Andrea Bruce; Chona Kasinger; Maddie McGarvey; Kim Raff; Matt Williams; Rebecca Zisser/Business Insider
The documents began arriving last fall, first in a trickle, then a flood. Emoji-filled text messages from teachers, handwritten complaints from students in the rounded script of teenage girls, type-written transcripts from HR investigations. Eventually, thousands of pages from disciplinary files of educators investigated for sexual misconduct made their way to my desk.
They documented grooming and groping, the sharing of dick pics and porn, sexualized comments in classrooms, oral sex in bathrooms, and statutory rape that in some cases continued for years. In case after case, from San Francisco, California, to Enosburg Falls, Vermont, the documents conveyed an unsettling story: school administrators across the United States catastrophically failing to prevent abuse.