A '90s sex-abuse scandal at Pahrump Valley High School (five convictions) prompted Terri Miller to craft Nevada's only law criminalizing sexual misconduct by educators (passed in 1997).
A three-year spate of arrests in the Clark County School District, along with a contentious Hofstra University study estimating that one in 10 students nationwide are sexually abused by a school employee, has the nationally noted activist on the offensive again, railing at states and school districts for not doing more to protect children.
"It's never been this bad," Miller, a training coordinator for the nonprofit Nevada Coalition Against Sexual Violence, remarked in 2002 after the district was hit with nine arrests in a five-month period (two teachers had prior histories of illicit contact with students).
At the time, George Ann Rice, assistant superintendent of human resources for the district, wished for "morals detectors so we could find the people with bad hearts," telling the Weekly that the district was doing all it could—fingerprinting, scrutinizing, questioning.
It hasn't been enough.
In the two years since Miller called for more laws, 10 local teachers have been arrested on charges ranging from possession of child pornography and lewdness to molestation and rape, bringing the number to 19 since 2001. And only one law has passed since—hers, amending the law she championed to add volunteers to the list of the prosecutable.
While vetting the histories of 2,000-plus teachers, something is likely to slip. Miller says the problem stems from a lack of cooperation between states and the federal government and collusion among enabling administrators.
Nevada remains one of 33 states that doesn't log data on sexual misconduct by school personnel despite the federal government requiring such data, and even conditioning funds upon compliance. But noncompliant states aren't being penalized, Miller says. Neither are they compelled to run new employees' histories through a federal clearinghouse.
"We have too many gaps in the communication system: Different states have different data on teachers who lost licenses, and often states don't say why licenses were lost," Miller says. "The national clearinghouse is underused, and it lacks funding to be reliable. So whose watching the henhouse in Nevada?"
Keith Rheault, Nevada's superintendent of public instruction, failed to return a call for comment. Local school officials routinely assure they're going above and beyond.
Then, as now, Miller says the biggest issue is "passing the trash"—shuffling abusers from district to district without divulging their criminal histories. Federal data shows that abusers have worked in as may as four districts before getting caught. A former Pahrump teacher, profiled in a segment on HBO's Real Sports, was in his fourth district when he was arrested for sexual misconduct at a California school in 2002. By exposing a hush-hush scandal in Pahrump—one teacher who married 1982 and 1992 graduates—Miller simultaneously became a town pariah and activist and earned the attention of the New York-based Survivors of Educator and Sexual Abuse and Misconduct Emerge Inc. In 2002, she was elected group president.
Miller was privy to the Hofstra report months ago, having helped lure its author, Hofstra University education professor Charol Shakeshaft, and seven other national experts in sexual misconduct, to town in 2003 for an educator sexual-abuse conference. Then as now, in Las Vegas as with the rest of the nation, she says, sexual misconduct by school officials is treated like a "dirty little secret. This is a systemic problem, one directly ignored and handled much in the same way as the Catholic church scandal."
Mandated by No Child Left Behind, the first-of-its-kind report sampled 2,400 students in half of the nation's 16,000 school districts and compiled nearly 900 documents (research papers, government reports, newspaper articles). Extrapolating data from a survey of eighth- through- 11th graders in 2000, which estimated 9.6 percent of students experienced sexual misconduct, Shakeshaft deduced there were 4.5 million affected students. The nation's teachers union chided the study for "creating unjustified alarm," "undermining confidence in public schools" and being "insufficiently focused." Others worried about students imagining abuse.
Reached in New York, Shakeshaft says she calculated in error margins to offset fables. Her mission was never to create a conclusive document. She couldn't. There is no peer-researched analysis in this field of study. Essentially, she's creating it. Shakeshaft says calling public attention to sexual abuse in schools rightfully trains the spotlight on the crimes.
"The study was not meant to say we have a definitive answer, but that this is the data we have and this is what it says," Shakeshaft says. "If there is an error, does that mean the numbers can be a little higher or lower? Yes. Does that mean there's no problem? No. Does that mean there's a need for a better study? Yes.
"The law doesn't say what a sexual act is or isn't," she continues. "Kissing you against your will? I reported on that. Porn? I reported on that. As a parent, as a teacher, as a member of society, I don't want school personnel sharing pornography with my kids or having sexual conversations with kids, or writing sexual notes or telling sexual jokes, or touching my child on the breasts or buttocks. Anything like this, I called it educator sexual misconduct."
Without hard state numbers, it's impossible to gauge where the Clark County School District rates. Miller cites federal data showing that in New York one child gets molested every day by a teacher, and says it's likely no more problematic than other overcrowded districts.
Though encouraged by recent talks with CCSD Superintendent Carlos Garcia—a meeting with the district's crisis-management team is planned—Miller says Nevada can take immediate steps to help safeguard children. They include requiring teachers to submit to polygraph tests and undergo a psychoanalysis similar to the ones given to police academy recruits; pressing for laws that mandate background checks every five years for school personnel; holding school officials liable for passing the trash; and asking districts to adopt live-scan technology, which allows administrators to check criminal records almost to the minute. Miller thinks the hardest fight will be changing society's attitude toward sexual misconduct at schools.
"Too often, great teachers and winning coaches groom students as well as the community," Miller says. "We never think that these people will abuse our children."