NEW HAMPSHIRE
Concord Monitor
By ALYSSA DANDREA
Monitor staff
Sunday, July 23, 2017
The attorney general’s launch of a criminal investigation into St. Paul’s School’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations over several decades is an uncommon move in New Hampshire that could require the school to make significant cultural changes, legal experts say.
The probe, announced 10 days ago, has put the elite boarding school under a microscope, as investigators work to determine what school officials knew about sexual misconduct by both staff members and students, when they knew about it, and how they responded to it.
While criminal investigations into specific incidents of sexual assault and abuse are commonplace at educational institutions, the attorney general’s probe into St. Paul’s will chart new territory.
Legal experts said the nature and scope of this probe is unusual, noting that they could draw similarities only to the attorney general’s criminal investigation of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester in the early 2000s. But even then, they cautioned, the global reach and influence of the Catholic church created a far different set of circumstances for investigators than that of a single – although prominent – boarding school.
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