The Sad Lesson of School Sex-Abuse 101: It’s Pass the Trash, Not Catch the Trash

(RealClearInvestigations)—To outward appearances, Michael Allen was a revered high school coach in the tiny community of Little Axe, Oklahoma — a caring, charismatic leader who mentored star athletes on his girls’ softball and boys’ baseball teams.

All of that changed when Allen and fellow coaches showed up at a 2002 spring break trip by Little Axe High School students to South Padre Island, Texas, some 750 miles south.

Ashley Terrell, a 17-year-old senior, and a friend were coaxed to the coaches’ hotel room where a party with alcohol led to Ashley blacking out. She woke up to find Allen in bed with her while her friend cried out for her from the bathroom, alleging she had been abused by another coach. Scared and confused, the girls fled the room.

Ashley quickly told her mother and school officials, including a school security officer she confused with a police officer. They assured her the matter would be handled. But Allen was never arrested or charged with any crime. He resigned quietly from Little Axe in 2002. In the years since, he has coached or taught at seven other Oklahoma high schools, according to state records, a development Ashley found appalling.

“I watched them pass the trash right in front of me,” said the woman, now Ashley Rolen, 39, an Oklahoma City entrepreneur married to a pastor. She is working to publicize the problem of sexual misconduct, particularly among K-12 school employees. “My story is significant but not unique,” she notes ruefully.

Rolen’s case illustrates a shadowy and largely undocumented aspect of the national crisis involving the sexual abuse of K-12 students by teachers, administrators, coaches, bus drivers and other staff. Experts say the hundreds of school employees arrested each year and the more than $1.2 billion in related settlements paid out by school districts in just the last decade represent a mere fraction of the problem in a system that works to deny and hide the abuse of minors.

There is no national data for sexual misconduct involving K-12 school employees, according to the Department of Education. The most recent outside research estimates only 5% percent of K-12 sexual misconduct cases are turned over to law enforcement, and only a fraction of those result in prosecutions.

“Given what we already know, based on existing research, it is of epidemic proportions and is deliberately ignored by the powers that be,” said Terri Miller, president of the advocacy group SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse Manipulation & Exploitation).

Victims of sexual misconduct by school predators may number in the millions, which would surpass the size of similar scandals in the Roman Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts, according to reports from academics and think tanks.

The Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative advocacy nonprofit focused on education and workforce issues, concluded in a study last year that “the ease with which school officials can pass sex abusers to other districts” helps explain why complaints of sexual violence filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights more than tripled between 2010 and 2019. The U.S. had 49.5 million K-12 students in the last school year, according to federal figures.

News accounts as well as litigation surrounding K-12 sexual misconduct cases illustrate aspects of the problem Miller describes as “mobile molestors”:

• A January lawsuit against Clark County Nevada schools around Las Vegas alleges union contracts protected predators who would drift from one school to another, racking up new victims along the way.

• The Tahoma, Washington, school system settled a case last year in which it admitted it was “negligent in continuing to employ a former paraeducator after reports he was sexually abusing and grooming students.”

• An Oregon case was settled for $3.5 million in March, the state’s largest such settlement, after a judge ruled the plaintiff could proceed with a claim of “state created danger” because officials had failed to act.

• In Camden, New Jersey, Wasim Muhammad plans to resume duties this month as Camden School Advisory Board president two months after the district settled for $2 million a lawsuit from a woman who said Muhammad sexually abused her when he taught there decades ago.

• Also this month, a teacher hired by Stamford, Connecticut, schools was revealed to have previously been investigated for inappropriate behavior with students in New York City schools.

Such recent examples confirm a long-term and continuing trend. A 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office to a House Committee found that in a majority of cases it reviewed the predators should have been stopped earlier.

“At least 11 of these 15 cases involve offenders who previously targeted children,” the report said. “Even more disturbing, in at least 6 cases, offenders used their new positions as school employees or volunteers to abuse more children.”

The problem and the cover-up are not limited to public schools. The prestigious Horace Mann School in New York City covered up rampant sexual abuse by staffers in the 1970s, before reaching private agreements with dozens of former students and apologizing in 2013. A Boston Globe “Spotlight” investigation found widespread sexual misconduct buried in the records of hundreds of elite New England private schools, including extensive failures to act promptly  at St. George’s School in Rhode Island.

The ugly phenomenon seems to accompany sexual misconduct generally. The Roman Catholic Church passed predator priests among parishes for decades, and Dr. Larry Nassar of the USA Gymnastics national team finally went to prison after officials ignored allegations he abused the nation’s best gymnasts for years.

Many students are victimized after flares had previously gone up about a predator at a school, only to see them fizzle and disappear when the falsely cultivated good reputation of the predator snuffs them or the predator moves on to another school or district. The spring break incident involving Coach Allen and Ashley occurred after a mother had already expressed reservations about his relationship with her daughter — and the school community backed him, ironically including Ashley’s late mother, who was a school staffer at the time and is now deceased.

Indeed, many cases are not reported until long after the fact. The victims are young, and they can be intimidated and uncertain about what has happened. Or the victim may genuinely like the abuser, seeing a promised future that never materializes. And then schools will often attempt to bury allegations rather than tarnish the reputation of the person implicated.

‘A Pool of Mobile Molesters’

An offender may have scores of victims. The Government Accountability Office cited four reasons such predators are able to filter through the system, hurting students over many years in multiple locations:

• Resignations that allowed the school to consider the matter closed and then even recommend the departing employee to a new school.
• Failure to “perform preemployment criminal history checks.”
  
• Checking applicants’ fingerprints only against regional rather than national databases.
  
• And the simple failure to “inquire into troubling information regarding criminal histories.”

“Passing the trash has created a pool of mobile molesters in our nation’s schools,” said Miller. “And we won’t know about them until some brave person or bystander comes forward.”

Multiple explanations have been given for the system’s frequent failures to stop predators, ranging from bureaucratic inertia to contracts that protect teachers or administrators. Whatever the cause, Amos Guiora, law professor at the University of Utah, believes failing to address sexual misconduct at its source, and thus enabling predators to offend again, lies at the heart of the matter.

“All of these incidents would be preventable after the very first instance if the perpetrator were not protected,” he said. “If they know they will or might be protected, the pattern will continue. Bad as the perpetrator is, without the enabler, he can’t operate.”

Guiora said the problem is particularly infuriating because school employees are categorized as mandatory reporters, meaning they are required to alert authorities in abuse cases. At the moment, however, violation of the mandatory reporter requirement is a misdemeanor usually with a one-year statute of limitations, meaning prosecutors rarely pursue such cases.

“Even worse, in addition to the initial attack by the molester, the child is subsequently re-attacked by others whose aim is to protect the perpetrator and institution: bystanders, teachers, principals, special interest groups, government bureaucrats, and politicians,” Guiora wrote in a 2022 Texas Tech Law Review article. “It is a sea of laws and social forces that work to rebrutalize survivors of childhood sexual assault. For the child, it is a sea of destruction.”

The ways in which K-12 predators have maneuvered through the system has led some to conclude the professional education establishment is more concerned with its own welfare than protecting kids.

“What you have is people protecting the reputation of an institution rather than the safety of children,” Oklahoma Republican State Sen. Shane Jett said. “Instead of exposing something that is ongoing, they aid and abet the bad guy because what’s most important to them is making sure everyone is employed.”

Jett pointed to lobbying groups, the teachers’ unions, and an Oklahoma organization called the Center for Education Law that represents many school boards there as enablers. RealClearInvestigations sought comment from the center as well as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, but none of them responded to questions.

Others also pointed to the collective bargaining agreements districts make with teachers’ unions, or favorable contracts for administrators that offer protections for employees and complicate the ability of future employers to learn of past misdeeds. Union contracts have long forced school systems to keep paying people even after allegations have taken them out of the classroom.

Some are taken out of the classroom and put into so-called “rubber rooms.” In one infamous example, New York City taxpayers paid an alleged sexual harasser and toucher $1.7 million as he sat idly for two decades.

Federal law already mandates that states pass laws against systemic elements that contribute to “passing the trash” — confidentiality agreements, separation agreements, or employment contracts that allow for the scrubbing of files when someone leaves a school. 

The  federal mandate stems from a clause in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act that federal regulators have failed to mandate, according to SESAME President Miller.

In 2022, the Department of Education said SESAME’s proposed legislation should serve as the model for state legislatures seeking to combat repeat offenders, but to date only seven states have passed it, and all told only nine have such laws on the books, according Miller.

But the pattern of failing to act when credible allegations are raised against an employee can also be rooted in simple convenience or ignorance. Predators are aware of this kind of built-in shield and use it to their advantage, experts in the field said.

“Very, very often they get away with doing the wrong thing, and lots of times the wrong thing will make everybody happy for a short time,” said Melanie Blow, executive director of the Stop Abuse Campaign. “It’s common to see parents don’t know what to think, either. Mom and Dad are kind of in too much of a crisis, they go to the principal, and they assume the school will do the right thing.”

Predators not only benefit from entrenched bureaucracies, they also work assiduously to build their nest within a school, according to attorneys and advocacy groups. In short, the bad guys aren’t only working their victims: In addition to the careful work they put into identifying, isolating and then preying on the students, the predators are also nurturing their own positive reputations to protect them when flags are raised.

“They might be grooming the adults, too,” said Roger Dreyer, a Sacramento attorney. “These guys can be very sophisticated.”

In June 2023, Dreyer was a lead attorney on $52 million in settlements the Sacramento schools reached over repeated sexual abuse in an elementary school. For three years, an after-school aide, Joshua Vasquez, covered the windows of his room with black garbage bags and proceeded to abuse multiple kids. School officials ignored this and other warning signs about what Vasquez was doing to kids, leading to an apology in addition to the money after Vasquez was sentenced to 150 years in prison.

Dreyer and other trial attorneys said predators are often viewed not as “trash” but as figures students trust and value, and that helps perpetuate their criminal careers. This is especially true when school employees are trained to spot possible signs of abuse only at home, not in their workplace.

“They’re not trained to handle this,” Dreyer said. “Their training sells them on the idea, ‘oh, it’s weird Uncle Harold at home,’ and then they’ll ignore all sorts of red flags. Often, you’ll hear the district saying ‘we’re lucky to have him,’ and they’ll blame it on everyone but themselves.”

All of this can leave the victim confused as well as wounded. Michelle Denault was sexually abused by a teacher at New Berlin High School in Illinois for years. She thought they were in love and would live happily ever after; as with many victims, it took her years to process what had happened to her in high school.

Today, however, Denault is under no illusions about the improper nature of what her teacher did starting inher freshman year, and he went on to chalk up other victims, she said.

“These are things we’re uncomfortable with — we just aren’t comfortable thinking about teachers or coaches assaulting our kids,” she told RCI. “We defend the ‘occupation’ as a whole. But silence and complicity are huge in institutional settings. The damage is caused by those who turn a blind eye: How can you understand how good people didn’t help you?”

Rolen said she encountered elements of all this when, prompted in 2020 by the case of Nassar and U.S. gymnasts, she went public with her ordeal. After addressing the state’s education department, she began painstakingly tracking Allen and the other coaches who had been on South Padre Island. (RealClearInvestigations could not locate Allen for comment for this article.)

She learned that Allen had gone on to impregnate a student at another school, eventually marrying her, but he has never been arrested or charged in connection with K-12 misconduct. After hearings by the state’s education department he agreed to surrender his teaching license last month. The teaching license of the coach who reportedly abused Rolen’s friend that night is scheduled for a state hearing next month.

“I had to do the investigation and that was almost worse than the rape,” Rolen said. “I wanted to die inside.”