Chicago Tribune Report: Over a decade, police investigated more than 520 cases of juvenile sexual assault and abuse in Chicago’s public schools.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

They were top athletes and honor-roll students, children struggling to read and teenagers seeking guidance.

But then they became prey, among the many students raped or sexually abused during the last decade by trusted adults working in the Chicago Public Schools as district officials repeated obvious child-protection mistakes.

Their lives were upended, their futures clouded and their pain unacknowledged as a districtwide problem was kept under wraps. A Tribune analysis indicates that hundreds of students were harmed.

Drawing on police data, public and confidential records, and interviews with teens and young adults who spoke out, a Tribune investigation broke through the silence and secrecy surrounding these cases and found that:

When students summoned the courage to disclose abuse, teachers and principals failed to alert child welfare investigators or police despite the state’s mandated reporter law.


Even in cases where school employees acted swiftly, they subjected young victims to repeated interrogations, inflicting more psychological pain and defying basic principles intended to preserve the integrity of an investigation.

Ineffective background checks exposed students to educators with criminal convictions and arrests for sex crimes against children. And CPS failed to disclose to other districts that past employees had resigned after investigators found credible evidence of abuse and harassment.

Whether the sexual attacks were brutal rapes, frightening verbal come-ons or “creepy,” groping touches, the students often felt betrayed by school officials and wounded for years.

One young athlete, a 16-year-old honors student aiming for a law career, began cutting advanced chemistry and math classes to avoid a track coach who raped her repeatedly in his office at Simeon Career Academy. Even after he was arrested, “she didn’t know if she wanted to go to school any more. She told me she felt alone. … She talked about suicide,” Simeon Principal Sheldon House testified at the coach’s 2016 criminal trial.

At Hubbard High School, Kyana Aguilar was 17 when she reported a security guard for groping her buttocks and breast. “I trusted him because he worked at the school,” she told the Tribune. “He was an ordinary person who violated me. It could happen to anyone.”

Aguilar is now 21, and the guard is behind bars. Still, she said, “there are some nights where I think about it and can’t sleep. It still haunts me.”

The exact number of cases in which school workers sexually assaulted students remains elusive, in part because CPS does so little to understand and tackle the problem. The district acknowledges that it does not track child abuse by its employees in a consistent or formal manner.

After the Tribune threatened to file a lawsuit to force public disclosure of basic CPS documents and data related to sexual misconduct, the district acknowledged that its Law Department had investigated 430 reports that school employees had sexually abused, assaulted or harassed students since 2011.

In 230 of these cases, or more than half, investigators found credible evidence of misconduct, the district said.

But CPS supplied only raw numbers — revealing nothing about what happened or which schools were involved.

To better quantify the frequency of abuse in Chicago’s schools, reporters obtained and analyzed Chicago police data on such crimes from 2008 through 2017. Police investigated 523 reports that children were sexually assaulted or abused inside city public schools during that 10-year period, or an average of one report each week, the data show.

An article, well worth your time. It's time to start thinking about shutting down government schools: they are a danger to the children. Just a reminder : think of this story the next time a progressive tells you public education is "accountable" unlike institutions based on the profit motive...