NAIS - Addressing Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Longtime Head Recommends Four Actions to Ensure Independent

Over many years as a head of independent schools, I often welcomed new families by quoting parts of Howard Nemerov’s poem “September, The First Day of School.” It captures the anxiety a father faces in letting go, placing a child in the hands of others for large portions of the day. Through those years, however, I never focused on these aspirational lines of the poem:

May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could.

While serving as an interim head of school in 2020, these lines took on a new and far greater significance for me. During that year, I met an alumnus—a survivor of sexual abuse who had been abused by his middle school teacher some 50 years before. I came to understand the impact when that “care of him,” as written in the poem, was replaced by abuse and unforgivable betrayal. Since coming forward four years ago, this survivor has been further traumatized, discovering that his former teacher was credibly accused of abuse at two other independent schools and appears to have continued working with children until very recently.

A sense of safety at school is a prerequisite to learning. Certainly, it begins with physical safety, but social, emotional, and intellectual safety are equally crucial. Federal, state, and local laws exist to ensure the safety of children at school. Independent schools are governed by many of these, and schools establish their own protocols and practices to provide a safe learning environment. Yet, for many years, laws and practices failed to protect some students from abuse in independent schools.

Best practice for dealing with educator misconduct and abuse has evolved over the decades, and many schools handled cases with a victim-focused lens, putting the safety of children first. Yet too many others avoided or covered up the issue, addressing it quietly if it had to be addressed, or reaching settlements with the most aggressive plaintiffs.

In more recent years, as public discussion of abuse has encouraged more survivors to share their stories, many schools have taken a fresh look at their policies and procedures. In some cases, the ways allegations were handled in the past did not keep all children safe. In 2016, among New England private schools alone, The Boston Globe reported that at least 67 private schools had faced accusations of sexual abuse or harassment of more than 200 students. In 11 known cases, private school employees accused of sexual misconduct went on to work at other schools. This sort of abuse certainly does not end at the boundaries of New England.

One federal study indicated that 10% of students in K–12 schools become targets of unwanted sexual attention by educators. In the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) co-sponsored a provision with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to ban “passing the trash,” a practice where school officials allow an accused or suspected child molester to move on to another school without sharing what they know. Sadly, few states have enacted legislation to enforce the provision. There is no national registry for teachers who have been disciplined or fired for sexual misconduct. Another job awaits in the neighboring district or state—someone else’s problem. How can we be so indifferent or insensitive to the fact that the next victim is still someone’s child?

Recent Guidelines

In 2016, NAIS and The Association of Boarding Schools established a task force to study educator sexual misconduct, which led to the 2018 Recommendations for Independent School Leaders from the Independent School Task Force on Educator Sexual Misconduct. These recommendations are intended to outline best practice for schools of varying sizes. As a membership organization, NAIS does not mandate practices. Even accrediting bodies are reluctant to prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach. The threat of abuse and misconduct, however, remain. Some significant systemic changes that could make a difference in halting the perpetrators and protecting the survivors remain unaddressed. Why?

I fear it reflects exactly what many victims have experienced in reporting incidents of abuse to school officials. To many, it feels as if the school is “circling the wagons,” focusing on protecting the school’s reputation, rather than focusing on the needs of the survivor. An adversarial relationship between victim and school is so often the result. It does not need to be that way.

Developing Even Stricter Protocols

Today, we are painfully aware that for many years abusers, posing as teachers and administrators, prowled the halls of independent schools grooming victims. To commit monstrous acts, these despicable individuals routinely abused one of our greatest strengths and most important attributes: the close teacher-student connection. Students suffered the impact of the violation of a sacred trust. We owe the survivors a better response than was so often provided, and we need to develop stricter protocols to protect today’s students. The present best practices employed by most schools are not enough. If they are not strengthened, the revered teacher-student connection, already diminished, will be forever at risk.

I suggest four actions, the implementation of which would allow independent schools to truly say we are living up to our mission of providing the safest environment for learning:

Develop a nationwide reporting system of all credible accusations of teachers’ sexual abuse of students.
Seek ways to eliminate the adversarial relationship that quickly develops between the school and the survivor following the report of an abuse incident. A school response focused on damage control runs counter to the mission of caring for the survivor(s). Schools need to work with legal counsel to find a response better than the present tort-based system—something respectful, compassionate, and non-adversarial, which does everything possible to prevent a credibly accused abuser from going on to hurt others.
While every effort should be made to protect the privacy of the survivors of abuse who come forward, develop policy governing settlement agreements that prohibit nondisclosure agreements as a condition for reaching such agreements or for establishing the amount of any monetary compensation paid to a survivor pursuant to such an agreement.
Crucial to ensuring the above actions are effective and ongoing, require that all regional associations responsible for accreditation processes include a standard related to protocols for responding to sexual abuse reports.

Independent schools clearly are not alone in struggling with this issue. All organizations that serve children, and all types of schools, are at risk. The Catholic Church, Boy Scouts of America, and U.S. Gymnastics are among the organizations that continue to struggle with responses to sexual abuse crimes. Some state and regional associations and ICAISA (International Council Advancing Independent School Accreditations) continue to explore better and additional safeguards and responses. And independent schools alone cannot eliminate the problem. But we should ask ourselves: Have we done all we can to address past issues within our schools and to better protect the children in our care today and in the future?

The Nemerov poem concludes, “But may great kindness come of it in the end.” I believe that sentiment guides most educators. I hope it can guide educational institutions and associations, public and private, as well. We need to do better for the survivors of abuse in our schools and do more to ensure there is no reason ever again to refer to any student as a survivor.