New Myers Park ‘rape culture’ reports likely need Title IX investigation, experts say
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Title IX complaints in CMS
From lawsuits at Myers Park High to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools reassigning administrators amid controversy, this is the latest on sexual assault cases and Title IX issues in the district.
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Amid protests and complaints to Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board members about sexual harassment at Myers Park High — and in some cases, sexual violence — the district needs a fresh investigation, several experts in Title IX law contend.
While public attention has for weeks focused on how CMS officials handled years-old campus sexual assault reports, other students have said they believe the school has a dangerous culture in which complaints about harassment aren’t taken seriously.
Title IX is a part of federal education law, passed in 1972, that prohibits discrimination based on sex and requires that schools thoroughly investigate harassment or sexual violence reports from students or staff.
Although the law does not require CMS to investigate itself for non-compliance with Title IX, students’ recent reports of being afraid to return to Myers Park — concerns parents have also shared — could be enough to trigger an investigation, according to one legal consultant who works with education administrators.
From Myers Park, two cases led to lawsuits against the district centering on alleged Title IX violations. In one instance, a student’s reported rape on campus in 2015 triggered a U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights probe that mostly found in CMS’ favor but cited issues with the way the case was handled.
And while many students protesting have already graduated, federal guidance released just this week recommends school leaders fully investigate allegations of sexual misconduct even if the students have moved or finished school. In cases new and old, federal regulations say, a formal complaint from a student is not required for a district to initiate an investigation related to concerns of Title IX rights and student safety.
The latest outpouring of students saying they’ve been subjected to sexual harassment and assault while at Myers Park High is likely enough to warrant an official Title IX investigation inside Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, said Lauren McCoy, an assistant professor at Winthrop University whose main research area is related to Title IX and sexual assault cases.
“If the group of students complained after a specific incident, the school would be required to investigate if the culture mentioned was associated with a specific complaint,” McCoy said.
School districts — according to McCoy and Title IX guidance in place at the time of the reported assaults — are required to investigate once they know or reasonably should know about an incident.
“If this ‘rape culture’ is rumor based without any specifics, it would still be reasonable to investigate to determine if incidents had happened and to re-educate students on the reporting procedure/complaining process,” McCoy said.
But CMS appears to be taking a different approach to handling the recent complaints.
An internal plan to re-train and re-educate is underway. But, a Charlotte Observer investigation finds that approach stops short of a rigorous review under Title IX law, which could show if problems went unchecked by school leadership.
CMS and Title IX
CMS refused to answer questions from The Charlotte Observer on whether the district will reopen any past investigations or initiate new ones based on recent student complaints. In a statement, a spokesman confirmed what Superintendent Earnest Winston told WBTV earlier this week: That he will hold a conference call with administrators and Title IX liaisons in the district to review federal mandates and school-level training for employees and students.
School board chairwoman Elyse Dashew on Friday said she could not comment but that the board is reviewing the issues.
Principal Mark Bosco, targeted in recent student protests by calls for him to resign, has not returned requests for interviews from The Observer since June. The district has refused to comment on specific allegations against Bosco or whether Bosco is under investigation for reports that he has not properly addressed sexual harassment or assault claims.
Assistant principals will undergo Title IX training at the start of the school year, spokesman Patrick Smith said, adding: “The discussions during these meetings apply to all schools in the district and are not specific to any particular school.”
That may not suffice, based on what federal guidelines say schools should be doing when allegations arise.
“ ... If I was at a school where I heard about these rumors,” McCoy said, “I would direct the Title IX investigators to determine if there is truth to the rumors and any specific complaints. You can’t force students to talk so if it’s all coming through word of mouth with no confirmation, an investigation might not find anything.”
In some instances, an investigation should be opened by a school or district Title IX coordinator, the recent Department of Education guidance says.
“Put simply, there are circumstances when a Title IX Coordinator may need to sign a formal complaint that obligates the school to initiate an investigation regardless of the complainant’s relationship with the school or interest in participating in the Title IX grievance process,” the federal guidance states. “This is because the school has a Title IX obligation to provide all students, not just the complainant, with an educational environment that does not discriminate based on sex.”
The issue of whether CMS officials followed Title IX regulations in the past is central to both former students’ lawsuits, filed in 2018 and 2019, and a more-recent report from Serena Evans, a former Myers Park student who says she was raped on campus.
In at least one case — brought by a former student under the pseudonym Jane Doe — an internal investigation was done at Myers Park following her report of being sexually assaulted in the woods close to school. In other cases, it’s unclear what happened but students say their reports of harassment or violence were not answered with the federally-mandated investigations.
With new accusations and reports of misconduct, CMS should start an investigation at Myers Park that follows Title IX protocols, said Barbara Osborne, a professor of sports administration at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Osborne’s expertise is in the area of sports law around the issue of sexual violence/harassment.
“It is the district’s job to investigate,” she said. “It’s the school board’s job to make sure schools are responsible.”
U.S. Rep. Alma Adams, of Charlotte, told The Observer this week she is “gravely concerned about the allegations at Myers Park High School.”
“I watched the passionate testimony from one of the sexual assault survivors at last week’s school board meeting, and my heart breaks for her and all of the other survivors,” Adams said. “When we have multiple credible allegations at a campus or school, we must call for accountability.”
In a tearful speech at a student-led protest in June, Evans, now 19, told the crowd standing in front of the entrance of Myers Park High that she is among the survivors of rape on campus. She was 15 at the time. She pointed to the school’s gym and said, “It happened right over there.”
Evans’ report of being raped at Myers Park High in October 2016 shares some similarities with the Doe case from 2015, and another case brought by a former student who says she was raped in 2014.
The Observer reviewed emails and other records Evans and her mother have kept going back to 2016, including the report they made to Bosco, Myers Park principal, and police and medical records related to the case. They allege Title IX rules were broken as it’s unclear whether school leaders actually investigated Evans’ report of being raped.
Although Title IX requires that schools formally notify involved students of investigations and outcomes, Evans and her mother say that didn’t happen. They say that even before taking Evans’ statement, a school official concluded in an email that CMS would respond with “mentoring and education in place for the young man” accused of rape.
CMS officials refused to answer whether school leaders investigated Evans’ case.
‘I just went numb’
It took five months from the original time Evans’ and her mother, Kay Mayes, reported the sexual assault for Myers Park leaders to seek a written statement, the mother and daughter say.
In a letter to an assistant principal who followed up on Evans’ report to Bosco that she’d been raped, the 15-year-old described how a football player cornered her in the gym basement, told her to go to the boys’ bathroom with him and locked both of them into one of the stalls.
“I couldn’t scream,” she said. “I couldn’t run. I just froze. I felt like I had to cooperate with him. He said something about having to ‘do it’ before he turned 18 on Saturday.”
Three days afterward, Evans disclosed to her mother what happened, and a subsequent hospital visit revealed the teen had suffered a ruptured ovarian cyst. Based on the medical report, Evans and her mother believe the rupture was caused by rape.
“As a mom, when I heard those words, I did everything wrong,” said Mayes, 63. “I am embarrassed now about how I reacted, what I said to her, but I was just in so much shock. I was crying. I am a helicopter mom. I kept her in a bubble except for when she went to school. I figured she’s at school, she’s safe.”
The email records show Evans’ mother on Oct. 30, 2016, after the medical exam, alerted Myers Park High, specifically Bosco, to the rape. Mayes says Bosco didn’t reply but later an assistant principal at the time, Tyson Jeffus, explained he’d be in charge of the case and that “Mr. Bosco is a very busy man.”
Mayes said she requested countless updates on their case and Jeffus would reply: “We will get back with you.” During the first meeting, she says Jeffus told them “never talk about it with anyone else.”
Evans said no one from the school reached out to her to offer resources. She said she tried for weeks to go back to school at Myers Park “because I really wanted to go back, but it felt very overwhelming and upsetting, and I just couldn’t make it work.”
Evans ended up taking online classes and finishing the semester from home.
One counselor who served Myers Park families and staff for six years through a school-based program told The Observer this week: “... Through what parents have disclosed to me in a therapeutic setting, and my own interactions with MPHS faculty, I am deeply concerned about the culture MPHS administration has created.”
Diana Levitt, a board-certified tele-mental health provider from Oak Family Counseling in Charlotte, said CMS officials’ recent response that they’ll do more to help students understand Title IX rights is not enough.
“It would be my preference for the school to take responsibility and hold this administration accountable, create a zero tolerance policy for CMS employees moving forward, increase and improve training on Title IX and the appropriate ways of handling student allegations, and hire more resource officers,” she said.
‘I was 14’
A federal investigation that preceded two lawsuits from former Myers Park High students shows years-long discussion in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools on Title IX compliance.
The Doe case triggered a U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) probe from 2016 to 2017. As The Observer has previously reported, the Doe lawsuit is pending, with a judge writing last year that there is initial evidence her report of sexual assault was likely not properly handled.
While OCR investigators assigned to Doe generally found in CMS’ favor on Title IX issues, the district was warned — as far back as 2015 — there were problems in how sexual assault reports were handled, the Observer found in reviewing public records. CMS was told that its failure to institute a Title IX coordinator violated federal rules.
That OCR case, the federal records show, prompted CMS to acknowledge the problem and designate a Title IX coordinator in January 2016. The district revised its Title IX policies and grievance procedures three months later.
Given the earlier Title IX violation, CMS would have undergone a few years of federal regulatory monitoring for other issues. A new complaint could trigger another investigation, says Brett Sokolow, a consultant and president of the Association of Title IX Administrators.
The latest guidance from the Office of Civil Rights makes clear that any K-12 school employee — from bus drivers to principals to athletic staff — has a duty to respond to sexual harassment allegations, which includes reports of rape or sexual violence.
If students formally complain about ‘rape culture’ to school leaders, “that could trigger an investigation (especially if specific instances are alleged), and should catalyze a series of remedial actions by the school if the allegations are founded by the investigation,” Sokolow said.
Joy Poe, a pseudonym because she doesn’t want her real name used, is a 22-year-old who graduated from Myers Park High in 2017. With her face covered, she told the school board at its meeting July 13 that she was raped in the woods on the Myers Park campus her freshman year.
She told The Observer this week that she didn’t report the incident to school staff because she heard other students say Myers Park couldn’t “do anything to help me.”
“I was 14 years old, scared, confused and full of fear,” Poe said, adding that she feels the school administration “helped perpetuate a culture of rape apology.”
Poe described to board members similar comments from Bosco that are referenced in the Title IX lawsuits: that the principal warned students, pointedly female students, at assemblies held at the beginning of the school year that administrators couldn’t protect them if they “went into the woods,” which are a part of the school’s campus. Poe said that not long after her rape, administrators warned students about a “snake” biting students in the woods.
She says administrators told students: “If we got ‘bit’ there was nothing they could do, and they weren’t responsible for what happens in the woods.”
Investigations under Title IX
At a student-led march and protest at the Myers Park High entrance on June 29, current students alleged that there is “still a rape culture” at the high school and staff ignore sexual harassment that is heard in the hallways and other parts of campus.
Students have made the same claims in the comment sections of online petitions.
Those methods of reporting — based on previous federal guidance that is urged but not legally binding — may necessitate official investigations. That step, the guidance stipulates, can determine whether additional incidents happened.
At a recent board meeting, Nikki Wombwell, Jill Roe in the lawsuit filed in 2019, said she’s heard sexual assault claims from Myers Park students who attended the school each year from 2014 to 2019.
“So why haven’t they launched an investigation?” Evans said. “Not in my case, but for everything else they’ve heard?”
In several past cases, former Myers Park students allege they were dissuaded by school officials from filing formal Title IX complaints — including being told if the accused male was found innocent, they could be punished for having sex at school. Title IX prohibits retaliation for those who report misconduct.
School board member Rhonda Cheek said at the July meeting that Title lX will be a topic at a board meeting in August.
“I want to make sure there is not a staff member at CMS that does not understand how to properly handle a complaint that somebody has in the future,” Cheek said. “And I want to tell those young women that spoke tonight that they were heard and that we will make changes as a result of what they’ve gone through.”
“Part of me wants to get a bulldozer and bulldoze the damn woods behind Myers Park High School right now.”
Evans said the problems at Myers Park aren’t confined to the woods.
“I’ve never been to the woods,” Evans said. “It’s a joke. It makes me think that they really aren’t listening.
“It’s their job to protect children. What has happened to all these girls has nothing to do with the woods. It has to do with administrators and the people you’ve put in charge to protect us, not doing their job.”
This story was originally published July 23, 2021 at 11:25 AM.
