Charlotte schools ordered to pay WBTV’s legal fees after withholding sexual assault data
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools violated public records laws when officials refused to give reporters school district data on rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment on campus.
Now the public tax-funded school district must pay more than $66,000 of television news station WBTV’s legal fees, a judge ruled March 28.
WBTV in June 2021 submitted public records requests for “all data” of the school district tracking reports of sexual assaults, rapes and sexual harassment since 2011. CMS told the news station, and later told a court mediator that the public records didn’t exist.
But they did, the mediator found after an anonymous source leaked them to WBTV. The data had been filed in a high-profile federal lawsuit involving a 15-year-old girl who said Myers Park High School administrators failed to investigate her on-campus rape.
CMS withholds school rape data
WBTV investigative reporter Nick Ochsner submitted nine requests to CMS from June 2021 to August 2021, including requests specifically for sexual assault, rape and sexual harassment data.
The district sent him more than 8,000 pages, CMS Board of Education spokesperson Sheri Costa wrote in an email to The Charlotte Observer this week. School leaders believed other records that might have fulfilled the requests contained too much private information and were excluded from public record under student privacy laws.
WBTV in August 2021 filed a lawsuit claiming the district wasn’t providing what it was required to under North Carolina’s public records law.
The school district in 2023 told a mediator in the public records case that the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction advised it to “keep [the documents] confidential” under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
WBTV’s lawyer, Lauren Russell, did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling in the station’s favor.
Leaked CMS sexual harassment records
More than a year after that mediation, a source sent WBTV 167 pages of “student-on-student sexual harassment disciplinary data” from 2010 to 2015. It did not contain any identifying data, according to court documents, because any sensitive information had been redacted.
CMS in a motion in WBTV’s lawsuit said some of those documents were filed in federal court as the district battled a lawsuit against the former student who said she was raped after a male student brought a gun to school and threatened to shoot himself if she didn’t agree to meet with him after class.
According to the 2019 lawsuit the student filed under the pseudonym Jill Roe, she was taken into the woods on the Myers Park campus and sexually assaulted. She was 15.
As that case played out in court, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education submitted sealed documents titled “Sexual Harassment Disciplinary Data.” The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights had previously asked the school board to compile data as part of an earlier resolution agreement.
In the federal lawsuit brought by the student, the documents have always been under seal. That’s why CMS didn’t submit them to WBTV in response to the station’s public records request under North Carolina law, the district wrote in a motion.
CMS ordered to pay
Those documents should have been sent to WBTV, court mediator Steve Dunn wrote, according to a court order signed by Superior Court Judge Justin Davis on March 28. Dunn rejected CMS’ repeated arguments that they believed the documents to be confidential and found “there was no acceptable explanation for CMS’s failure to provide” the records.
“The fact that WBTV was forced to obtain these records from another source, and after significant delay, is the fault of CMS’s improper conduct,” according the court order.
WBTV paid attorneys more than $120,000 during the nearly four-year-long lawsuit. CMS must pay WBTV $66,057.10.
In a separate case in 2024, The N.C. Court of Appeals ordered the city of Charlotte to pay $125,000 in attorney’s fees to WBTV after finding the city improperly withheld public records about a teambuilding survey for the Charlotte City Council.
