The Black & White Vol. 60 Issue 2

A history of oversight

Sexual abuse cases persist despite MCPS prevention efforts

by Lauren Heberlee

Some names have been changed to respect students’ privacy.

In 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.

“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 something the county should look into potentially updating.”

For junior Sophia VanLowe, the personal body safety lessons lack emphasis on how important the topic is. After attending the Sept. 21 lesson, VanLowe was disappointed that the information wasn’t presented in a manner that made it seem significant for students, she said.

“The body safety lessons are ineffective and don’t do enough to teach students how prevalent and how much of a risk child sexual abuse is in MCPS,” VanLowe said.

Despite the databases, guidelines, training sessions and safety lessons that have emerged over the past decade, certain MCPS staff members have remained employed after specific allegations were made but never investigated, Gross alleged.

Memberships in state and local chapters of teachers’ unions, like the National Education Association (NEA) and the Montgomery County Education Association, provide teachers with legal representation if they’re accused of wrongdoing in the workplace. Moreover, collective bargaining agreements between the unions and MCPS prolong the process of firing members by requiring strong documentation of reason. While unions have protected teachers from unjust job terminations — including those rooted in false accusations and retaliatory firings for refusing a superior’s sexual advances, not unlike cases seen in the “#metoo” era — critics say unions can also insulate a teacher from accountability for misconduct by initiating costly court battles that can take years to resolve.

In 2017, John Vigna, a teacher employed for over 20 years at Cloverly Elementary School in Silver Spring, received a 48-year prison sentence for the sexual abuse of four students in grades three through five. Nine years earlier, in 2008, the county gave Vigna a warning to stop putting children on his lap, something he frequently did, and after two additional complaints by students of inappropriate touching, he signed a written pledge in 2013 to avoid all physical contact with students. Due to the absence of a further investigation into his behavior, Vigna’s abuse of children continued until county police arrested him in 2016 when a new allegation emerged from a student who, after receiving a body safety lesson at school, realized she’d been the victim of sexual abuse. Only then, eight years after the first reports of inappropriate behavior, did the county put Vigna on administrative leave.

“If you look into that case, he was abusing kids for probably well over 10 years,” Gross said. “The school knew, and they left him in the classroom.”

MCPS claims that it maintains a rigorous review process for new employees. Before an employee is hired, Edmundson said, there’s an extensive process of screening, fingerprinting and reviewing the American Identity Solutions database. But despite these precautions, sexual abuse cases persist in the classroom.

Mark Yantsos, once head of security at Richard Montgomery High School, engaged in sexual relations with a 17-year-old girl during the 2016-2017 school year. The school system placed him on administrative leave until the county police later arrested him. Previously, Yantsos had worked in MCPS for more than a decade as the lead security guard and the varsity girls’ basketball coach at Richard Montgomery High School during the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 seasons. But prior to working for MCPS, in 1994, the New York Police Department arrested and charged Yantsos with a misdemeanor for threatening a 30-year-old woman with his gun while intoxicated and off-duty from his job as a police officer, according to The New York Times. Yantsos still managed to pass the MCPS criminal background check.

In both the Vigna and Yantsos cases, the victims’ parents went to the respective schools to express their concerns instead of directly reporting the allegations to CPS or the police, leading to red tape and years of inaction.

“MCPS has evolved but it still has massive problems that they’ve refused to correct,” Gross said. “A major hole in the county’s plan is that students should not [only] report crimes to MCPS.”

In spring of 2021, Whitman crew athletes voiced complaints of abuse by Whitman social studies teacher and crew coach Kirkland Shipley to the Whitman Crew Boosters Board of Directors. The Board, which is composed of parents, hired an independent human resource company to conduct an investigation of Shipley’s behavior, which the company and boosters deemed a “culture review.”

“An HR person is for adults in the workplace. They were investigating potential, at the very least, emotional abuse of children,” Gross said. “That’s like going to a podiatrist if you think you have a heart problem. If things are so bad you think you need to pay someone to investigate what’s happening, get rid of [Shipley].”

The culture review concluded that Shipley “made individuals feel degraded, demeaned and not respected” and that “there was an insufficient respect of boundaries between coach and athletes,” as stated in an email from the Crew Board of Directors to the Whitman crew community in August.

“I definitely think the board should’ve immediately reported him to CPS,” said former girl’s crew member Brooke. “An MCPS investigation on Shipley’s behavior in 2018 came to a similar conclusion, and to see that it’s happening about three years later means that he hadn’t changed, even though he’d been reprimanded before. I think that they should’ve gone ahead and fired him and toldpeople about what he was doing.”

Despite the severity of the initial report, the Crew Boosters Board didn’t report student allegations to CPS, and they failed to remove Shipley from his position as coach. While MCPS now includes mandatory reporting to CPS in its training for employees as well as student safety lessons, allegations aren’t always reported to outside authorities before they’re shared with school personnel.

“Victims should report ‘out,’ not ‘up,’ first — out to CPS and the police, and then up through your chain of command,” Gross said. “When you report out to the authorities, they’re getting the information face to face. No one is filtering it.”

Since 2012, county advocates against sexual abuse have submitted numerous testimonies to the Board of Education, met with local politicians and county officials, taught prevention classes to parents and testified at the state level to change legislation regarding child sexual abuse. Today, they continue to pressure MCPS to strengthen its protocols in vetting, training and reporting abuse among its 30,000 employees. But despite their efforts, according to the district’s annual report, in the 2019-2020 school year, over 270 cases of alleged abuse or neglect by MCPS employees were reported to CPS or the Montgomery County Police Department. For advocates like Gross, there’s still a long way to go.

Students who’ve witnessed sexual abuse occur in MCPS firsthand agree.

“When we went to the board, our anonymous reports weren’t validated, and our identities were exposed,” Brooke said. “If they don’t believe us, recognize our reports and get us adequate help, how do they ever expect us to report abuse in the future? A cycle will be created unless they make changes.”