Who Protects Kids?
Not the Chicago School Administration

Jun 25, 2018

A big expose by the Chicago Tribune found that over the last ten years, there have been hundreds of cases of sexual assault by Chicago Public School employees, including security guards, teachers, and coaches. It’s unclear from the reports if sexual abuse is more common in Chicago schools than anywhere else. But with sexual assault and abuse rampant throughout society, it should come as no surprise that it happens in the schools.

In any case, many of the administrators who heard about these abuses acted, not to protect children, but to make the problems go away–for themselves.

Some students who told authorities about abuse report that they were made to feel like criminals. One said she was asked what she was wearing, as if this 14-year-old student might have been “asking for it!”

A coach at another school was found to have raped a student repeatedly. When the student sued the school district for negligence, since they hired the coach despite his criminal record, the district’s legal department tried to defame the student.

Another teacher who was fired for molesting a student was allowed to quietly resign and move on. This let him get another teaching job in Florida, putting more students at risk.

A priority of anyone working in a school should be to protect the students. The vast majority of adults–teachers and others–working in schools understand this.

But for CPS administrators, the number one goal, apparently, was to protect the CPS administration–at the expense of children’s safety.