Exclusive: St. Andrew’s kept quiet over student’s molestation report, by Andrew Marra, Palm Beach Post (August 24, 2016)

BOCA RATON — In May 2014, a 15-year-old freshman at St. Andrew’s School went to administrators with an upsetting accusation: A senior boarding student had barged into the girls’ campus dormitory with his friends and, in the middle of a card game, fondled her repeatedly in front of several students.

The school interviewed the student but never notified police or child-welfare investigators, despite a state law that calls for schools to report suspicions of sexual abuse against minors, police records obtained by The Palm Beach Post show.

Instead, the Boca Raton private school conducted its own investigation, which administrators resolved by sending the girl to counseling sessions and writing a stern email to her 18-year-old attacker, who had graduated days earlier and returned to his home in Russia, police records show.

Police were not alerted until more than a month after the incident, when the girl and her mother went to the Boca Raton Police Department to report the incident themselves.

After a four-month investigation, detectives moved to charge Oleg Novikov with lewd and lascivious molestation. He was eventually arrested on a felony battery charge, court records show, though the charge was dropped after he wrote a letter of apology admitting he fondled her and agreed to perform 50 hours of community service.

The revelation of the school’s failure to report suspicions of sexual abuse is the second such case to emerge in the past week. On Friday, the school released a report by a private attorney that concluded St. Andrew’s also failed this past year to report administrators’ concerns about what appeared to be a teacher’s intimate behavior with three boarding students.

Though no evidence of sexual misconduct has been found in that case, that teacher, Christopher Waite, 41, was forced to leave the school amid concerns about his secret sleepovers and long embraces with teenage students. He has not been charged with a crime.

Now details of the 2014 fondling case, revealed publicly for the first time, raise still more questions about both the school’s failure to notify authorities and whether it did too little to supervise interactions between male and female students living on campus.

Florida law requires everyone to report any suspicions that “a child is the victim of childhood sexual abuse” to the state Department of Children and Families. State law defines sexual abuse of a child to include “intentional touching” of a minor’s “intimate parts, including the breasts.”

The mandate to contact DCF doesn’t appear to apply to cases where the alleged perpetrator is 18 or older and is not “in a caregiver role,” DCF spokesman David Frady. In those cases, “law enforcement should be notified directly,” he said, although he added that notification in such cases isn’t explicitly required by Florida’s mandatory-reporting law.

An attorney for the 15-year-old student, who no longer attends the school, said that school administrators should have alerted authorities about the reported sexual assault so the case could be handled by experts.

“The people you report it to are trained investigators,” attorney Adam Horowitz said. “It’s not for the school to determine the merits of the claim. Let the trained investigators look into it.”

A spokesman for St. Andrew’s declined to comment, saying that the school “treats matters involving a student under the age of 18 as confidential by nature.”

In a message to parents on Wednesday, Jim Byer, the school’s interim headmaster, said that the school was implementing major reforms, including a new team overseeing the school’s on-campus dorms.

“The past few days have been extremely difficult for all of us here at Saint Andrew’s, particularly as past school matters play out in the public eye,” Byer wrote. “That said, our focus remains on the important work we have to do as stewards of your students’ education.”

He added that the school had already taken “definitive steps to institute mandatory child-abuse annual training for all faculty and staff” and to “hold accountable all who interact and engage with students on a daily basis.”

According to the police report, the incident happened on May 24, 2014, when Novikov walked into the girls’ dorm along with some other male students after drinking at an off-campus graduation party.

“No one stopped the intoxicated 18 year olds from entering the girls’ dorm,” Horowitz said. “No one was monitoring.”

As the girls played a card game in the dorm, Novikov asked the 15-year-old if he could touch her breast, according to the police report.

The girl told police that she told Novikov not to touch her, the report states, although other witnesses recalled that she told him he could, and a school administrator said that, when she first reported the incident at the school, the girl had said that she had reluctantly given Novikov permission.

Horowitz disputed the report’s characterization, saying that the girl has always maintained she told Novikov not to touch her.

Whatever the girl’s response, Florida law prohibits any child younger than 16 from legally consenting to sexual contact with anyone.

The girl and multiple witnesses said that Novikov did more that merely touch her breast — he fondled her breast through her clothing several times, the report said, and then groped her buttocks.

Two days later, the girl reported what happened to Brooke Swindle, the resident life director at St. Andrew’s. To follow up, the girl and her mother met in person with Swindle and Andy Mulligan, the school’s dean of students.

The result of the meeting, police say, was that administrators arranged for the girl to speak with the school counselor. The purpose, the report said: “to help her deal with what had happened.”

After that, weeks went by without the girl or her mother hearing back from the school, police say. Swindle, meanwhile, sent an email to Novikov, who had returned to Russia, saying that he was no longer welcome on campus.

Impatient, the girl and her mother went on July 1 to the Boca Raton Police Department, where police say detectives launched a criminal investigation.

A week later, the detectives interviewed Mulligan, who said that the girl by then had met with the school counselor several times. He admitted, though, that school administrators never followed up with her family.

Swindle, who no longer works for the school, did not respond to a request for comment. An attorney representing Mulligan said that the failure to report was a pivotal moment at the school, leading to Swindle being removed from her position overseeing the school’s resident life program.

“That was the incident, it’s my understanding, that led to her being replaced,” attorney Bill Cornwell said.

Because Novikov had returned to his home in Russia, detectives did not manage to interview him for months. They eventually spoke with him in October, after he moved to Boston to attend college at Suffolk University. In a recorded interview, police say, he admitted he might have touched the girl’s breast but said he couldn’t remember clearly.

Two years later, though, the school might yet feel repercussions from the incident. The girl and her mother are preparing to file a lawsuit against the school, Horowitz said.

“It was my client, not the school, that reported it to the Boca Raton police,” he said. “And there was no effort to notify DCF.”