Ousted Over Sexual Misconduct Claims, and On to the Next Teaching Job

Sound familiar? From The New York Times, story by reporter Elizabeth A. Harris. Full story here.

Excerpt:

For many years, when teachers at private schools were forced out over claims of sexual misconduct, administrators let the accused quietly move on to teach elsewhere. The pattern was so common it earned its own grim moniker: “passing the trash.”

A report released this month by Choate Rosemary Hall, an elite Connecticut boarding school, is filled with instances of men who had been accused of sexually abusing students, yet were allowed to keep teaching. Now accusations have emerged that two of the men may have abused students at other schools.

Two women have come forward to accuse one former teacher, Frederic Lyman — who was forced to leave Choate over claims of sexual misconduct in 1982 — of inappropriate behavior while he was on the faculty at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., before he came to Choate.

After leaving Choate with a recommendation, he got a job at a school in Colorado, Kent Denver.

 

And:

 

Five states, including Connecticut, have enacted “pass the trash” bills that aim to keep teachers who commit abuse from cycling to other schools. Some of these laws prohibit school districts from entering into agreements with abusers that may suppress information about sexual misconduct, for example, or they might require applicants to disclose if they were ever the subject of a sexual misconduct investigation, unless the charges were proved false.

“Some schools were doing the exact same thing that the Catholic Church did if they had an abuser in their midst,” said Jetta Bernier, the executive director of Massachusetts Citizens for Children, a nonprofit advocacy group, and a member of an “educator sexual misconduct” task force convened by two private-school organizations. “It’s the same human dynamic. If we just get rid of him, it’ll be O.K.”

In Connecticut, educators have been required to report any allegations of sexual abuse to the state authorities since 1967. But Choate made no reports until 2010, even when it forced teachers out.