CMS is punishing sexual assault victims. It should be supporting them.
After handfuls of protests, a firestorm of public criticism and even legal action, you’d think Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools might’ve learned a thing or two about how to handle — or, more accurately, how not to handle — student reports of sexual assault on school campuses.
Unfortunately, recent events show they’re still making the same mistakes.
A student at Hawthorne Academy of Health Sciences was punished after she reported being sexually assaulted by a male classmate in a school bathroom earlier this year. Though law enforcement ultimately charged him with two counts of sexual battery, the female student was suspended by the school for “falsification of information.” According to the girl’s mother, the student was told she needed to sign a non-disclosure agreement about her pending punishment.
The principal and assistant principal have been suspended with pay. But why did CMS officials wait to suspend them until after public backlash? Shouldn’t district officials have been aware of the case before the student was suspended? And if so, why didn’t they stop it?
This follows similar, disturbing stories from CMS campuses revealing a culture that encourages silence around sexual assault and punishes those who bravely come forward.
Last month at Olympic High School, students staged a walk-out protest after a male student facing criminal charges for sexual assault was allowed to play in a football game — while wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor. Inexplicably, several volleyball players who participated in the protest were given a one-game suspension as punishment.
And two former Myers Park High students sued the district in recent years, alleging that school officials discouraged them from taking formal action after they reported being raped in the woods adjacent to the school in 2014 and 2015. The principal was suspended and then reassigned to a senior administrative role in the district last month following an “investigation” that did not include speaking to the students who filed the lawsuits.
It’s estimated that nearly 80% of sexual assaults go unreported, largely because survivors fear they will be treated exactly like this: ignored, silenced or, worst of all, blamed and punished themselves.
“It’s already really difficult to report something like this. It’s a really terrifying decision to make, because you don’t know how you’ll be treated,” Nikki Wombwell, one of the former Myers Park students who sued the district for mishandling her case, said. “So the more cases there are like this, the more it reinforces the idea that you shouldn’t report.”
We should be able to send our kids to school with the knowledge that they are in good hands. We should trust that school officials will not only keep them safe, but take their claims seriously and investigate them fully and fiercely. Any school administrator who can’t carry out that fundamental duty has no business caring for students.
But this isn’t isolated to one bad administrator, or even one bad school. It’s a wider, systemic issue.
“The fact that even after months of protests and petitions and speeches, that cases like Hawthorne and Olympic are still happening, it just shows how deeply rooted the treatment is,” Wombwell said. “There are too many cases to believe that they are all isolated incidents, especially because they’re all happening under different administrations.”
CMS has said it is taking steps to improve its handling of Title IX violations, including the creation of a Title IX task force to “review current reporting and support procedures.” But the task force has faced scrutiny for holding its meetings behind closed doors, while CMS itself has faced criticism for not listening to survivors or including them in conversations about how policies can be improved. It’s hard to have faith in the district’s assertion that it’s taking these matters seriously when recent actions suggest the opposite.
“I don’t think that you can reform the issues in a system and refuse to acknowledge or include the people that were wronged by that system the way it currently exists,” Wombwell said.
CMS has failed its students. Not just those at Hawthorne, or Olympic, or Myers Park, but all of the students who hear about these incidents and think they can’t trust the adults in the system to support them. Obviously, CMS needs to uphold clear and supportive policies regarding Title IX and sexual misconduct. But first, CMS needs to listen. Listen to students when they tell you about the worst thing that’s ever happened to them. Listen to the survivors who have witnessed the broken system and have suggestions of how to fix it.
If they can’t do something as simple as that, how can we trust them to make real change happen?
This story was originally published November 12, 2021 at 11:59 AM.
