and Families, something the school admitted not doing in at least one of the other cases, and directed the law firm to investigate.
The lawyers found that former faculty member Paul Betts, who taught at the Windsor school from December 1985 to June of 1987, “had engaged in sexual misconduct with at least two students while he was at the school.”
The students didn’t report the abuse. The school became aware of the allegations in the 1990s but “did not report it at that time,” according to the recent letter, posted on the school’s website.
Betts has denied the allegations, school officials said. They said they named Betts based on “the nature and extent of the allegations” and an assessment of his credibility and responses.
A second case mentioned in the letter to the Loomis Chaffee community involved allegations of sexual misconduct against a former teacher in the 1980s. The alleged victim sued the teacher and the school in 1992; the school reached a financial settlement with the student and the teacher, who denied the allegations, left the school.
Loomis officials said the administration at the time disclosed the allegations only in “letters of recommendation” for the teacher, and did not report the episode to DCF, “a failure that the school has since corrected.”
That teacher isn’t being named because of nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements signed by the participants in the lawsuit, school officials said.
In addition to those two cases, Loomis Chaffee officials said they recently learned that a former faculty member named Eric Meinecke, who taught foreign languages in the mid 1940s, had been named in a sexual-misconduct investigation at St. Andrews’ School in Florida. While Cowdery & Murphy were investigating, it received a credible report that Meinecke had groped a former student Loomis Chaffee on one occasion. The student did not report the abuse and school records show that Loomis provided two letters of reference for Meinecke in 1948.
Officials said the allegations at two schools meet their criteria to name Meinecke, who died in 2006.
In the recently posted letter, school officials again apologized “for all the instances of sexual misconduct that have occurred at the school,” and expressed gratitude to those who have come forward.
“We know that reporting took great personal courage,” the letter said.
Officials said the school now engages in a long list of background checks and questionnaires aimed at new and active faculty members, and adult family members living in school housing. Outside experts are brought in regularly to talk to all adults about the requirements of mandated reporting.