25 Investigates: Racial disparities, hundreds of students disciplined for sex assaults in MA schools

BOSTON — 25 Investigates has uncovered hundreds of students disciplined for sexual assault in Massachusetts public schools over the past decade, as school districts face wide-ranging complaints over their handling of student-on-student incidents.

We found school districts are facing a mounting pile of lawsuits alleging officials are failing to properly address incidents of alleged sexual violence among students. Those students and families say school officials are too slow to respond – failing to follow or put in place adequate rules and procedures, while lacking trained and independent investigators.

And we found that when schools discipline students for sexual assault – Black and Hispanic students are disciplined at much higher rates than white students.

GROPING IN WOBURN

“It definitely killed us,” Kevin Coucelos said. “No parent should go through that.”

Woburn father Kevin Coucelos said he remembers the day his son revealed the September 2021 attack in his high school locker room at Woburn Memorial High School.

“That he was sexually assaulted and jumped in the locker room and there was video,” Coucelos told Investigative Reporter and Anchor Kerry Kavanaugh.

His son was 14 at the time of the group assault after a football game.

He was punched, slapped and groped.

According to legal filings in the boys’ parents’ ongoing federal lawsuit, the son immediately told his assistant coach – but the school took no action.

“Doe immediately reported to… an assistant coach, ‘that he was just jumped and assaulted in the locker room,’ but no action was taken,” reads a Nov. 27 reply filed by lawyers for Woburn city and school officials.

The parents reported the incident to the police over two weeks later – after their son disclosed the incident to them.

“The next day, we sat down with the principal and the first words she said to me, my wife: ‘Why did you go to a police station? You should come to me directly,’” he said.

Coucelos said his son, who is Hispanic, feels discouraged and upset that the alleged perpetrator – who is white – was allowed to keep playing and allegedly ended up getting more football playing time than him.

And he said his son faced physical attacks, threats, intimidation, and cyber-harassment in the weeks following the attack.

Coucelos said: “He goes, ‘Dad, they failed me. They failed me bad.’”

Five football players were charged with the locker room pummeling, including one who faces an additional charge of indecent assault and battery for allegedly groping the then freshman. Two others were charged with attacking him in a separate incident.

His son ended up transferring to a different school in February 2022, according to the lawsuit.

The principal of another Woburn school investigated the September attack and found the conduct was both severe and offensive, per legal filings.

But lawyers for the city of Woburn and its school district are fighting the Coucelos’ lawsuit by arguing that the conduct was not “pervasive” and “conscience-shocking” enough to violate federal law.

Woburn Public Schools officials have not responded to 25 Investigates’ emailed questions about this lawsuit.

OVER 660 STUDENTS DISCIPLINED FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT

For months, 25 Investigates has been working to uncover the scope of sexual assault in Massachusetts public schools and how schools address allegations.

We found a total of 666 public school students disciplined for sexual assault – including rape – by schools across Massachusetts from 2013 to 2022.

That’s according to 25 Investigates analysis of a little-known dataset from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

That means an average of nearly 67 students are disciplined for sexual assault each year.

That’s a tiny fraction of the roughly 900,000 public school students enrolled in about 1,800 schools statewide.

It’s unclear whether reported discipline rates are rising or falling in recent years - in part due to the COVID-19 epidemic. It’s also unclear how exactly all schools define “sexual assault,” which is defined as “including rape” in the DESE dataset.

The state’s public schools reported 73 students disciplined for sexual assault in 2022, compared to 12 in 2021 and 71 in 2019.

Schools with the highest number of disciplined students from 2013-2022 include:

• Durfee High School In Fall River (14)
• Washington Irving Middle School In Boston (13)
• John Reid Middle School In Pittsfield (12)
• James Timility Middle School In Boston (12)
• Breed Middle School In Lynn (9)
• Boston Green Academy Horace Mann Charter School (9)
• Maria Weston Chapman Middle School In Weymouth (8)

Public school districts with the highest number of disciplined students from 2013-2022 include:

• Boston (131)
• Fall River (25)
• Springfield (24)
• Pittsfield (21)
• Lowell (21)
• Lynn (19)
• Lawrence (18)
• Methuen (17)
• Weymouth (15)
• Haverhill (15)

We reached out to a dozen school officials in northeastern Massachusetts districts – from Boston to Haverhill – to ask how they address student-on-student sexual assaults. Those officials either declined comment or did not respond to our request for an interview.

DOZENS OF REPORTS OF STUDENT SEXUAL MISCONDUCT

Mandated reporters, including school officials, are required under state law to file what are known as 51As as soon as they hear of suspected abuse or neglect.

Students also have federal constitutional rights to a school environment free from sexual harassment and discrimination – under what is known as Title IX.

25 Investigates submitted hundreds of records requests to schools and police agencies statewide, as we sought numbers and reports of sexual violence and misconduct in schools over the past five years.

Those agencies widely rejected our requests for data on educator abuse.

School districts and police departments often did not provide records in response to our requests for data on student-on-student or educator sexual assaults: Boston Public Schools, for example, said it does not record instances of sexual assault.

But dozens of school districts and police departments did provide 25 Investigates with redacted reports of student-on-student sexual misconduct.

Incidents ranged from a student being sexually assaulted on a school van, to another student raped in a school bathroom.

In 2019, Norfolk police investigated an alleged sexual assault involving two students on a school van for special education students.

“After viewing the video, it was evident that… actions were more than explorations,” reads the police report.

The officer said due to their training and experience, they asked the school if they had “any suspicion” concerning the alleged perpetrator’s family.

“The school provided me with a lengthy history of the family,” reads the report. “They state they have filed a 51A twice on this family…”

And Norton Public Schools provided 25 Investigates with a report of a student allegedly raped on campus in a single-stall bathroom.

The redacted report doesn’t include the year of the incident.

The allegedly victimized student told a friend, who encouraged her to tell an adult. The student then reached out to a school staff member, according to the report.

The report says the incident “will likely become a case, but not an arrest.” The school’s report also said they would reach out to the student to see if she wanted to file a Title IX complaint, while the other student would not be “allowed to report to school until the hearing occurs.”

In other incidents, schools dealt with allegations involving sexually explicit photos and videos circulated by students online.

In May 2023, Winchendon Police investigated a complaint that an inappropriate video of a young teenager was circulating among students. Police ended up closing the case without criminal action, at the request of the minors’ parents.

Massachusetts in one of only two states – along with South Carolina – that has yet to criminalize so-called revenge porn.

The bill includes provisions aimed at ensuring minors get diverted to educational programs.

The legislation would also require the attorney general to develop a “comprehensive educational diversion program” to teach teenagers about the legal consequences of posting explicit images online.

‘LACK OF OVERSIGHT’

Attorney Dan Heffernan has represented families who say Massachusetts schools are failing to properly investigate sexual misconduct.

“It’s a lack of oversight and then proper investigation of the claims,” Heffernan said. “It’s just your reputation over child safety.”

His clients include five families who sued Boston’s now-shuttered Mission Hill School in Jamaica Plain, and eventually settled for $650,000 in 2021.

Those families said that school officials failed to act to prevent a student from repeatedly sexually assaulting other students.

“There was a matter of the students not being sort of believed or just being sort of shoved aside because they wanted to handle it in their own way,” Heffernan said.

Heffernan said the impact of such alleged negligence can be life changing.

“Children who are young and very and still developing, to have this sort of assault can be very, very damaging and impactful over a long period of time,” he said.

“Some of the situations happened because kids are sort of isolated,” he continued. “They’re not really believed. Maybe they can’t sort of articulate, if they have disabilities, about what happened.”

Heffernan said he does not think he could have taken on the Mission Hill lawsuit in the current legal landscape.

He said that’s because a 2022 Supreme Court decision barred emotional damages in Title IX lawsuits.

Heffernan said the state could reform laws about lawsuits.

“Municipalities have a lot of defenses, particularly on peer-on-peer stuff, to any sort of claims and lawsuits I’ve made,” he said. “So, I think a loosening of that would be helpful, to be able to bring forward these cases, not have them get sort of dismissed, not have such a high bar for showing negligence of school officials.”

Heffernan said it’s incumbent on investigators to have specialized training, for schools to have strong policies – and for schools to ensure they are enforcing their own procedures. He also called for better oversight.

“It has to be someone who has specialized training in that, that that’s what they do, and they know how to do it, not just: ‘Oh, this is a good person to sort of do it,” Heffernan said. “When do we call DCF, when do we call the police?”

Dorchester bus incident

Laquanda Willis, a Dorchester mom, told 25 Investigates that she’s grown frustrated by Boston Public Schools’ response to her complaints about inappropriate behavior on her young daughter’s school bus.

Willis said she has had to fight to get incident reports and a safety plan.

She says school officials investigated an older boy allegedly sexually touching her four-year-old daughter on a school bus on Halloween.

Willis said she complained about a September incident on the bus to no avail: “They said they were going to investigate it. I never heard anything back from that situation.”

Willis said she’s primarily concerned with ensuring her daughter is safe on the bus.

And she said as a parent, she also hopes that kids who may exhibit inappropriate behavior are getting the help they need.

“It makes me think, at what age do we teach our kids about bodies and sexual harassment?” she said. “You know, because I never thought that I would be trying to explain [sexual assault] to a four-year-old.”

She continued: “There’s many kids in the world who probably are experiencing abuse or physical abuse or any type of traumas. And they can be, you know, displaying it on other children.”

Jetta Bernier, executive director of child advocacy group MassKids, said that there is a lack of awareness and training about the difference between developmentally expected behaviors and behaviors that are cause for concern and outreach.

“There’s a continuum of sexual behaviors that children express throughout their whole lives,” she said.

She said children often engage in “green light” – or developmentally expected – behaviors.

But she said trained adults in positions of authority should be aware of “yellow light” behavior that could put younger and more vulnerable children at risk.

“There’s a difference in terms of power, because of the way they look,” she said.

She added: “Children with a lot of disabilities, physical, emotional disabilities are at very high risk of sexual abuse. And so we’re concerned about them especially.”

RACIAL DISPARITIES IN DISCIPLINE

When schools do respond to allegations and discipline students, 25 Investigates found those students are predominantly black and brown.

According to 25 Investigates’ analysis of DESE data, of the roughly 660 students that schools reported they disciplined for sexual assault from 2013 to 2022:

• 185 were Black students.
• 270 were Hispanic students.
• 180 were white students.

That means nearly 70% of all students disciplined for sexual assault were Black or Hispanic.

Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic students make up just one-third of students in Massachusetts.

And 572 disciplined students were listed as “high needs” students because of factors including economic disadvantage or receiving special education.

In Boston Public Schools, the disparities were even more glaring: out of a total of 131 students reportedly disciplined for sexual assault from 2013 to 2022, just three were white.

Meanwhile, the district reported 69 Black students and 58 Hispanic students disciplined for sexual assault over that period.

Overall, 119 of the disciplined BPS students were listed as having “high needs.”

‘PERCEIVED AS MORE ADULT’

In 2019, a school in Massachusetts called the police on a six-year-old boy of color for allegedly touching another student’s bottom in 2019.

That’s according to a Massachusetts mother who spoke to 25 Investigates on condition on anonymity to protect her son’s identity. She provided court rulings backing her account.

“These kids are six,” she said. “They’re learning how to be in school. They’re learning how to keep their hands to themselves.”

The mother – who is still fighting to have records related to her son’s case erased – said racial bias led to her son being singled out.

“I have no doubt that what happened to our son is because of who he is and who he wasn’t at school,” she said.

She said her son was not suspended, but expressed concern for other kids who may face a similar scenario: “We know that children of color in schools are more likely to face disciplinary repercussions.”

“We know that the behavior of black kids, of kids of color filters through a lens where their behavior is perceived as more adult,” she said. “Like clearly whoever filed these reports in the school applied an adult parameter of sexual behavior, which is not appropriate.”

Attorney Heffernan said in general, schools may overreact when allegations of sexual misconduct arise and neglect to follow their own procedures.

“There should be more of a uniform way of handling and looking into these cases and not overreact, but also not under react,” he said.

The Massachusetts mother said schools failed to follow-up or offer support to her son – and she said school officials failed to heed procedures in their own training manual for handling scenarios involving young children.

“There is actually an example that describes an interaction between children the age of six,” she said. “It is flagged in the training manual as this is the kind of thing that should not be reported.”

She said the school’s handling has traumatized her family, who’ve had to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills.

She called for more accountability for teachers and school administrators.

“I don’t put it lightly when I say this completely ruined our lives,” she said.

SCHOOLS FACING A ‘MINEFIELD’

Attorney Doug Louison has represented Massachusetts schools and municipalities accused in lawsuits of mishandling reports of student sexual assault.

He told 25 Investigations that districts are facing an “explosion” of lawsuits over student-on-student abuse.

“There is certainly an explosion and increase in awareness of liability and claims that are being brought against the school systems, the teachers and administrators,” he said.

He said schools increasingly must navigate the “minefield” of protecting the rights of all students to privacy – and to an education.

Such considerations can make it tricky to set up safety plans aimed at separating certain students, for example.

“That is where the minefield exists,” he said. “Interpretation of the law is interpretive, and it develops over time. And the people in the middle are the school administrators who are trying to do the right thing and try and navigate what’s required.”

He said school administrators have to consider how to handle sexual assault incidents that may happen off-campus, or incidents involving alleged sexually explicit photos and videos circulated on social media.

“Social media gets involved and then there’s issues as to how much school administrators can or should be monitoring social media that’s outside of the school setting,” he said. “And then what happens is the flag gets thrown and then a claim is made against a school or a town saying you should have known about this. This is being spoken about by students, friends in that social media context.”

He continued: “And sometimes, unfortunately and with no intentional delay by the school administrators, they’re trying to catch up to what’s already happened. And then they have to react: how do they protect the interests of all the students involved in the school setting?”

He said school administrators also face the challenge of figuring out the difference between developmentally expected, concerning and potentially criminal behaviors –particularly in cases that appear less clear-cut.

“Oftentimes when it’s a student-on-student interaction, it’s not as clear as to what grows into a wrongful act that implicates the school system,” Louison said.

LAWSUITS ALLEGING BUNGLING OF SEXUAL ASSAULT CASES

And we found at least 10 lawsuits filed over the last decade in state and federal court lodged by students and parents who claim schools are bungling sexual assault complaint and failing to take steps to keep kids safe..

Ongoing lawsuits, or lawsuits that ended in settlement, include the Mission Hill litigation as well as:

NORTHAMPTON: In November, the city of Northampton settled with two Jane Does who claimed that the school punished a teenage girl rather than treating her as an alleged victim of sexual assault.

A federal judge’s March 2023 memorandum says the 15-year-old Jane Doe was riding on a school bus following a wrestling match in January 2016 when a 17-year-old student “removed her pants and forcibly raped her.”

Lawyers for Northampton officials argued that the Jane Does did not show they suffered because of school officials’ conduct.

BOSTON ARTS ACADEMY: A Boston Arts Academy student sued the city of Boston and the parents of a fellow student she alleged sexually assaulted and digitally raped her at a Christmas party, according to an ongoing federal lawsuit lodged in March 2022.

The lawsuit alleges that school officials failed to separate her from the fellow student – who was in her classroom – and took “no action” to protect her from harassment and bullying by other students following the alleged assault.

Lawyers for the City of Boston have argued that Doe’s allegations of harassment were “vague and conclusory and that her more specific allegations do not rise to the level of severity contemplated by Title IX.”

HOLYOKE: An ongoing federal lawsuit filed by multiple Jane Does alleges a Holyoke school has a “reputation for turning a blind eye to sexual assault complaints from male students.”

The lawsuit says in fall 2019, a sophomore girl was “violently sexually assaulted” by a fellow male classmate. And in September 2021, the lawsuit claims a 14-year-old girl was “sexually assaulted by an older male student inside one of the hallways” of the school.

The lawsuit claims the school waited five months to interview witnesses, allegedly cherry-picked surveillance footage and failed to offer the girls support or safety measures.

Lawyers for Holyoke Public Schools filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit and said the plaintiffs did not prove violation of their constitutional rights. “Although Plaintiffs and their parents may not have agreed on how defendant Holyoke Public Schools handled the situation does not mean it rises to the deliberate indifference,” reads a March filing.

LOWELL: A ten-year-old boy “sexually abused” an 8-year-old boy on “nearly a daily basis” on a school bus for months during spring 2018, according to a 2022 lawsuit filed in Middlesex Superior Court.

The lawsuit claims the boy “abused other children” on the bus. The mother reported the abuse to the city of Lowell and claims the 10-year-old boy continued to ride on the bus despite assurances otherwise from school officials.

Lawyers for the City of Lowell are seeking a jury trial. They argued that any harm was caused by “someone for whose conduct the defendant was not and is not legally responsible.”

DENNIS-YARMOUTH: The parents of a girl with disabilities allege she was sexually assaulted, harassed and abused at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School, according to a federal lawsuit filed in 2021.

In September 2021, a lawyer for the school district argued that there was no widespread concern before the alleged assault about insufficient staffing or students going unsupervised.

In January 2022, a federal judge said the lawsuits’ Title IX and negligence claims could move forward. The lawsuit was settled by July 2022, though no details of the settlement are publicly available.

NORTH ANDOVER: The Town of North Andover reached a settlement by late October 2023 with a former high school student and her mother who said school officials failed to properly investigate a student accused of sexual assaults in 2017.

Students at North Andover High School staged a protest in 2019v after school officials allowed the accused student to attend school while his case was in the courts. A victim said she was threatened with expulsion for refusing to sign a safety plan to stay away from the alleged perpetrator. The accused student eventually pleaded guilty in 2021.

In court filings, lawyers for the school district argued “a claim that a school could have done more in hindsight was not enough.”

NEWBURYPORT: The city of Newburyport settled a federal lawsuit in 2019 that claimed school officials created a sexually hostile environment for a former high school student who was allegedly sexually assaulted.

“As a result, Plaintiff was subject to continuing harassment and a loss of educational opportunity,” reads the initial lawsuit filed in 2017.

Later in 2017, lawyers for Newburyport fought the lawsuits’ claims and argued that school officials had no obligation to investigate a “weekend off-campus incident.”

WOBURN: Coucelos said he hopes the ongoing federal lawsuit against Woburn Public Schools will inspire others to come forward.

“I hope a lot of the families come forward,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. Especially parents, mom and dad. Get them the help they need.”

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Marina Villeneuve reported this story while participating in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 National Fellowship, which provided training, mentoring, and funding to support this project.

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If you are a victim of sexual abuse:

• Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE, online.rainn.org y rainn.org/es)

To report child abuse in Massachusetts:

• Call the DCF Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline Toll-Free: (800) 792-5200

Read part 1 of our series on MA laws enabling secrecy over alleged sexual abuse by public school personnel.

Read part 2 of our series on MA’s failure to pass laws to address child sexual abuse.

Read part 3 of our series on warning signs of abuse/

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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