A report from Chicago Board of Education Inspector General Philip Wagenknecht, the watchdog who keeps an eye on Chicago Public Schools, details “pervasive” adult-on-student sexual misconduct on more than one campus.
“Pervasive” is not a word we like to read in the context of kids and schools.
Office of Inspector General investigations found that across the large district, 44 female and 21 male students were victims of misconduct, with students ranging in age from 4 to 19. The report also provides extensive updates on the egregious abuse committed by staffers from the Little Village Lawndale High School Campus.
In August, Brian Crowder, the former dean of the school, was sentenced to 22 years in prison for sexually abusing a student. The victim, now an adult, testified that when she was around 15 years old, the former dean came up to her in the school lunchroom and asked for her SnapChat username; she said the relationship eventually became sexual. Crowder’s attorneys said Crowder got the victim pregnant twice, pressured her to have abortions and posed as her parent at appointments. When she broke off the relationship, he threatened her.
In December, the Chicago Board of Education approved a $17.5 million settlement in this horrible matter.
Inappropriate contact issues at the Little Village Lawndale High School Campus went beyond this one case.
In another example, a teacher and athletic coach blurred the line with a student, meeting outside of school to discuss their personal lives, exchanging over 18,000 text messages over the course of three and a half months and spending hours on the phone, often late at night, according to the report. The report discloses that the female teacher and student were physical — sharing a kiss — without going into detail about how far the teacher took things. The victim is now an adult and did not pursue a police investigation, but the teacher was removed from the classroom and placed on a do-not-hire list.
On that same troubled campus, a popular teacher “who was known to hold strong influence over his students, especially his female students,” repeatedly exhibited a pattern of connecting with female students and then pursuing them after graduation, all while presenting himself as a feminist and champion of women. According to the OIG, “in at least four cases, Employee 3 met with the former student in person and had sex with them.” He claimed his behavior was appropriate “because CPS never told him not to.” The IG concluded that most of the alleged conduct was not criminal in nature, often due to the student’s age at the time of the conduct. Nonetheless, it represented a profound abuse of trust rooted in relationships formed in the classroom.
The report goes on for pages regarding the toxic culture on this campus, where the boundaries between bad actors and students seemingly did not exist, and the problem was so bad that one student said she was targeted by three different teachers.
NBC 5 found that since 2017, at least seven educators, including two administrators and five teachers, have resigned or been fired while under investigation for sexual misconduct at Little Village Lawndale High School. The 12 former students NBC interviewed shared personal stories, saying “they either witnessed, were approached or felt they were groomed into sexual relationships with their former teachers.”
The misconduct described at Little Village Lawndale occurred in the 2010s, prior to CPS tightening oversight after a Chicago Tribune investigation that led to stricter rules, including a ban on social media contact with students and the creation of a sexual allegations unit.
It’s good to know that changes have been made, and when the district learned of misconduct, people were fired. Still, parents are left wondering how much other inappropriate conduct continues to take place in our public schools and how many children are still at the hands of adults who would misuse their power and authority. It’s hard to regain trust once it’s broken, especially when it concerns children.
While the bulk of the report’s findings focused on the problems at Little Village Lawndale High School, it also detailed other disturbing instances of abuse, including a fourth grade girl who was fondled on the bus by an aide on multiple occasions. At another school, an hourly employee was found to possess child pornography and to have sexually abused a child to whom he was related.
Reading this report is enough to make any parent question their child’s safety at school. Past reforms matter, but they are not a guarantee. The inspector general’s findings serve as a reminder that protecting students requires constant vigilance and an intolerance for blurred boundaries. Public trust in schools rests on a simple promise: that no child will be asked to trade their safety for an education.
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