By: Ashmar Mandou
Public schools in Chicago are under fire after a report released by the Chicago Board of Education Inspector General (OIG) Will Fletcher on January 1st reported that over 400 sexual complaints were made against the Chicago Public School employees from students in 2022. The report detailed various instances of groping, abuse, grooming, threats, and assaults by school officials. One investigation found a former Junior ROTC staff member had sex with a 16-year-old high school student for a year. When he learned there was an investigation, the staff member threatened to kill the girl and her family if she cooperated with investigators.
The report claims that the office’s sexual allegations unit (SAU) opens a case for every single complaint it receives, and their list includes a range of allegations from “creepy” behavior of adults, to assault, and others that “can be difficult to investigate”. The report went into detail about the various attempts carried out by teachers, including an allegation that a special education teacher groomed an eighth-grade student. A current elementary school teacher is facing allegations of inappropriate and sexual touching of a student in the late 1990s, when the child was enrolled in CPS between 11 and 14. The report also detailed a high-school teacher allegedly grooming five female students. “The teacher pressured the students into sexual acts (including kissing a student in the teacher’s classroom), solicited sexual acts from them, and sexually harassed them with overtly sexual comments, frequent telephone calls and social media communications, and inappropriate intimate physical contact,” the report claimed.
According to the report, countless alleged abusers at CPS were working in the school system despite the accusations. The OIG recommended disciplinary actions for any administer or staff who failed to report complaints of abuse. In total, there were 1,825 complaints received in 2022 covering the sexual allegations, misappropriation of funds, fraud, bullying and other bad conduct. CPS is in charge of 300,000 students across Chicago, the US’s third-largest city.
