Breaking: Board of Ed returns teacher to classroom after complaints of sexual harassment

Blair freshman Diana’s eighth grade P.E. and health classes became a nightmare when she was continuously sexually harassed by her teacher. "Whenever I would ask a question in class he would just be rubbing my back, he would call me 'sweet thing' and 'baby' and it was just really weird," she explains.

Several Blair students who went to the same middle school recall similar uncomfortable experiences fromanything about it. "I remember hearing from my friends like, 'he's really, really weird, don't get too close to him, keep your distance,'" remembers junior Sarah. "There was a lot of rubbing on the back, stuff like that, stuff teachers don't do because they can get in trouble for it." "I always had like that feeling that he was a little suspicious because he would always stare at people," says junior Anita. 

Among some Blazers, the teacher was known for targeting his inappropriate comments at specific students during class. "There was this one girl in my class that he'd single out and he'd talk to her one on one. She didn't look that comfortable but he kept pursuing class after class everyday and I remember it being really weird because she was like 12," explains Sarah.

Anita recalls an instance where the teacher singled out a student and made comments about the clothes she was wearing. "This one day my friend was wearing leggings and he was like, 'oh you look good in those leggings.' At first I thought it was a little weird and my friend didn't really care about it, so she let it go. A few days after she was wearing these other leggings and he said, 'wow you look really tall in those leggings, you look nice.'" 

For Sarah, reporting these events didn’t even cross her mind as a middle school student. "I don't remember anybody saying like, 'maybe I should go to a teacher.'" Looking back, she reflects that a solution didn't seem likely even if incidents were reported. "I don't think that there was enough of a support system there that if you went to a teacher people would actually do something about it."  

Unlike the Blazers who had previously graduated from this middle school, Diana did decide to report the P.E. teacher, 
as she had been taught to do from a young age. "My mother always told me if something's wrong, if something doesn't feel right, don't just keep it to yourself because that's when trouble starts," she says.

So she went straight to the adults, first to the principal, a woman she trusted, and then to her counselor, to lodge a complaint. To her surprise, she found that she wasn't the first one. "I went to the principal and I told her that my health teacher was calling me weird names and touching me inappropriately and she said, 'We'll take care of it, we've gotten other reports before and this is his last strike'," she explains.

She learned that the two other complaints, both from young women had been lodged earlier that year: one a couple months before Diana's and one about a year before. 

What happened next for Diana was exactly what should occur every time a complaint like this is lodged. "For a week [the teacher] was under fire, so they wouldn't let him teach for a week, we had a sub for like a week, and then he got replaced with another teacher and I found out [the accused teacher] got fired," she recalls, "I just told [the principal] and they just took care of it and they just followed up and told me what happened."

http://silverchips.mbhs.edu/story/13689

Courtesy of American Libraries Association

When she was little, Diana learned from her mother to speak up when something was not right.