I recently heard #MeToo founder, Tarana Burke say, “If we are living in community with each other and one person has harmed another, if you can’t get accountability from that person, I, at the very least, need to try and stand in the gap.”
This is my attempt, to link up with Tony Mecia, Cristina Bolling, Carter Sherman, Nick Ochsner, Anna Maria Della Costa, Scott Fowler, and those in media I may have missed, and stand in the gap.
With gratitude to my editor, Greg Lacour, for being put in the almost unfair position of editing a passionate woman on such a challenging topic.
Opinion: The Questions the CMS Sexual Assault Trial Didn’t Answer
On January 20, a jury in U.S. District Court found that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools did not act with deliberate indifference in the handling of a former Myers Park High student’s report of sexual assault by another student in 2015. That is what is required to prove a violation of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sexual discrimination by public schools that receive federal money.
The verdict ended the formal, legal process in one case. But I have a daughter in fourth grade at a CMS school, personal experience that provides insight into how school systems should handle these matters—and questions the verdict didn’t answer.
The case is one of a string of allegations that CMS ignored or intimidated female students who accused male students of sexual assault on school property, including five others at Myers Park from 2014 to 2019. In 2021, a Hawthorne Academy student was suspended after she reported her sexual assault, and two other Hawthorne students say school administrators forced them to sign non-disclosure agreements outside the presence of their parents, and told them later there was no evidence for their claims.