How does your school respond to on campus assaults

[Anonymous]

First, I hope that there have been no assaults at your schools. However, if there have been allegations of student-on-student assaults where no charges were filed, how did your school deal with it? Does your school disclose when there have been alleged assaults? Or say how they investigated or what prevented measures they have taken? I understand that if there have been no charges filed the school may not want to alarm parents potentially for no cause. On the other hand as a parent I want to know so I can try even harder to try to educate my child about how to potentially avoid such an incident and also just make an informed decision about the safety of my child.


(mods, I understand that this is close to the topic of the other threads you’ve locked down, but as a parent of a child at a school with an incident, think an open discussion of how schools typically respond would be very helpful)

[Anonymous]

Very few will have experience or knowledge about this.

At the very least, the police should be notified to investigate and the school should fully cooperate / assist where they can. It becomes a criminal investigation and the school will be limited in what they can say about it. Their role is limited.

[Anonymous]

Dare I ask what kind of assault? Physical (fight)? SA? Other?

Did the assault occur on school grounds or off?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Very few will have experience or knowledge about this.

At the very least, the police should be notified to investigate and the school should fully cooperate / assist where they can. It becomes a criminal investigation and the school will be limited in what they can say about it. Their role is limited.

I was an NCS parent during the infamous Google doc incident. The girls were tracking harassment and assaults by STA boys. A boy found it on his sister’s computer, and all hell broke loose. The obvious consequences: the girls got in trouble.

[Anonymous]

My kids' private school expelled two students who physically assaulted another student on campus. There were videos of it and I believe charges were filed. There's no way I would've kept my kids there if the school had let the assailants stay.

[Anonymous]

Lowell School retaliates against victims by forbidding them to speak about their experience to other families and threatening legal action if they do. I think this is
typical.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Lowell School retaliates against victims by forbidding them to speak about their experience to other families and threatening legal action if they do. I think this is
typical.

Yes, Lowell is horrible. Create the conditions for abuse to occur (like accept kids they know have problematic records), spend massive resources to cover things up when they go wrong (to the point where it becomes the school's priority), blame and/or smear the victims and their families, and intimidate those who dare to speak up or challenge the administration and their official stories. Link to recent Lowell discussion on these issues here: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1308900.page

[Anonymous]

I have no experience with this personally, but I'd hope a school my children attend would (a) report to the appropriate authorities immediately; (b) prioritize doing absolutely whatever is possible to help the victim with recovery (regardless of the source of the trauma!); (c) cooperate with any official investigations; (d) hire a private investigator to work simultaneously in case the official investigators miss something; (e) implement new policies to make similar events less likely in the future; and (f) notify the community ASAP (with the assistance of legal guidance) that something has transpired, that the event is being investigated & handled, and that learnings are being implemented going forward. Once everything has played out, students who have acted badly should be asked to leave, even if it is not legally possible to prove they have committed a crime. This seems like the bare minimum, and every school should have a plan prepared in advance to implement if & when necessary!

[Anonymous]

Some of these stories coming out of these private schools are absolutely HORRIFIC!! GDS, Lowell, just to name a few.

[Anonymous]

I had an experience at a parish school where a child was targeted. In response, they expelled the child at the request of the ADW and the priest. So if it’s that type of school, they just care about the reputation.

We are now in public school and so much happier to have rule of law and transparency. It’s definitely not perfect and sometimes slow moving, but at least it’s not a dictatorship.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Some of these stories coming out of these private schools are absolutely HORRIFIC!! GDS, Lowell, just to name a few.

I think, unfortunately, the “horrific stories” are not private school-specific. Pick a school and I suspect you’ll find some wild and abhorrent stories about individual behavior at all of them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Some of these stories coming out of these private schools are absolutely HORRIFIC!! GDS, Lowell, just to name a few.

Doesn’t matter if it’s private or public. It just gets more attention when these things happen at private schools because people think they’re paying for sunshine and rainbows all day long. But I would say what goes on at public schools is probably more shocking. Maybe people just expect it to happen at public schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some of these stories coming out of these private schools are absolutely HORRIFIC!! GDS, Lowell, just to name a few.

Doesn’t matter if it’s private or public. It just gets more attention when these things happen at private schools because people think they’re paying for sunshine and rainbows all day long. But I would say what goes on at public schools is probably more shocking. Maybe people just expect it to happen at public schools

+1 police get called to public schools all the time for terrible things like fights and assaults. It is more of a public school thing that people don’t expect in private.

[Anonymous]

Most schools will handle disclosure on a case by case basis. Factors in the decision making process would be: how serious, how wide of a threat, how public is it already, will it result in policy changes that need to be communicated, were police/EMS on campus as a result, level of student privacy involved, other "need to know" items, etc.

If it is a clear case, say minor incident between two kids witnessed by a teacher, one-off incident, it will handled as a private disciplinary matter. If it's a kid who is deemed a larger threat, explusion will happen and typically that sort of thing cannot be disclosed, but "gets out." If they need more information from other kids, a broader message will be sent. If it is causing a lot of inappropriate gossip and the like, a message may be sent to shut that down. If police/EMS are on campus, it will be disclosed to the necessary and allowable degree.

Schools have to balance all sorts of issues on these topics, and it can be a challenging call between privacy laws, legal investigation restraints, gossip gone wild, and angry parents. But, very generally speaking, the broader the potential student impact (e.g., a campus security breach, weapon on campus, serious crime, school lock down), the more a school will err on the side of broader disclosure if it potentially impacts the safety of others. If they find no threat to others, or are otherwise forbidden by law to disclose, then the curious but uninvolved will not be indulged.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Very few will have experience or knowledge about this.

At the very least, the police should be notified to investigate and the school should fully cooperate / assist where they can. It becomes a criminal investigation and the school will be limited in what they can say about it. Their role is limited.

Police are not notified of every altercation between students.