Gazette: Bates remained in substitute bus aide pool after he was fired from MCPS
by Meghan Tierney | Staff Writer
A former special education instructional assistant recently charged with sexually abusing a Germantown girl five years ago was fired from a county high school in 2000 after being accused and later acquitted of making sexual advances toward a female student.
Vernon Eugene Bates, now 41, of Washington, D.C., turned himself in on March 24 in the Germantown case involving a then 16-year-old girl.
According to a January 2000 article in The Gazette, he was also arrested on child sex abuse charges on Dec. 15, 1999, after allegedly sexually touching a then-17-year-old girl while giving her a ride to the Wheaton Metro station. Bates was employed as a special education instructional assistant and assistant football coach at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring at the time.
MCPS placed Bates on paid administrative leave the day he was charged, and fired him in January 2000, according to Kate Harrison, a Montgomery County Public Schools spokeswoman.
Bates was found not guilty during a jury trial and the charges were later expunged, according to Cpl. Tracie Copeland, a Montgomery County Police spokeswoman. Police and court records are no longer available because the case was cleared from his criminal record, but according to an article that appeared in The Washington Post at the time, he was found not guilty of second-degree assault and a fourth-degree sexual offense after a three-day jury trial in Montgomery County Circuit Court in 2000.
Despite being fired from his staff job, Bates remained on an MCPS list of substitute bus attendants from August 1999 until February 2002, Harrison said. He was never called to service during the four years he was in the database, she said.
It is unclear why Bates was allowed to be on the substitute driver list given his firing, Harrison said, noting that Bates passed a background check when he was hired as a bus attendant. MCPS also moved to another database system during the years Bates was in the pool, she said.
Bates applied for the bus attendant position before he was hired as an instructional assistant, Harrison said. Names are dropped from the database if they are not called up after a certain period of time, she said.
Harrison did not know if the substitute pool is ever screened after an employee is hired or how the attendants are placed when the need arises.
‘‘This is an unusual situation,” she said. ‘‘I think we can assume his name would have been flagged.”
Bates’ Silver Spring-based attorney, Teresa Whalen, did not return a call for comment.Harrison said that the school system conducts its own inquiry when an employee is charged with abusing a student but did not know if Bates’ case had been investigated. The decision on whether to fire a worker is made on a case-by-case basis, she said.
Harrison declined to provide further information, citing employee confidentiality concerns.
Bates was most recently charged with sexually abusing a minor, second-degree assault and fourth-degree sexual offense after the now-21-year-old daughter of his former girlfriend told police he had sexually touched her when she was 16, according to police. The abuse occurred on two separate occasions in April 2003, according to police charging documents filed in District Court.
Bates, who frequently spent the night at the family’s home, exposed himself on one of the occasions, the documents state. He also told the alleged victim’s mother that he had been ‘‘inappropriate” with the teen after the incidents occurred, according to the documents.
The girl came forward to police in February after a recent telephone conversation with Bates in which he ‘‘took ‘accountability’ for his behavior and [said] ‘it was not your fault, you didn’t deserve it,’” the documents state.
Bates was released on $50,000 bond, police said. A preliminary hearing is scheduled May 2.
Bates was working as a personal trainer at Washington Sports Club, located at 6828 Wisconsin Ave. in Bethesda, when he turned himself in to police, police reported. He was known to have associations with teenage girls at the club, according to a police statement.
