“The school did not provide detectives with the 90-page report until Wednesday, the same day as its public release.”
Can you say “witness tampering” and “obstruction of justice”?!
There needs to be a dramatic change in the way boarding schools (or any schools) handle allegations like these. When the allegations are actual crimes (rape, assault), the school has no business conducting an internal investigation. Crimes go directly to the police. A school with good intentions will then work with police in a police investigation.
IMO, any school that conducts these internal investigations of criminal acts should be subject to criminal and civil liability. And yes…including our family’s school.
Truth bomb Consider the environments of these boarding school and the nature of the relationships, as well as the issues with some people who are drawn to that residential environment as teachers. There are boarding schools were there have been histories or boundary issues in different types of relationships. There are multiple relationships with adults and students - teacher, coach, dorm parent, advisor. Some all wrapped up into one person.
In New Hampshire, there was an independent investigation authority set up in response to one school where the internal investigation approach was not effective.
The Board acted properly regarding the report. Many corporations and institutions conduct parallel internal investigations even while criminal charges are being pursued by police authorities. This is most certainly not witness tampering, nor obstruction of justice. Further, because this involved events going back 40 years, there was not a duty to report until the board actually learned of the evidence. (None of these people are likely to have been on the Board beyond 5 or 6 years, and most will have been on for only 2-3 years.) Once it was informed, the matters were then reported to law enforcement.
This is not a defense of past Board actions, however.
Not exactly. From the LA Times, police were not notified when material information was first known to the school:
Investigators were examining whether the incidents constituted crimes and whether teachers and school officials abided by their duty to notify law enforcement about suspected abuse of minors, according to Capt. Eric Buschow.
The complaint was made that the current Board is engaging in bad acts. A Board cannot report historical events until it is aware of them. The only way the current Board has a duty to report is: (1) for recent events, if the administrators had actually informed the Board of the event, or (2) for past events, once the investigation results were provided to it.
Having reviewed the underlying materials, I do not see that information regarding any recent events were communicated to the current Board by school administrators. However, the practice of school administrators of not informing the Board on these matters is itself problematic, as it is problematic that the Board did not demand that it be informed. A Board cannot willfully be uninformed on serious matters affecting the students. Both of these practices (failure to inform and failure to require reporting) are the subject of corrective action moving forward. Rightly so.
I’d like to offer an update from within the Thacher community.
The accounting of one of the primary incidents made the subject of the report (alleged assault of two students by other students allegedly without reporting to police or CPS over 20 years ago) appears to have excluded significant controverting evidence-- that the allegations were in fact reported to both outside authorities, that the complainants themselves gave evidence inconsistent at the time of the alleged incident with what they have recently reported, that third party witnesses contradicted the allegations both then and now, and that both students were referred to outside psychologists who themselves had independent reporting duties. Aside from the issue of the inconsistent witness reports and inconsistencies with the same witness statements over time, the other facts seem to significantly belie the notion that there was an attempted “cover-up” by school administrators at the time of the alleged event.
All of this goes to show why the law disfavors passing judgment over matters that occurred in the distant past. Memories fade, memories get corrupted, and evidence is lost. As someone who is very significantly impacted by the report (parent of former and current students), I know that I will never have the totality of evidence necessary to decide for myself whether the former school administration failed to protect students in this instance. That information is now lost to time.
What I can know, however, is what the current administration and Board is doing to investigate past matters in order avoid repeating past mistakes, what its plans are moving forward to insure that student safety and well-being is never compromised, and, if the Thacher of today is living up to its commitments to the core principals of honor and truth. (Kindness and fairness being the other two.) I resoundingly believe that they are. And they are also being incredibly brave and honest. After these actions, it will be very hard for any other school going through a similar process to do anything other than the completely transparent process that has been modeled by Thacher.
In response to the above post @ SPS “setting the standard for transparency”….I wouldn’t like to disagree, but here is the backstory that is pretty well known to those of us who were on CC and followed the developments.
Here is an article from earlier this year that summarizes some of the efforts SPS tried to initiate to promote transparency after the problems they made with the Owen Labrie case…
For the victim’s personal experience of the events and how SPS managed the situation then you can read the book by Chessy Prout (released just a day or two before March 10th, 2018). Hmmmm - at the time we wondered about the strategic release date. You can go back on old threads to see the viewpoints expressed by fellow CC members…Interesting fact: We toured in 2017 and our guide was a witness in the case.
Thanks for your insightful post. I read the news article and also dug up some of the past threads, so what I should have written is that the standard for transparency was set during the St. Paul’s scandal, meaning the school was forced into it. The same as Thacher was forced into this report because of the three Instagram accounts. For those of you who haven’t read the Instagram accounts, not only did posts allege abuse but so did comments. The writing has been on the wall since last summer.
I think an outside “compliance overseer” would be an amazing addition to Thacher, but I shan’t hold my breath.
Just asking: Why does this story sound familiar? “Get Over it” and “Rites of Passage”…and “Boys Will Be Boys”…This story is from a couple of months ago, but if anyone has an update or insights from inside the Blair community please share it with us.
Consider the environments of these boarding school and the nature of the relationships, as well as the issues with some people who are drawn to that residential environment as teachers. There are boarding schools were there have been histories or boundary issues in different types of relationships. There are multiple relationships with adults and students - teacher, coach, dorm parent, advisor. Some all wrapped up into one person.