Kansas City area disabled student sexually assaulted. Parents sue district, seek change
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Parents sue Raytown schools after son sexually assaulted
A middle school student with an intellectual disability was sexually assaulted by a fellow student on a field trip in Kansas City. His parents are now suing the Raytown district.
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Kansas City area disabled student sexually assaulted. Parents sue district, seek change
Read the lawsuit filed against the Raytown school district over its handling of a sexual assault
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What is sexual violence?
He tries to block it all out.
The phone call. The hospital visit and endless blood tests. The joy drained from his son’s face.
When the memories come back, so do the rage and frustration. And the questions.
How is it possible that his oldest son could have endured unthinkable violence — a sexual assault by a fellow eighth grader in a public restroom — while he was supposed to be safe on a school field trip?
How could that son — who survived heart surgery at 5 months old, grew up with an intellectual disability and became a thriving middle schooler — have had his uniquely bright spirit stolen from him in a matter of minutes?
And how could his school have allowed that to occur?
“There’s no reason for this to have happened,” the Raytown father said.
“This could have just been a tough conversation about how a student tried to do something to hurt our son. But no. This got to the worst case scenario really, really fast.”
The stay-at-home dad and his wife are searching for those answers. They have filed a federal lawsuit against the Raytown school district, saying staff failed to adequately supervise and protect the special education students on that field trip.
The lawsuit alleges that the district violated Title IX, the civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, and also mandates how federally funded schools must respond to reports of sexual misconduct.
Raytown district spokeswoman Danielle Nixon said that, “out of respect for the minor plaintiff’s privacy, the legal process and more importantly the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the district cannot provide any further information not already available to the public.”
“Although we cannot discuss specifics as they pertain to the claims in the lawsuit, please remember that at this phase in the litigation plaintiff has merely set forth allegations. Plaintiff has not been required to provide any evidentiary support for the plaintiff’s claims,” she said. “The district denies many of the primary allegations set forth in this suit.”
The Star is not naming the child nor his parents because the minor is a victim of sexual assault. It is also not naming the suspect in the case, who is also a minor.
Missouri ranks second in the nation, behind only Maryland, for having the highest rate of incidents of rape or attempted rape in public schools in the 2017-2018 school year, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to the U.S. Education Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection. Kansas ranks right behind at third.
That same year, Missouri was the 10th highest-ranking state for incidents of sexual assaults in public schools. The year before that, the state was third.
And nationally, adults and children with disabilities are three to seven times more likely to become victims of rape and sexual assault than those without disabilities, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. They are also less likely to report the assault. From 2017-2019, just 19% of rapes or sexual assaults against people with disabilities were reported to police compared to 36% of those against people without disabilities.
“We do know that individuals with disabilities experience high rates of sexual violence and other types of violence, because we know individuals who commit this type of harm are oftentimes targeting those who may be vulnerable or less likely to be believed by society,” said Victoria Pickering, with the Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault in Kansas City.
The Raytown family has been haunted by the sexual assault endured by their son. Before, he was social and sweet, and starting to meet more goals in school, his parents said. But now he has been so traumatized he regressed several years and won’t communicate with anyone other than his dad.
The parents allege school officials did not do enough to protect their son from the violence they say could have easily been prevented.
“They are seeking justice for their son. And they want to make sure there is training and policy procedures in place to such a degree that nothing like this ever happens again,” said attorney Reed Martens, who is representing the family in the case. “What happened to their son is every parent’s worst nightmare.”
A ‘little rock star’
Growing up, their son was always the center of attention.
He was expressive and affectionate. Always the line leader at school, helping fellow students get to class or step off the bus.
“He was like having your own little rock star to take everywhere with you,” his dad said. “Out at a restaurant, he’d make everybody come give him knuckles. And he’d have a whole line of people doing it.”
In 2019, the parents held their son back a year to repeat eighth grade, worried about sending him to high school, where the building would likely be more difficult to navigate.
Their son was roughly half the height of many of his classmates, and developmentally, about at a first grade level, learning to write letters on his own without tracing them.
“The biggest thing was that he was hitting more goals,” his dad said. “He was, I’d say, a week or maybe two weeks away from being completely potty trained. And his support system was there.”
At school he had an individualized education plan to ensure he received specialized instruction and accommodations, for example, determining how many minutes he would spend with speech and occupational therapists, his mother said.
But on April 16, 2019, the dad got a phone call, and everything came crashing down.
Toward the end of the school day, he answered a call from the principal at the time of Raytown Central Middle School. He said the details were vague, but she explained that while his son was on a field trip at the Kansas City Zoo, he was involved in an assault in the bathroom.
“My emotions go pretty high when I start to talk about this,” the dad told The Star, apologizing for “clamming up” because he had “tried to block out most of this.”
“She told me an incident had happened, and I instantly started asking questions, you know, who, where, what happened?” he said. “And I asked if there was penetration. And immediately she said no. … I remember the exact words, she said, there was ‘no skin on skin contact.’”
It wasn’t until the couple later read the police report, they alleged, that they learned that was not true.
“We were given the wrong information,” the mother said.
‘In utter shock’
On the call, the dad said he learned his son was riding back home from the trip, on the same bus as the student who had just sexually assaulted him.
“(The principal) was like, ‘I have to let you know they’re on the bus together coming back,’” he said. “I never had a moment to calm down. Every answer just went further and spiked more and more rage.”
He called his wife, who was at work at the time. She said she was, “just in utter shock. It was like I was outside my body. I couldn’t process it.”
His son was already on the bus, and his younger children were expected home shortly after, the dad said. “And my (wife) had the car because we were a one-vehicle family at the time. So I just had to wait. And it was the worst feeling.”
When his son got home, “it was like he was drained. It was like somebody had taken all of the joy, everything. Like someone had a device to take all of that away from him, and just ghosted him.”
In court documents, the Raytown district claims to have reported the incident to the Missouri Division of Family Services and Raytown Police Department on or about the day of the incident. But the Kansas City Police Department, with jurisdiction over the zoo where the incident occurred, was not dispatched until the next day, when an officer responded to the middle school, according to the Kansas City police report.
On the field trip, the two students, who were both in the special education program, were left unsupervised in the men’s restroom, the report states. That alone was concerning for the parents, who said their son was wearing a diaper and needed assistance in the restroom, usually from a paraprofessional — one of the protocols the parents said should have been followed, according to the lawsuit.
“That’s why you have assistants there. That’s why you have people there to chaperone events, to make sure the students are taken care of,” the mom said.
She alleged that “miscommunication was part of what happened. The teacher and para were switching groups of students they were with. One thought the other was with him, and the other thought the other was with him. They should have never been left alone.”
According to the police report, a paraprofessional who was on the trip, and is currently listed as an instructional assistant on the school’s website, told police that she realized the students were in the men’s restroom “for longer than normal.”
It states that upon entering the bathroom, she saw the victim’s pants were pulled down, and the other student was standing behind him, and that his “penis had made contact with the victim’s butt.”
The complaint filed in the lawsuit states that the child was sexually assaulted and sodomized. The police report states that a sexual assault test kit was done.
“I can’t for a second believe you would leave a child, or two children, alone at a public restroom, especially with one of them being potty trained,” the dad said. “I can’t imagine for a second leaving a student with his diaper and his pants on the ground trying to go to the restroom.”
Neither the principal, who is no longer with the Raytown district, nor the paraprofessional responded to The Star’s request for interviews. District officials did not agree to answer questions about staffing levels or special education program requirements on field trips.
The school board’s policy for field trips and excursions states that officials must consider the level of supervision before approving a trip, without specifics. Mallory McGowin, with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said the department does not provide staffing guidance for field trips; those are policies and procedures developed at the local level.
After his son got home, the dad took him to Children’s Mercy Hospital to have him tested.
“He had so many blood draws. (His dad) had to hold him down,” the mom said.
“I blocked it out. Her just saying that brought me back to that,” the dad replied. “That was the worst experience I’ve ever had.”
“We have a picture of him sitting on his bed in his room after the hospital,” the mother said. “I see him as hollow. He looks like he’s not even there. It’s just his body. It’s a scary picture.”
A challenging case
The parents were called to the school a couple of days later, they said.
“We only met with the principal,” the mom said. “And I feel that you could tell she was extremely shaken. I felt empathy from her. She had children herself, and she told us that.”
School officials, the parents claimed, eventually decided to move the student who assaulted their son to a different middle school. And their son was moved to a new class with a different teacher, where he would also likely spend less time with the paraprofessional who was on the trip. The parents alleged that their son had struggled to work with that employee even before the incident.
Schools are required to offer such accommodations following the report of sexual harassment or assault under Title IX.
The mother said she went to parent-teacher conferences with the new teacher. Her son sat at his desk, and she noticed a photo of his class taped to it, taken months before the incident. Among the group of students was the face of the boy who had assaulted her son, staring up at them.
The mom claims the photo remained on the desk even after the boy was removed from her son’s school.
In their lawsuit, filed this past spring, the complaint states that the school district violated Title IX by failing to “adequately supervise its students,” and it “allowed the sexual assault of the child by a fellow student.” The suit alleges that school officials were “deliberately indifferent” to “known acts of harassment in its programs or activities, including those committed by the other student/suspect.”
Title IX cases are challenging, with a high standard of proof, Martens, the family’s attorney, said.
The law requires that a plaintiff prove school officials had “actual knowledge” of harassment, not just after-the-fact notice of a single instance of sexual assault, according to court documents. The plaintiff must show the school had “prior notice of a substantial risk of peer harassment” in its programs, prior knowledge of harassment committed by the same perpetrator, or previous reports of sexual harassment occurring on the same premises.
“The difficulty is that Title IX requires that the school have actual prior notice that the perpetrator, not just that they were behaving inappropriately or not just that they were making inappropriate comments, but that it was really of a sexual nature, so much as to put them on notice,” Martens said, adding that school officials also must have shown to be deliberately indifferent to any prior notice of harassment, and that they did not take action to prohibit it from occurring again.
That’s a challenge in this case, the parents said, since their son is largely non-verbal and struggled to communicate much of what occurred at school, such as whether he had been harassed by his fellow classmate before the field trip.
“That will be a big point of inquiry in this case. What did the school district know about the other student’s behavior prior to the time he assaulted our student?” Martens said. “That’s going to be the big question in this case, and what discovery is really about. We are confident the discovery process will reveal the truth about what happened.”
In court documents, attorneys for the Raytown district argue that administrators “did not have actual knowledge (as recognized under Title IX) of the alleged April 16, 2019, incident, but rather had after-the-fact notice” of the single incident on the field trip.
“Plaintiff’s single interaction with his peer is not actionable under Title IX. … Discrimination must be more widespread than a single instance of one-on-one peer harassment,” the district’s response to the complaint states.
Attorneys for the district denied most of the claims in the lawsuit and requested it be dismissed.
U.S. Magistrate Judge W. Brian Gaddy denied the motion to dismiss claims against the district, stating in part that, “several courts have found a single incident of one-on-one peer harassment may be severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive for purposes of a Title IX claim.”
The judge, though, did agree to dismiss claims against the principal, who was originally named as a defendant.
Advocates argue that changes to Title IX, implemented last August, have stymied students wishing to come forward with reports of sexual assault. The framework, put in place by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in the Trump administration, bolstered due process protections for accused students and narrowed the definition of sexual harassment.
This spring, the Department of Education under the Biden administration began the process of rolling back those changes, beginning with a review and weeklong public hearing. But advocates are pushing for more immediate action.
’What went wrong?’
During eighth grade, their son was starting to meet benchmarks and progress in classes. But that all changed after the field trip.
“That incident happened, and he just went three years backwards, at least,” the dad said.
Their extroverted son shut down.
“He was communicating very well,” the dad said. “And that’s been a rough thing. Take the emotions and everything away from it. Strip that all clean. And the biggest thing that we’ve dealt with because of this is him not talking. He will only talk to me now.”
“He’ll hardly ever talk to me,” the mom said. “He won’t talk to his teachers very much. Unless it’s his dad, he won’t do it.”
Now in high school, their son is still not fully toilet trained, even though he was so close to getting there before the incident.
“I get called four out of five days from the school, asking me to talk to him,” the father said. “They’ll take him to the restroom, and he’ll flop on the floor. They can’t touch him. I’m the only one he will allow to do hygienic things for him. That’s the situation we’re at with that.”
“Yeah, it makes me feel awesome that I can help my kid do these things. But he should be doing these things with everyone,” he said. “They have to call me because he’s been sitting on the floor for an hour-and-a-half, in a dirty diaper half the time. It’s been really rough.”
By filing the lawsuit, the parents hope to hold the school officials accountable for the incident that stripped so much away from their son. But they also are demanding change, pushing for stricter policies on staffing and supervision to ensure other students are spared from such a fate in the future.
“They are seeking justice for their son. But they also want to know what went wrong in this instance,” Martens said. “They want answers to questions such as whether the school district had the proper procedures in place regarding supervision of students while on field trips and while using restrooms. They want to know whether the proper procedures were in place for students enrolled in special education who perhaps need an increased level of supervision.”
The parents said they gave the district a list of suggested changes to policies and special education program procedures.
“Things such as making sure that all support staff and teachers are fully aware of what to do in a situation like this. Making sure that whenever it’s a special needs class, that there’s always someone watching the students and there’s never miscommunication,” the mom said. “And they need further training on how to deal with children with special needs. Children with special needs, unfortunately, are more often the ones who are taken advantage of.”
“Make sure you have enough people to take care of the job,” the dad said. “If you don’t have the people, don’t go on the field trip. If it’s dangerous, don’t do it.”
“This is on the school,” the dad said, emphasizing that the district needs to have clear plans in place to prevent such incidents in the future.
“I have other kids who are going to be going to that same school,” he said.
This story was originally published December 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
