A HISTORY OF OVERSIGHT:
SEXUAL ABUSE CASES PERSIST DESPITE MCPS PREVENTION EFFORTS by Lauren Heberlee
Some names have been changed to respect students’ privacy.
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n 2017, Montgomery County police arrested an elementary school teacher for touching children under their clothing while they sat on his lap. One year later, the police arrested a Montgomery County school bus driver for allegedly sexually assaulting special needs students. And just a few months ago, D.C. police arrested a Whitman crew coach and teacher for allegedly sexually abusing two female members on his team. As troubling as these incidents are on their own, they become even more concerning when revealed as part of a pattern of sexual abuse in Montgomery County Public Schools. For years, cases like these have been mishandled and brushed aside, allowing abuse to continue. Over the past decade, there’ve been nearly 70 confirmed cases of child sexual abuse committed by MCPS employees. In the 2015-2016 school year alone, there were almost 340 instances of alleged inappropriate behavior reported to child welfare officials. Of these cases, 26 resulted in termination or resignation. According to MCPS, a high volume of sexual abuse cases are reported today due to continual updates to county training. Greg Edmundson, Director of MCPS Student Welfare and Compliance, says that MCPS staff, students and families have a better understanding now of what abuse looks like and how to report allegations, leading to more reported cases. “Because of the training, we now know what the cases are, and we know how to report it much quicker,” Edmundson said. “But compliance training on child abuse and neglect, and anything along the lines of a code of conduct, doesn’t change a person’s heart.” In 2012, social worker Jennifer Gross, a Whitman parent and alum, first noticed the high number of MCPS employees arrested for sexual abuse. Having previously worked for Child Protective Services and as a therapist for convicted sex offenders, the volume of abuse cases in the school system troubled her, regardless of the district’s size. “MCPS had no employee code of conduct,” Gross said. “They had no training for parents. They had no prevention program for kids. They had nothing about child abuse and neglect on their website at all.” Gross reached out to the MCPS Board of Education to sit in on meetings related to sexual abuse.
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“I kept writing letters, and I kept copying more and more people on them,” Gross said. “But then a former school board member told me I had to go to the media, that the schools weren’t going to improve unless they were called out in the media. So that’s what I did. And that’s when MCPS started taking action.” In 2013, following several negative media reports featuring Gross’ findings, MCPS created an advisory group on child abuse. The committee, which included Gross, aimed to revise and strengthen the school district’s policies on recognizing and reporting cases. Additionally, MCPS developed a database in the summer of 2013 to track allegations of inappropriate conduct among its employees more efficiently. However, advocates for sexual abuse victims often disparagingly referred to it as the “infamous database.” They claimed that the database’s lack of transparency prevented the school district from being held accountable for investigating allegations, as it was unclear who oversaw the database, who knew about it and who could access it. The county eventually dismantled the database in the summer of 2015. “The database had over 200 people they thought might be abusing kids, but they never reported them to the police or CPS for investigation,” Gross said. In the school district’s ongoing efforts to prevent abuse, MCPS instituted an employee code of conduct for the first time in the 2016-2017 school year, along with new sexual abuse training for employees and body safety lessons for students. Currently, students in Pre-K through 12th grade receive personal body safety lessons in order to help them recognize and report suspected instances of abuse. According to MCPS, the lessons are catered to be age appropriate: The Pre-K through fifth grade curriculum focuses on understanding the areas of your body that are private and learning how to tell trusted adults, while students in higher
grades learn to define different types of abuse. “We have a team of 30 members from multiple offices who meet about 10 times a year to rebuild employee training,” Edmundson said. “We work with a company called Praesidium, a national expert in this work, and they review our training that we provide our employees. So I feel like our training is excellent.” While MCPS believes in the effectiveness of the safety lessons — presented to 11th and 12th graders at Whitman this September — others see faults in its design. “One of the things that’s frustrating is the lesson could be considered dated,” Resource Counselor William Toth said. “That’s some-
graphics by EMMA LIN
