Our laws cannot allow public schools to shield sexual predators

The Biden administration recently announced its new proposed Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), providing numerous revisions to the most authoritative repository of information on civil rights in public schools. Predictably, the Biden proposal seeks new data on coronavirus responses and LGBTQ issues, including the addition of a nonbinary sex category. Commendably, the new version retains expanded provisions on religious harassment that we had added last year when we headed the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). 

Shockingly, however, the Biden proposal eliminates some of the most important provisions that we had added, particularly, new questions regarding practices that shield sexual predators from public scrutiny...

...The most concerning issue — and the one that is stripped from the Biden version of our collection — are the new questions we added to get information on “pass the trash” trends in schools. “Pass the trash” is the name for the practice whereby a school employee who engages in sexual misconduct with a student is “passed” from one district to another. In these situations, the teacher accused of sexual misconduct resigns before he or she is terminated, or even prior to the conclusion of an investigation. The sexual predator obtains employment in a new district where they prey on new student-victims. Because the investigation ends with the teacher’s resignation, there is no formal finding of wrongdoing to share with victims or with subsequent employers. In other situations, sexual predators are reassigned to other positions or schools within the same district.  It is commonly used by administrators who wish to pacify angry parents by moving an alleged perpetrator to a different location in which families are unaware of his background. 

This practice was infamously used recently in Loudoun County, Va., where a student accused of raping a girl in a bathroom was moved to a different school. The superintendent denied that the case had happened and the victim’s father was arrested after trying to disclose the matter at a school board meeting. The case exploded into public attention, possibly influencing Virginia’s recent statewide election when the perpetrator was later arrested for assaulting a different girl at his new school, and evidence emerged suggesting a cover-up by school administrators...

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/584461-our-laws-cannot-allow-public-schools-to-shield-sexual-predators