BishopAccountability.org

Lax rules on sleepovers, little training on abuse at St. Andrew’s

By Andrew Marra
Palm Beach Post
August 22, 2016

http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/news/local-education/lax-rules-on-sleepovers-little-training-on-abuse-a/nsKZY/

Lax rules and poor training helped to enable a teacher’s months-long pattern of “inappropriate” behavior at Saint Andrew’s School in Boca Raton, a report found.
Photo by Greg Lovett

The lax rules and poor training helped to enable a teacher’s months-long pattern of “inappropriate” behavior with boarding students at the Boca Raton Episcopal school, including sleepovers, long embraces and late-night excursions, concludes the report by New Hampshire attorney David Wolowitz.

No evidence of sexual misconduct has been found, but the report criticizes the school for exposing students to “potential abuse” and says it failed to comply with a law requiring that child abuse concerns be reported to state authorities.

While the investigation blames several administrators for failing to report the former teacher’s actions, others call it an indictment of the school’s top leaders and board of trustees, whose members include Bishop Peter Eaton of the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida, a non-voting member.

“There were not policies and protocols in place to guide reporting, so to fault the administrators named in the report for lack of reporting is unjustified,” parent Liz Tymorek said in a statement to The Palm Beach Post.

The school ultimately notified the state Department of Children and Families of its concerns in April, at Wolowitz’s urging — and five months after the teacher was removed from the school. The Boca Raton Police Department looked into the reports but closed the case after concluding “there were no reports of a crime,” a police department spokesman said.

But an attorney representing four of the administrators mentioned in the report pushed back against the idea that they were solely to blame, saying that members of the board of trustees were also aware of the teacher’s behavior and also failed to notify state authorities.

“The board made no direction to any of these people to report to DCF and did not make any report of their own to DCF,” attorney William Cornwell said.

Part of the problem stemmed from the school’s “lack of meaningful protocols for addressing serious behavioral concerns,” the report said.

Though students and teachers have lived on the school’s gated campus for decades, no school rule banned student-teacher “sleepovers” until administrators learned in September that a student had twice slept in a teacher’s apartment, according to the report.

Even then, the new sleepover ban created a loophole allowing students to sleep in the residences of school guidance counselors and chaplains. The report calls this exemption “outside of acceptable practice at similarly situated schools.”

That wasn’t the only gap in the school’s policies, Wolowitz found. The school had few clear guidelines about how sexual misconduct suspicions should be handled.

The guidelines in the employee handbook for reporting suspected child abuse were “inconsistent with Florida state law,” the report said. And the school “had virtually no training for faculty and staff on child abuse,” it added.

The school’s student handbook, meanwhile, said virtually nothing about sexual harassment, despite the growing worries on campuses nationwide about student-on-student sexual assault.

Wolowitz’s reports say that the lack of clear policies could affect the school’s attempt to keep its accreditation by the Florida Council of Independent Schools.

The report calls for the school to hold several school administrators accountable for “failing to stop harm to students.”

But it has also fanned flames in a months-long divide in the school, one that has festered since the departure in April of the school’s headmaster, Peter Benedict, Jr.

While many parents and faculty members see the investigation into last year’s events as a necessary probe into a systemic failure, others see it as a ploy by the school’s board of trustees to justify Benedict’s ouster.

Many parents angered by Benedict’s ouster have called for the resignation of trustees, including chairwoman Mary Jo Finocchiaro, who the board’s former vice chairman is suing for defamation. Finocchiaro didn’t not respond to messages seeking comment.

Some parents say that the board of trustees’ failure to create clearer policies is ultimately to blame for the school’s slowness in dealing with the teacher’s behavior.

“It is the board’s responsibility to establish and oversee policy at the school, and yet I know of no initiative to review or enact ‘policies and procedures to protect students’ during (Finocchiaro’s) tenure on the board,” Tymorek said.




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