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| BRYAN TUCK/Advocate |
Fourteen years ago, 13-year-old Daniel Lewis enrolled as a boarding student at the Louisiana School for the Deaf, a place that was supposed to give him the skills to engage with the world.
That August, Daniel — with bright blue eyes and blond hair, but borderline mentally retarded and smaller than his peers — moved into a room in the middle school dorm on the school's Baton Rouge campus with three other boys.
During Daniel's second week at the school, one of his roommates, a larger 13-year-old of normal intelligence, began crawling into his bed at night to rape him, Daniel recounted recently.
Susan Lewis, Daniel's mother, pulled him from the school after only three weeks, when Daniel, despite not completely understanding what had happened, managed to tell her.
"I came home and told my mom what happened, all of it," Daniel said.
Daniel's rape was one of several at the school in the early 1990s, court records show. A four-part WBRZ series in 1999 uncovered "numerous and unabated" sexual incidents among students at the school, including rapes and molestations, many of which were not reported to police.
That series prompted state officials to form a task force to investigate those allegations and make recommendations for changes.
But a spate of recent incidents suggests that problems with sexual misconduct persist at the school.
A five-month Advocate investigation has revealed that in the past five years, seven adults — three teachers, a dorm worker, a counselor, a Sunday school teacher and a former student — have been accused of improper sexual behavior with four girls at the school.
Additionally, hundreds of pages of police and school incident reports show at least 32 incidents of sexual misconduct among students in the past five years, ranging from rape to sexual battery to inappropriate touching.
"That's unreal, why hasn't it stopped? Why hasn't anybody in an administrative position stopped this?" Susan Lewis asked after hearing about the recent incidents.
School and state education officials maintain that they have adequately addressed the problem by reporting incidents to authorities, holding workshops with students and meeting with parents.
In a recent interview, state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek stressed that the five arrests of school employees were for alleged crimes that did not involve actual "skin-on-skin" sexual contact with students. Investigators have said that there was no skin-on-skin contact in the other two arrests either.
"I've been told by the experts that we brought in that the amount of activity we have going on is lower than normal as compared to (other) residential deaf education settings," Pastorek said. "Having said that, is it good to have these kinds of actions? No, it's not good. Is it acceptable? No, it's not acceptable. Is it something we should try to reduce? Yes."
Several outside experts maintain that deaf schools are an essential place for developing deaf culture and should be safe havens for students. No level of sexual misconduct is acceptable, they say.
A series of arrests
The 156-year-old state-run Louisiana School for the Deaf — with an annual budget of more than $20 million — is situated on 116 grassy acres on Brightside Lane in Baton Rouge and serves 225 students ages 3 to 21.
With the student body drawn from across the state, 146 live in the school's six dormitories during the week. They are bused home on Friday evenings and return to the school on Sundays, interim director Kenneth David said.
Aside from being deaf, 28 percent of the school's students have an additional disability, such as autism, below-normal mental capabilities or blindness, said Virginia Beridon, interim director of the state's Special School District, which also oversees the state blind and special education schools.
The school employs 55 teachers, 23 teacher's aides and 50 dorm workers, Beridon said.
While in the 1990s the school's problems seemed to be limited to inappropriate sexual behavior among students, the problem today includes teachers and staff accused of being offenders.
The seven adults arrested from May 2003 to April 2008 are all deaf and were either school employees or members of the state's tight-knit deaf community.
Four of the employees — Ray Freeman, Nathan Boyes, Christopher Watson and Amanda Key — were accused of sending a mix of explicit e-mails, text messages and photographs to teenage students.
A fifth employee, Charles Hodges, was convicted of molesting a 15-year-old girl. Prosecutors claim he forced her to touch him over his clothes when he was chaperoning a school trip to Florida.
A sixth arrest occurred when Brandon Veronie, a former student, sent explicit text messages to a 16-year-old girl. His plans to have sex with her in a field were thwarted when the student's mother found the e-mails, police said.
Joey Thomas, a Sunday school teacher at the Liberty Deaf Assembly of God Church and former student, was arrested most recently. He was accused of sending explicit text messages and e-mails to a 14-year-old girl he considered his girlfriend.
Other inappropriate sexual behavior from teachers, while not criminal, has also occurred in the past five years.
Kristin Post Thibodeaux was allowed to resign in 2004 after an internal school investigation found she had conducted a series of inappropriate activities with her fourth-grade students. She taught them about oral and vaginal sex, put a thong on a boy's head and stuck sanitary napkins on another student's back, documents provided by the school say.
Melissa Stevens, one of the parents who sparked the investigation of Thibodeaux, said she was troubled by the way the school handled the situation.
"Allowing her to resign instead of being disciplined by termination, I don't think that was appropriate," Stevens said.
Adults were not the only people accused of sexual misconduct with deaf school students.
Under the state's public records laws, The Advocate obtained internal school incident reports for 32 cases of student-on-student sexual acts that school administrators have handled since January 2003.
Of those, five were classified by the school as "Class A" offenses, defined as rape, sexual battery or a "repeated Class B offense."
For a Class A offense, students receive from three to five days suspension or assignment to the After School Behavioral Center. Incidents are referred to police and the Office of Community Services when appropriate, school officials have said.
Freeman, the staff member arrested and convicted in 2005 on charges of obscenity, worked in the After School Behavior Center, counseling students when their behavior was inappropriate for the classroom.
The remaining reports were for "Class B" sexual misconduct, defined in the student handbook as "having sex or being involved in sexual activity (molestation) on-campus or off-campus during any school-sponsored activity." For a first-time Class B offense, students receive one to three days suspension and assignment to the After School Behavioral Center.
In response to The Advocate's public records request about student-on-student sexual acts, the deaf school provided incident reports that were almost completely blacked out. Those deletions made it nearly impossible to get a clear sense of what happened and the age or sex of the students involved.
Additionally, school officials and lawyers for the Department of Education repeatedly refused to provide the dates of offenses. They said providing that information would identify individual students.
Responding to a July letter asking for the dates of offenses, Pastorek offered in late September to provide them in exchange for blacking out more information. The Advocate declined.
While the documents provided by the school do not provide a clear description of the offenses in question, some contain narratives of meetings among students, staff and parents over allegations of sexual misconduct.
The following are excerpts from the reports provided by the deaf school, and two recent responses from David, the interim school director.
David asked a victim if maybe he or she "did not really want sex but just accepted it and was not forced." The victim replied that the sex was forced.
When asked about this, David said the context could not be provided because it would reveal personal identifying information about the students involved.
David stated that he might make a scarlet letter to put on the shirt of a student so that everyone would know the student was sexually active and must be closely watched.
Asked about tshe comment, David said: "Because our students are language-delayed and language-disordered, in order to get them to understand the seriousness of a situation that they were involved in we have to come up with some situations to help them understand how serious it would be. We have to make it very concrete because of the language barrier there."
The mother of a student "stated she was angry with the school because this was the fourth incident that had occurred where she had not been notified."
Police reports obtained from the same five-year period provide much more information. But because the dates are not included on the school's reports, it is impossible to match up the two sets of documents.
The police reports show that:
- In March 2004, a 14-year-old boarding student at the school reported to police that someone came into her dorm room while she was sleeping and fondled her. No arrest was made because she could not identify the attacker.
- In November 2005, a 14-year-old boy told his mother he did not want to go back to the school because he had been raped by a 15-year-old boy in a dorm room. A juvenile sex crimes detective investigated, but there was not enough evidence to arrest the 15-year-old, a police report says.
- In February 2006, a 16-year-old girl reported that she was sexually assaulted by a 17-year-old boy. He pushed his hand inside her underwear after grabbing her in a recreation room at the school. The victim decided not to pursue charges after her assailant withdrew from the school.
The school responds
In the late 1980s and early '90s, stories of student-on-student rapes at the school made headlines, prompting lawsuits and the arrests of at least two students.
A four-part series that aired on WBRZ-TV prompted then-state Superintendent of Education Cecil Picard to convene a 12-member task force of social workers, outside educators and parents to investigate incidents at the school.
In a 2000 report, the task force faulted then-school superintendent Luther Prickett for his "top-down" management style.
The report concluded that the sexual misconduct they found was not unique to the Louisiana School for the Deaf. Those problems "are seen in any comparable institutional setting, in public and private schools and life in general," the report says.
Prickett retired in 2005. Longtime employee David, then dean of students, took over as interim director of the school.
This year, after the arrest of Joey Thomas in April, Pastorek announced that he was bringing in another set of experts to evaluate the school's response to the problems.
Pastorek hired Dr. Alan Cohen a psychiatrist at the National Deaf Academy and Reginald Redding of the Eastern North Carolina School for the Deaf. Cohen was paid $9,688; Redding $3,000, Beridon said.
Beyond hiring consultants, Pastorek also met with parents in May to discuss the arrests.
Beridon said the consultants spent three days at the school in June. They reviewed documents and met with staff and four parents at a time when the majority of the student body was home on summer vacation.
Pastorek said he has met twice with both experts and has been encouraged by their evaluation of the school. They will issue a report in October.
"I feel confident that what we're doing at the school is the right thing and that we're taking reasonable steps to ensure the safety of the children," Pastorek said.
During the hiring process, the school performs background checks of potential employees. Also, once hired, employees are required to sign a form in which they agree that only designated sex education teachers can discuss sex with students.
Pastorek also said the school reports incidents to authorities as they arise.
Letters David sent to parents indicate he has been more proactive than Prickett in communicating with parents.
David sent parents multiple letters about the five arrests that occurred during the 2007-08 school year. In a letter sent to parents in April, David wrote that incidents leading to the arrests did not happen on school hours or on school property and stressed that inappropriate correspondence could be found at any school.
"I would also like to suggest that if someone were able to procure transcripts of all cell phone communications of students at any school &hellip that such transcripts would reveal totally shocking information. Inappropriate use of electronic communications and/or the Internet is not unique to LSD — it is occurring everywhere," David wrote. "However, we need to be ever-vigilant in protecting our students."
Kaedra Arnold, the grandmother and legal guardian of a 13-year-old fifth-grader at the school, said her grandson has benefited from the school's education and has not been involved in any of the sexual misconduct cases.
However, she urged the school to be vigilant and not accept any level of sexual misconduct within its walls.
"The standards ought to be set so high so that you have something to aim for," Arnold said. "We need to make sure that we're not measuring ourselves against other people and against other establishments."
‘Easier targets'
Frederic G. Reamer, a professor of social work at Rhode Island College who has spent years working with offenders who prey on the disabled, said deaf children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to abuse.
Reamer said some sexual predators even seek out children and teenagers with disabilities because they are "relatively speaking, easier targets, easier marks."
Deaf children with multiple handicaps are "especially vulnerable because they may not have the wherewithal that other kids would have to resist the adult's sexual advances and they may find it difficult to speak up about them," Reamer said. "They may find it extremely difficult to assert themselves and disclose to other people in authority what is going on."
Reamer was quick to add that he has encountered sexual misconduct in other institutional settings involving the disabled.
"I think it cuts across a number of different disabled populations, and this is an especially vulnerable population because they're kids," Reamer said.
Deaf children at residential schools are often far away from their parents and tend to rely on teachers and staff for encouragement and support more than other children would.
Sexual scandals occur at deaf schools around the country. In May, a dorm supervisor at the Texas School for the Deaf in Austin was arrested after confessing to fondling a boy in his care.
"The stories are heartbreaking and the kids are very vulnerable for a lot of reasons," said Donna Mertens, a professor of education at Gallaudet University and author of a 1996 study on sexual abuse at deaf schools.
In her study, Mertens spent two weeks evaluating the situation at a state-run deaf school that had seen a number of arrests and convictions.
"So many people told me ‘that's the way it's always been, that always happens to deaf kids,' and they're not surprised by it," Mertens said. "There's just no excuse for denial. &hellip The basic principle that needs to guide your actions is the safety of the children."
Mertens stressed that deaf schools play a crucial role in providing a place for deaf children to feel normal and be around others who share their language and culture.
Lawrence Siegel, a special-education attorney based in Fairfax, Calif., and the founder of the National Deaf Education Project, agreed that deaf schools are important places for deaf children to form peer relationships.
A deaf child attending mainstream public school might be the only deaf child there, he said.
"The school where a 12-year-old deaf kid can have a 12-year-old deaf peer is truly the least-restrictive environment," he said.
Deaf schools provide a place where deaf children can communicate with each other in American Sign Language, their first language, and not feel as isolated, Siegel said.
"The value of these kind of language-rich environments is really staggering, Siegel said.
Daniel Lewis, the 13-year-old boy who was raped at the deaf school in 1994, never benefited from immersion in the language-rich environment. Instead, he went home.
A lawsuit over the rape was settled out of court. His mother declined to discuss it because of a confidentiality agreement.
With the help of a therapist, Daniel slowly recovered from the trauma of the rape. But his quality of life has been profoundly impoverished by the incident, his mother said. Daniel has no deaf friends and never learned sign language.
Today, Daniel is a soft-spoken 27-year-old who lives an isolated life with his mother and his dog, Daisy Mae, and several cats in a town of 1,300 in Acadia Parish.
"He did belong there—he was part of the deaf community. And now he's not at all," Lewis said.
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Reprinted with permission of The Advocate.
