Education chief says risks reduced for students’ safety
Baton Rouge Advocate. November 6, 2008, Page 1B.
Classes resumed Wednesday at the Louisiana School for the Deaf, almost a month after allegations of sexual misconduct forced state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek to shut its doors to make changes to ensure student safety.
Pastorek suspended operations at the school Oct. 8 after a 16-year-old male student allegedly raped a 6-year-old girl on a bus chartered by the school on the ride home to north Louisiana on Sept. 26.
Both day and boarding students at the school resumed classes Wednesday, though Pastorek had initially announced that students would return in phases.
“I feel a lot more comfortable about the security and safety of the children,” Pastorek said Wednesday. “I think that the risks have been reduced, but we still have to change the culture and create an attitude of zero tolerance of inappropriate behavior.”
Those changes, which are outlined in a six-page chart by the department, include overhauling school rules and procedures, retraining staff, separating children by age and gender on buses, requiring all staff to gain certification in American Sign Language and creating an electronic “parent command center” to keep parents in the loop.
Teams of consultants evaluating the academic, managerial and psychological components of the school will continue to monitor the situation there, Pastorek said.
Dr. Alan Cohen, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with the National Deaf Academy, said that these changes will make the school safer, but are not a silver bullet.
“Ultimately, you can’t guarantee anybody’s behavior, but what you can do is the best possible job minimizing risks,” Cohen said.
The culture of the school must be changed to make the procedural changes stick, Pastorek said. New leadership is key to changing the culture, said Joseph Fischgrund, the former headmaster of the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf leading the academic review team.
“I think we should have a goal of zero tolerance and zero incidents so that every child is safe. Their safety is what helps them to continue to learn,” Fischgrund said.
Pastorek said that state Department of Education official Liz Moore will continue to lead the school while the search for an interim and permanent director moves forward.
Pastorek said these changes have been needed at the deaf school for a long time.
An Advocate investigation found the problems with sexual misconduct there span at least two decades. A task force was formed in 2000 in response to a four-part series on WBRZ that found “numerous and unabated” sexual incidents among students at the school in the 1990s.
Many of the recommendations of the task force, released in a 2000 report, were never implemented.
In the past five years, lawsuits and criminal actions have been brought against the school and adults affiliated with it, in each case alleging inappropriate contact with students.
“There were challenges in the school, they were real and they needed to be eradicated,” Pastorek said.
School administrators previously, Pastorek said, had an “unintentional but implied tolerance” toward inappropriate sexual behavior that led people in the community to think that some level of it was normal.
“It was a bit disconcerting to me that people would actually say that these kinds of things are normal, because they’re not,” Pastorek said.
Until the school’s $285,000 camera system is completed next week, two off-duty Baton Rouge police officers will work extra duty at the campus in the afternoons and evenings to ensure the staff follows the school’s new security guidelines, Pastorek said.
Sarah Fall, whose 12-year-old daughter attends fifth grade at the school, said Wednesday evening her daughter was thrilled to be back in school.
Fall, who was displeased with Pastorek for closing the school without a contingency plan, said she still wants to know how her daughter is going to make up the days she missed.
“There are still a lot of unanswered questions,” she said.
Trey Arnold, a 13-year-old fifth-grader at the school, said his teachers spent much of the day going over the new rules in class.
“I feel safe,” he said.
Kaedra Arnold, Trey’s grandmother and guardian, said that while she was frustrated with the lack of communication during the closure, she thinks the changes will lead to a better school overall.
“I think (the school) is going to do a much better job because there’s a heightened awareness to the problems,” Arnold said.
That awareness will cause other parents to be more engaged and alert to potential issues, she said.
Michele Kolb, whose 15-year-old deaf and autistic daughter was molested in 2003 on a school trip by dorm worker Charles Hodges, said she was heartened by news of the changes.
“I’m so glad things have worked out the way they have,” she said. “I appreciate their willingness to shut down and reopen so that what happened to our child won’t happen to anybody else’s.”
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