Child Advocate Report Cites Vernon Schools Over Adult Sexual Misconduct Incidents

by Jamil Ragland

HARTFORD, CT – The Office of the Child Advocate released a report this week detailing multiple failures of the Vernon Public School district and the Department of Children and Families in dealing with allegations of adult sexual misconduct.
The report was in response to a complaint received by the Office of the Child Advocate (OCA) in July 2022 detailing sexual harassment of a student outside of Vernon Public Schools by a VPS staff member. The staff member, who is not named in the report or supporting documents, was providing coaching services in an outside district when the harassment occurred.
According to the report, the unnamed faculty member was a physical education teacher who had worked for VPS since 2000. The allegations stated that the teacher had exchanged “explicit and suggestive” text messages with the student between late 2021 and early 2022, when the student was 17 years old. The Department of Children and Families (DCF) conducted an investigation at the time and substantiated the claims of abuse. No formal charges were filed, and the teacher resigned from Vernon Public Schools.

The complaint also alleged that the staff member had committed other instances of harassment of students in the Vernon school district, and that the district had failed to conduct a timely investigation into those prior allegations. OCA investigators viewed the teacher’s file, and concluded that although there were no instances of adult sexual misconduct in his file, after OCA reviewed DCF records there had been multiple allegations of sexual harassment and/or inappropriate behavior toward students made against the teacher by students enrolled in the district. The report details five different incidents involving the teacher that stretch back to 2003, with most occurring since 2020.
“OCA identified widespread deficiencies in the district’s compliance with Title IX and other requirements for the prevention and response to child sexual harassment or abuse,” wrote State Child Advocate Sarah Eagan.
Despite receiving multiple complaints about the teacher from students, and the superintendent acknowledging to OCA investigators that there had been multiple complaints, the Vernon school district never opened its own investigation into the teacher’s conduct, which is required under Title IX. Additionally, when OCA asked the Vernon school district for any other Title IX investigations it had conducted, the district responded that there had been none in the last five years. When pressed further, the district produced documentation regarding two separate investigations it had conducted outside of the Title IX framework.

However, OCA investigators reviewed DCF records and found that more than two staff members had been accused of adult sexual misconduct by individuals reaching out to the DCF Careline. The time period in which Vernon schools claims to have carried out no Title IX investigations includes the case of former staff member Christian Stevenson, who was arrested in September 2021 on multiple felonies including second degree possession of child pornography and voyeurism with a child under 16 years of age. Stevenson was accused of taking “upskirt images taken surreptitiously of underage students inside the school” and  “hundreds of photos, often focusing on the buttocks, chest and crotch of young female students,  taken in Rockville High School.”
“The lack of any documentation regarding a working Title IX system…leads OCA to conclude that the District is likely in substantial non-compliance with its obligations under federal law to prevent and appropriately respond to concerns of sexual harassment and sexual abuse of children enrolled in the District,” the OCA report states.
In response to the investigation conducted by OCA, the Vernon Public School instituted several new policies, including revising its sexual harassment reporting forms to facilitate better record keeping, offering new trainings to staff regarding adult sexual misconduct, human trafficking, and Title IX requirements, and seeking additional feedback from students in surveys regarding bullying and harrassment.

The report also included recommendations for DCF to improve its process of investigating adult sexual misconduct in schools, noting that “such investigations are typically facility and staff oriented and may be very different than investigations into family-based caregiver misconduct.”
DCF created a specialized unit, the Educational Professionals Investigation Unit, to respond to calls it receives to its Careline. 
“The Department appreciates the unique nature of investigations conducted by the Educational Professionals Investigation Unit (EPIU) and is finalizing policy and training specific to this work, which will be governed by the Department’s existing statutory authority related to abuse and neglect investigations,” DCF said in a statement. “Likewise, the Department also appreciates the intent of [the recommendation] related to  training and oversight for the EPIU. The EPIU was created in 2020 for the purpose of  centralizing all school personnel investigations under one statewide management structure to standardize practice and procedures for these specialized investigations.”

Vernon Public Schools did not immediately respond to a request for comment.