An epidemic of sexual abuse in schools

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.

In April 2019, administrators at Utah's Salt Lake City School District learned that a language-arts teacher had been arrested and charged with seven felonies involving sexual abuse of a 17-year-old student. Records show they responded promptly, putting the teacher, Sterrett Oney Neale, on paid leave.

But more than a year before the arrest, in August 2017, an administrator at the school, West High, had reported seeing Neale alone with the student in his classroom before the start of the school year, according to subsequent court testimony. When administrators told Neale to stop spending time alone with her, the teenager said in court, she defended him — something a trained investigator would know is common in cases of grooming. In the records released to me by the district, there's no documentation of a formal investigation at that time.

The student's testimony, offered during a preliminary hearing in Neale's ongoing criminal trial, made clear that the classroom encounter was a red flag. She described how Neale had been a source of support as she was grieving the death of her grandmother and how he'd helped her report abuse she'd experienced at the hands of another teacher during summer camp. How Neale directed her in school plays and even advised her on a research paper about the psychological effects of child sexual abuse. And how he then kissed and touched her in that same classroom, which led to months of sexual encounters at his home.

The district allowed Neale to voluntarily resign at the end of the school year — and paid his salary through the end of his contract that August. (Neale's attorney declined to comment.)

I came across another disturbing case from several years ago in Durham County, North Carolina. There, a student at Neal Middle School said her chorus teacher, Troy Logan Pickens, had groped her. (She only disclosed later, in high school, that he'd raped her.) An interim principal, James Key, didn't open an investigation until the child's mother got involved, and even then, according to a subsequent civil suit that settled out of court, failed to report the groping allegation to law enforcement or child protective services, as required by state law. Instead, Key allowed Pickens to resign, paving the way for him to continue teaching.

Months later, Pickens applied for another teaching job, in nearby Wake County. He landed the job thanks in part to a positive review from Key, who, according to the civil suit, shared nothing about his misconduct investigation. (Key did not respond to requests for comment.)

Before long, Pickens sexually abused a student at the new school. The methodical assaults in a school bathroom, detailed in court records, included digital penetration and forced fellatio. The student only came forward about the abuse two years later, after Pickens was arrested for raping the student back at Neal.

Just as in Durham County, the Wake County district allowed Pickens to resign.

Hundreds of Rosemeads

Earlier this year, I explored how the culture of a single Southern California high school — my alma mater, Rosemead High — became a stalking ground for child predators. I spent years trying to get to the heart of what went wrong there, first with an investigation into my former journalism teacher Eric Burgess and then, after receiving a flood of tips about other Rosemead teachers, by detailing 40 years of sexual abuse and misconduct. The more I uncovered, the more I began to wonder whether Rosemead was unique. Or whether a broader lens would reveal similar patterns of behavior elsewhere.

No federal agency tracks teacher sexual misconduct. So I requested disciplinary records and severance agreements from the 10 largest school districts in all 50 states, as well as license revocations from every state's department of education.

Opposition to disclosing these records was fierce. In several states, including Alabama, Iowa, and Virginia, their largest districts refused to release any records. Many districts demanded prohibitive sums of money to fulfill requests. The Hawaii Department of Education asked for $75,060. The Katy Independent School District in Texas wanted $125,352. Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska invoiced $243,836.

Other districts never provided records, even places such as Alaska's Bering Strait School District, where multiple teachers have been criminally convicted in recent years for abusing students. "Nothing is digital, so it is tedious research," a district official told me. Some, such as Springfield Public Schools in Massachusetts, argued that releasing records would be an "invasion of the teachers' privacy outweighing any possible right of the public to know."

In the end, we received more than 800 disciplinary files from 85 school districts in 34 states. Many of the records were partially redacted or incomplete, but 388 files included enough detail to determine they were related to sexual misconduct with students. We also obtained more than 3,700 teacher severance agreements. We supplemented these documents with teacher union contracts, court and law-enforcement records, a database of news coverage of educator arrests, and a review of employee policies from the largest school districts in every state to see what behavior they do — and don't — prohibit.

Taken together, the tens of thousands of pages of records, combined with interviews with school administrators, state investigators, liability-insurance reps, lawyers, and academic experts, indicate that there may be hundreds of Rosemead Highs across the country — and provide a window into how abuse has been allowed to fester.

A national panic about child "groomers" has dominated public discourse in the past two years, sparking hundreds of school book bans targeting LGBTQ content and a dozen state bills criminalizing drag performances for children. But only four state legislatures have taken steps during the same two years to block documented predators from continued access to children.

The scope of the problem is larger than previously known. At least 1,895 teachers have had adverse action taken against their credential by state education licensing boards from 2017 to 2022 for sexual misconduct, according to data collected by the nonprofit National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, or NASDTEC. The figure, provided exclusively to Business Insider, is almost certainly an undercount, as many states do not report details of why a credential was suspended or revoked.

We also analyzed a database of local news stories collected by Billie-Jo Grant, a leading researcher on sexual abuse in schools, and her students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and found that at least 3,045 school staffers have been arrested since 2017 following allegations of sexual misconduct involving students. This includes both licensed teachers and noncredentialed staff, from janitors to teachers' aides.

Despite the frequency of the abuse, we found a fragmented approach to accountability that leaves oversight largely in the hands of administrators at each of the 13,000 school districts in the United States. They are in turn governed by a patchwork system of state laws.

The documents we obtained lay bare the life cycle of sexual abuse in schools, documenting how administrators and policymakers have failed students at every turn:

• A third of districts we examined have threadbare policies that bar sexual misconduct but do not prohibit widely recognized sexual grooming behaviors.

• District officials often conduct cursory investigations, sometimes interviewing only the accused educator before finding claims unsubstantiated.

• Districts routinely mete out mild sanctions such as reprimands or suspensions, and they often allow teachers who engaged in abuse to resign or retire. Only 15% of the cases we analyzed resulted in termination.

• Legislators have failed to keep abusers from moving on to other schools; only 17 states and Washington, DC, require districts to disclose information to prospective employers about an allegation, investigation, resignation, or termination related to teacher sexual misconduct.

• A culture of silence dominates, with widespread use of nondisclosure clauses in severance agreements and strict union confidentiality language protecting teacher personnel files.

• The only national database that tracks teachers who've lost their license in the wake of sexual misconduct is voluntary and nonpublic; state credentialing agencies all participate, but just 2% of school districts opt in.

"The bottom line," Grant said, "is that we've collectively valued the reputations of teachers over the safety of students."

A failure to prevent

Every school district we examined has some kind of sexual-misconduct policy in place; a typical one from Lee County, Florida, prohibits employees from "engaging in or soliciting sexual, romantic, or lewd conduct with a student." But of the more than 150 policies from large districts we reviewed, a third fail to prohibit grooming or boundary-violating behaviors that can lay the groundwork for sexual abuse. The most thorough policies are explicit in naming unacceptable behaviors, such as giving students gifts, texting them, or spending time alone with a student in an isolated classroom — as Sterrett Neale did in Salt Lake City.

The policy manual for Putnam County Schools in West Virginia lacks these prohibitions. The manual clearly defines sexual harassment and bans "amorous relationships" between employees and students. But it doesn't provide guidelines for teachers on maintaining appropriate boundaries, which experts say is often where abuse begins.

Against the backdrop of these weak guidelines, Kevin Dean Neal, a law and public safety teacher at the Putnam Career and Technical Center vocational school, cultivated a sexual relationship with a student. After her classmates reported their suspicions to a counselor in late 2017, an assistant principal picked up the student from class, investigative notes show, and she confirmed that Neal had sex with her. It started, a classmate said, when Neal began giving "special treatment" to the girl and spending time with her between classes, including alone in his office. The singling out and the one-on-one time are both recognizable behaviors that an anti-grooming policy could have prohibited.

Neal was suspended. Then, like many teachers before and since, he asked the student he'd groomed to participate in a cover-up.

"Just deny it all," Neal told the girl in a string of digital communications uncovered by investigators. "They will probably want to download our phones so make sure your txt, emails, social media is all clean from anything that has to do with us." (Neither Neal nor his attorney responded to requests for comment.)

Even when strong policies do exist on paper, attorneys, school insurance representatives, and state department-of-education investigators I spoke with described training as bare bones.

Mary Jo McGrath, a lawyer in Santa Barbara, California, spent decades bringing child-abuse cases and developed a training program to assist school administrators in rooting out abuse. But while many California districts have adopted aspects of her curriculum, she said most districts "do the bare minimum" in educating staff to identify signs of abuse.

Scott Tennant, the deputy director of a firm that provides liability insurance for nearly 100 New Jersey school districts, told me that training for reporting suspected abuse needed to be improved. Teachers, he said, are often encouraged to go out of their way to help struggling students, and they need granular guidance on how not to cross boundaries. Navigating those limits can be especially challenging for young teachers in their 20s, Tennant said, who sometimes feel they have more in common with their students than with their older colleagues. The students who need additional support from teachers are often the same ones who, research shows, are most vulnerable to being groomed, a pattern that plays out again and again in the disciplinary documents we analyzed for this story.

"For educators, they are told all the time, 'Build a relationship with your students,'" Tennant said. "In schools there's an intimacy that doesn't exist in any other organization. You need to wrestle with that, talk about it, and be constantly aware."

No unified tracking system

Experts in teacher sexual misconduct agree that one of the most critical steps in preventing abuse is for schools to avoid hiring documented predators. Yet there is no surefire way for administrators to know that someone they're considering for a job has a history of sexual misconduct.

With no federal system for tracking educators who abuse students, NASDTEC has stepped into the breach. Since 1988, the Washington, DC-based nonprofit has maintained a clearinghouse of adverse actions taken against teacher credentials from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. But the database is not public; it's available only to state credentialing agencies and the small fraction of districts that opt in and pay a modest annual fee. Only 254 school districts across the country — less than 2% — currently have access.

NASDTEC's executive director, Jimmy Adams, chalked up the small number to a lack of awareness, which he said he's working to address next year.

But his predecessor, Phil Rogers, told me that he'd often run into resistance when pitching the clearinghouse to superintendents. "It's surprising how many districts have no interest in it. They just see it as another chore," Rogers said, recalling efforts his staff made to expand access and redesign the online portal to make searching for teachers' names more straightforward.

"When you can prevent a problem and you choose not to, it's just baffling," Rogers said. "I have no way to explain it."

The records states share with NASDTEC are often uncategorized. In Kentucky, for example, state officials reported 460 adverse actions taken against teacher credentials from 2017 to 2022, labeling 10% as having stemmed from sexual misconduct. But last year the Lexington Herald-Leader analyzed a subset of those cases and obtained the underlying documents, finding that the majority of its sample — 61% — related to sexual misconduct. (Toni Konz Tatman, a spokesperson for Kentucky's Department of Education, declined to say why the agency doesn't note which cases are sex-related, saying the agency reports all adverse actions to NASDTEC "regardless of the offense.")

To see whether such discrepancies are common, I requested the adverse actions on teacher credentials that each state has reported to NASDTEC since 2017. The records, which we obtained from 33 states, show that action was taken against at least 22,000 teacher credentials. But only 11 of these states disclosed whether a given incident was sex-related. Thousands of cases in those states appeared to involve misconduct with a student — with language referencing an inappropriate relationship with a minor or "conduct unbecoming to the teacher profession," among other vague verbiage — but state officials didn't file them as sex-related.

Many states claimed that they didn't maintain a record of what they'd sent NASDTEC, or heavily redacted their reports before releasing them. Louisiana's Department of Education, for example, initially gave me a spreadsheet including columns for each type of misconduct except sexual misconduct. I pressed for an explanation, struggling to see how the omission could be inadvertent. Eventually the department released an unredacted version, showing at least 18 credential revocations for sexual misconduct.

The lack of transparency sometimes extends to what districts disclose to their own state licensing boards.

"We try as much as possible to get information," said Kris Murakami, a licensing specialist with the Hawaii Teacher Standards Board, which oversees credentials for the state's 13,000 teachers. Murakami said her office isn't notified by the state's largest school district, which employs the majority of teachers on the island, when a teacher is investigated for suspected abuse. When an investigation ends in a teacher's resignation or termination, the district doesn't routinely share disciplinary records with her office in a timely manner, she said — records she needs to take action against a teacher's license. She sometimes learns about abuse from local news reports.

"Our concern is that without knowledge that individuals were disciplined, we have no idea," Murakami said. "Therefore, some teachers could still be in the classroom" in one of Hawaii's charter or private schools.

I asked Murakami's boss, the board's executive director, Felicia Villalobos, why she thought the district wasn't more transparent. "Once the individual is terminated, they couldn't care less about the license," she said. "It's like, 'We got rid of this person. That's it.'"

It was a pattern I'd noticed in the data: teachers being disciplined at the district level but retaining their state credential.

(A district spokesperson declined to make anyone available for an interview and did not respond to detailed written queries.)

Some state credentialing agencies have chosen transparency, creating online portals where anyone can search a teacher's name to see whether they are credentialed. But few disclose why a credential was revoked — potentially opening the door for disgraced teachers to pack their bags and find a job in one of the many states facing a crushing teacher shortage.

In 2020, records show, Anthony Rudy Cisneros, a teacher in the Santa Fe Public Schools in New Mexico, repeatedly messaged a 17-year-old student asking for photos of her. "Me being a creeper asking you for a sexy picture!" he wrote to her. "You are a very beautiful young lady!" A couple of months after, the district's superintendent sent Cisneros a notice of termination, informing him that the reasons "shall not be publicly disclosed." When I asked him about the misconduct, Cisneros said, "Who gives a fuck? I can care less."

A Santa Fe Public Schools spokesperson, Cody Dynarski, said that in cases like Cisneros', the reason for termination "would be disclosed to another school district upon inquiry so that we do not pass a problem from one school district to another." But the New Mexico Public Education Department's online portal offers only a one-word description of Cisneros' credential status: "revoked."

Cursory investigations

By the time a former student of a stage manager, Jacob Zamora, shared his experience with a psychologist, it had been nine years since Zamora began having sex with him. He had been depressed, the young man told police, and Zamora, then his teacher, was the only adult he could confide in at the time. The day Zamora performed oral sex on him in his bedroom was the first sexual experience of his life; after that, Zamora met with him for sex "every other weekend" for months, he said.

Police alerted Zamora's employer, Arizona's Skyline High School, in June 2021 and later shared documents. Yet district records indicate that the head of HR, Renee Parker, waited until August 28 of that year to investigate — three weeks after school had started. Parker's notes show that her investigation amounted to a single meeting with Zamora. She asked him repeatedly about meeting up with students outside school, and he said he did so often, in groups. "I provided coaching telling him that it was time to stop meeting students off of campus," Parker wrote.

Days after Parker questioned him, Zamora was arrested and charged with three counts of sexual contact with a minor. The following week, he sat down with Parker for a due-process hearing. This time, Zamora admitted to a sexual relationship with the boy — and made another startling admission: He'd sexually abused several more students. "I pressed for names of the victims multiple times, but he would just say that he did not remember them by name," Parker wrote. She told him she would recommend that he be fired, and noted that Zamora "accepted resignation in lieu of termination." There's no record in the files that Parker interviewed any other teacher or student in an effort to identify Zamora's additional victims.

Zamora pleaded guilty to sexual conduct with a minor in 2022 and was sentenced to five years in prison; he did not respond to a request for comment. A district spokesperson, Jen Snyder, said Parker "worked directly with the Mesa Police Department and followed their guidance" in conducting her investigation of Zamora.

Of the 388 disciplinary files related to sexual misconduct we obtained, less than half contain evidence that a thorough investigation was conducted. Most of the disciplinary files show that administrators simply interviewed the teacher, or the teacher and the student they were accused of abusing. In many cases, as with Parker's first interview with Zamora, administrators then allowed the educator back into the classroom with a warning.

At Gibbs High School in St. Petersburg, Florida, an anonymous tipster reported in 2018 that a coach was having an "inappropriate relationship" with a student. Principal Reuben Hepburn, who has since died, spoke with the child's father, who, according to notes of the meeting, told him the coach was "very involved with his 3 children — with his blessing." Maybe the tip about the coach was false, or maybe it wasn't. Hepburn never found out, because the investigation ended there, with a note that he would monitor the teacher and concluding: "File under school name: unsubstantiated."

In Clayton County, Georgia, a district HR official reprimanded a teacher named William Zerressen in 2022 after a complaint alleged that he'd hugged a grade-school student and touched her "in a way that made her feel uncomfortable." The reprimand itemizes eight previous allegations spanning two decades, noting the "similarity and the severity" of the misconduct. It then instructs Zerressen to engage in "appropriate student interactions," attaches a set of employee policies, and allows him to continue teaching.

There's no indication that the official interviewed any of the other complainants.

Zerressen told me that administrators removed the student from his class and that an investigation found no wrongdoing. He also said he's now retired and suggested that the string of misconduct complaints over the course of his career were fabricated.

Mild sanctions

The disciplinary documents show that substantiated misconduct by teachers often leads to minor consequences.

In one case, the Lake Washington School District in Washington State identified a "pattern of inappropriate behavior" by Scott Nelson, a PE teacher, including complaints from students that resulted in at least six separate investigations over a nearly 30-year career. Students accused Nelson of making sexist comments that made them uncomfortable and said he'd "poked" and "grabbed" them. He was repeatedly warned that "touch was only to be used when necessary for health and safety reasons," placed on administrative leave for violating the district's sexual-harassment policy, and issued letters of reprimand, most recently in 2021. Yet each time, Nelson was allowed to continue teaching.

Nelson told me the accusations against him were false and called them acts of retaliation by students with "low or failing grades." He resigned from Redmond Middle School earlier this year and said he was now coaching at another school. (District spokesperson Shannon Parthemer said that while she could not comment on personnel matters, "Our district is dedicated to creating a safe and positive learning environment for all students.")

Another Clayton County, Georgia, teacher, Donald Wilson, was investigated by law enforcement in 2017 after multiple female students said he'd sexually harassed and groped them. (It does not appear that charges were ever filed.) Several girls told investigators that they'd witnessed Wilson, a JROTC instructor, hug recent alumni while sliding his hand "down to their buttocks" and that he'd had sex with a former student. Wilson received a written warning for "unprofessional conduct" from the superintendent — and continued teaching. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Investigative notes from last year show in granular detail how Larry A. Jackson, a teacher at South High School in Columbus, Ohio, engaged in textbook grooming behavior. Once, when a student was in his car, Jackson touched his thigh and rubbed his neck; another time, Jackson "tongued" the student in the school basement. Jackson told the boy that if they waited until graduation, they could "do everything we weren't able to do now." A friend of the student eventually told another teacher, who alerted administrators.

Rather than fire Jackson, district officials reassigned him to a job at the enrollment office. A spokesperson, Letrece Griffin, said the district immediately removed Jackson from the classroom and that he resigned 11 months later "instead of facing disciplinary action." (Jackson did not respond to requests for comment.)

Of the 388 investigative files we reviewed involving allegations of teacher sexual misconduct, more than a quarter resulted in no more than a reprimand — or no disciplinary action at all. A handful of teachers were suspended or reassigned. Sixty were terminated. Twice that many were allowed to retire or resign.

That outcome is often described in documents as a "voluntary resignation in lieu of termination." It's an approach that allows administrators to more quickly get rid of abusive teachers. But it also can provide cover for teachers accused of serious misconduct.

In some districts, such as Cumberland County Schools in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the outcome appears to be routine. In internal emails we obtained, a human-resources official explained to the school board's attorney that "these matters typically have resulted in a resignation" without a settlement or separation agreement. (Associate superintendent Ruben Reyes said the district is "committed to transparency" following allegations of teacher sexual misconduct and reports relevant information to the state board of education.)

In dozens of other districts, officials said they could not process my request for severance agreements because they kept no centralized record of them.

Some said the only way to identify severance agreements would be to comb through years of school-board meeting agendas to find the names of teachers whose resignations were quietly rubber-stamped. Other districts said they would need to go through each individual teacher's paper personnel file, one by one. An attorney for the Federal Way Public Schools outside Seattle told me he'd identified more than 130 teachers who "may have" signed an agreement, but he said the files were in off-site storage and locating them would take more than six months.

'Pass the trash' laws

Again and again, the documents tell the story of school administrators who had no idea that a new hire had been investigated for misconduct with students at a previous school.

In 2021, Frank A. Hrvatin, a substitute teacher in New Mexico, resigned after students told administrators he had sexually harassed them, remarking during a virtual class "won't you turn on your camera to make an old man's day" and in another instance touching a female student's chest. Only during their investigation of the incident did Rio Rancho Public Schools officials discover that Hrvatin had been accused of assault and battery of a student in a previous school district. Hrvatin had resigned from that job, too.

Rio Rancho spokesperson Wyndham Kemsley would not comment on personnel matters but said all district job applicants are "subject to work history, education history, and reference investigations"; Hrvatin did not respond to requests for comment.

Before Paul H. Ladd, a special-education teacher, went to work in Vermont's Missisquoi Valley School District, he'd left a job in a nearby district after an administrator reported suspicions about Ladd's relationship with a female student. Once at his new job, Ladd was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting the girl. Missisquoi's superintendent, Julie Regimbal, told me she'd been blindsided — the district had made three reference checks, she said, and "there were no concerns or allegations of misconduct of any kind shared."

(Ladd was eventually convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to a year in prison; he did respond to requests for comment. Lynn Cota, the superintendent for his previous district, Franklin Northeast Supervisory Union, said she was "not aware of any sexual misconduct by Mr. Ladd while he was employed" by the district.)

It turns out Neal, the public-safety teacher in West Virginia who urged the student he abused to "deny it all," also had a history his employers at the Putnam Career and Technical Center were unaware of. Documents show that a student's mother at one point confronted Putnam's principal about Neal's background at Ben Franklin Career Center, a nearby technical school.

The Putnam principal, CD Caldwell, sent an urgent email to a staffer at Ben Franklin: "You had told me initially there were unfounded allegations" against Neal. "I was very disturbed," he went on, "when you started filling me in with all you knew about Ben Franklin and the accusations there." Caldwell mentioned his conversation with the mother. "I told her I could not talk about that," he said. (Briana Warner, a spokesperson for the Kanawha County Schools, which oversees Ben Franklin, said while Putnam could have asked for Neal's personnel file during the hiring process, "to our knowledge, that was not requested.")

Neal was eventually convicted of sexual abuse for his potentially preventable misconduct at Putnam.

Last year, the federal Department of Education published an explosive report that detailed the fragmented and inadequate state-by-state approach to preventing abusive teachers from reoffending. The report found that 16 states lacked any so-called Pass the Trash bans, a collection of laws requiring districts to disclose sexual-misconduct allegations against teachers to prospective future employers or to look into applicants' employment histories. Yet the report withheld the names of states to "maintain their anonymity."

Business Insider obtained the report's underlying data, which allowed us to identify which states have instituted a variety of laws and policies meant to prevent districts from hiring teachers who have engaged in sexual misconduct or from suppressing information about their behavior.

We found out that West Virginia, home to Putnam County, is one of the 16 states that does only the minimum — requiring a criminal background check for new hires.

Documents show that even districts in states with the strongest combination of Pass the Trash laws don't always comply with them. When Mina K. Bateman was hired as a special-education assistant in Seattle Public Schools in late 2017, she failed to disclose a 2016 reprimand stemming from inappropriate conduct with a student at her previous district, nearby Oak Harbor. Seattle Public Schools should have requested Bateman's records prior to hiring her, as required under Washington's Pass the Trash law — the first of its kind, enacted back in 2004. But Seattle didn't ask Oak Harbor to share the disciplinary documents until 2018, when it sent a state sexual-misconduct disclosure release form.

Once Bateman's reprimand surfaced — a substantiated allegation that she had messaged a male student on Facebook and communicated inappropriately with him, violating a policy on "maintaining professional staff/student boundaries" — district administrators allowed her to continue teaching under a "last chance" agreement and did not require her to admit to any wrongdoing.

Bateman continued teaching in Seattle until August 2019; she did not respond to requests for comment. (Bev Redmond, a Seattle Public Schools spokesperson, said in a statement that the district had since "tightened its application standards and would currently not allow an employee who provided false information on a job application to remain employed.")

While Pass the Trash laws generally require information-sharing among district administrators, they stop short of requiring that this information be made publicly available, leaving students and parents in the dark.

Regardless of state laws, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 requires any educational institution receiving federal funds to have policies that prohibit employees from "aiding and abetting sexual abuse" by assisting those who engaged in sexual misconduct in getting a new job elsewhere. Terri Miller, the president of the advocacy group Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation, said that law, too, is not always enforced.

"It doesn't have teeth," she told me. "They say states can lose federal funding for not following this, but not a single state has."

It can be expensive and time-consuming to fire a teacher, Miller said, between legal costs and negotiations with teachers union reps. But failing to conduct a thorough investigation and allowing teachers to resign effectively evades disclosure laws and "exacerbates the problem," Miller explained. "The teacher goes on, and offends at their next school."

Enforced secrecy

A national conversation has erupted in recent years about the ethics of nondisclosure agreements in cases of sexual misconduct in the workplace. Last year, Congress responded by passing the Speak Out Act, which bans the use of NDAs to gag victims of sexual abuse. But this legislative urgency hasn't extended to schools. Only 20 states have enacted laws or policies that prohibit district officials from suppressing information about sexual misconduct by school employees.

We found that nondisclosure clauses remain routine in school-district severance agreements — even in some of the states that prohibit them in cases of sexual misconduct.

Of the more than 3,700 such agreements we obtained from school districts since 2017, the vast majority offer no detail of the conduct that led to the departure. But in 196 cases, we were able to pair the agreements with disciplinary records released by the same district. We found that districts in 13 states — Arizona, California, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming — used NDAs to gag district officials from speaking about allegations of teacher sexual misconduct, regardless of whether the claims were substantiated. Of those, four states — Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, and Washington — explicitly prohibit the use of NDAs by districts to conceal sexual misconduct by employees.

The nondisclosure clauses often bar school officials from sharing anything beyond basic information with prospective employers, such as dates of employment and subjects taught.

Beyond the use of NDAs, many districts are bound by union contracts to keep teachers' personnel files private. Nearly a third of union contracts feature such protections, according to our analysis of 142 union contracts from large districts in every state, shared with us by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, DC-based think tank. This kind of contract language was often cited by administrators in response to our requests for disciplinary records.

These simple secrecy mechanisms play a major role in allowing predatory teachers back in the classroom.

SESAME, the organization led by Miller, has worked with state and federal lawmakers in an effort to ban NDAs in school district severance agreements. But she said SESAME had run into opposition from teacher unions. While Pass the Trash laws in many states require that past misconduct findings be disclosed, compliance is difficult, Miller said, as the culture of many school districts is "ingrained in silence."

It's a culture I often encountered while I sought teacher disciplinary records.

In Montana's rural Lockwood School District, Superintendent Tobin Novasio initially redacted the name of Lynette Larson, a deceased teacher, from what he told me was the district's only recent separation agreement.

"I likely don't have a legal leg to stand on, I'm just unsure what value there is in releasing Lynette's information," Novasio emailed a colleague. "I'm sure they are looking to do an article on how many misconduct cases there have been and how much taxpayer money is wasted on these buyouts," he wrote another. "In our case it was much more cost efficient to pay her insurance for a couple of months than hire an attorney to terminate her."

In other cases, administrators appeared to be more concerned with avoiding teacher lawsuits than protecting their students. Take the Central Bucks School District outside Philadelphia.

"With something of this nature, the potential liability of disclosing this information far outweighs the benefits to disclosure," the district's outside attorney, Robert Iannozzi, told me, after acknowledging that the district had discretion under the law to release teachers' disciplinary records.

After a spokesperson on the call interjected, Iannozzi walked back his remarks. "Forget my concerns of liability," he said. "I should not have complicated the situation."

An analysis of settlement payouts tracked by United Educators, an insurance firm in Bethesda, Maryland, shows that teachers don't represent the only litigation risk. Since 2017, $886 million in settlement payouts have been made across the country to students who filed lawsuits alleging teacher sexual misconduct.

The "vast majority" of the nation's 3.5 million public-school teachers "are ethical professionals who work to protect children," Adams, NASDTEC's director, told me. "We all agree that one incident is too many."

The cost of silence

The inability of administrators to even determine how many of their teachers have been investigated for misconduct leaves a gaping hole in our understanding of sexual abuse in schools. Experts say the lack of data on basic questions, such as how often abusive teachers are passed along to other schools, allows policymakers and education officials alike to believe the problem isn't as widespread as it is.

"This is all about protecting the institution," said Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah who has authored research papers on child sexual abuse. "So that when there's one case that comes out, they can say, 'Oh, that's just one case.'"

The invisibility and silence surrounding abuse in schools has been critical in allowing it to endure.

That silence begins with the failure to itemize and prohibit grooming behaviors in educator codes of conduct. It continues when school officials make a problem quietly go away with a resignation, forgoing the kind of investigation that could uncover other victims and create a paper trail. And it is at its most dangerous when school officials decline to share misconduct allegations and even substantiated cases of abuse with an educator's next employer.

When I set out to see whether these painfully obvious shortcomings, so routine at my alma mater, were common elsewhere, I wondered what patterns might emerge. Such as whether schools in working-class neighborhoods like the one I grew up in were more likely to harbor predators. Or whether districts where a teacher had been arrested for sexual misconduct implemented changes or simply allowed history to repeat itself.

In the end, I found prevention failures and mishandled allegations all across the country, in rich districts and poor ones, urban and rural, in schools with mostly white students and in schools attended mostly by students of color. In district after district, the incidents were deliberately shrouded by secrecy.

This silence surrounded the case of Troy Pickens, the chorus teacher who was investigated in 2015 for abusing a student at Neal Middle School in Durham County, North Carolina. "The situation looked bad," an HR official told Pickens, according to a subsequent civil suit, "and they would rather he resign than be fired."

That quiet resignation paved the way for Pickens to lie to school officials in nearby Wake County when he applied for a teaching job there, saying he'd left Neal to care for a sick family member. There, at Durant Road Middle School, Pickens repeatedly sexually assaulted a sixth grader in the school bathroom, her civil complaint alleges. (The suit settled out of court.)

Pickens was eventually convicted of statutory rape and other sexual offenses and sentenced to more than 75 years in prison. His attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

As for the student, she was unable to set foot on campus again at Durant Road. Then she stopped attending school for good. She became despondent and was treated for severe emotional distress and developed an eating disorder so severe that she was hospitalized. Her weight, at age 12, dropped to just 50 pounds.

"Predators," her lawsuit says, "are well known in the field of education to 'go where the children are.'"

This was the cost of Durham County's silence.

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