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Share this on Email Background checks ignored Man with criminal record assaults girl after being allowed to volunteer as coach Agnes Lee / For the Chicago Tribune Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-illustration-gaddy-20180523 The man known as “Coach Babyface” had a rap sheet that disqualified him from supervising Chicago Public Schools students, including four felony convictions for dealing and possessing drugs. But Simeon Career Academy failed to conduct a mandated criminal background check before making Gerald Gaddy an assistant coach of the boys wrestling and girls track teams starting in 2010. The following year, when officials finally looked into the volunteer coach’s background, the district’s Office of School Safety and Security sent an urgent email to Simeon’s principal, stressing that Gaddy should not be allowed near students until further checks, including fingerprinting, were conducted. Gerald Gaddy Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-mug-gerald-gaddy-20180525-002 “This person MUST NOT perform volunteer work,” Chicago Public Schools employee Luz DeLuna wrote in that email. Instead, Gaddy would become a prominent presence in the school, a South Side sports powerhouse that has produced NBA superstars and competed for state trophies in the sports Gaddy coached. Simeon even gave him a master key to school classrooms and offices, court records show. In one of those offices, a secluded space overlooking the high school’s Olympic-size pool, Gaddy would repeatedly rape a 16-year-old athlete. His sexual demands were brutal. He told her: “I want to see tears in your eyes,” according to her statement in one police report. Gaddy is now serving a 40-year state prison sentence for those assaults as well as for groping two other female athletes, one 15 and the other 16. In addition to those crimes, Gaddy subjected at least six more students to unwanted sexual touches and frightening sexual come-ons in a pattern of abuse that lasted more than a year, according to police reports, internal CPS memos and court documents examined by the Tribune. His sexual behavior toward students could be brazen at times, a prosecutor said in court. In two blurry cellphone snapshots taken by a friend of Gaddy’s primary victim, a school security guard appears to watch as Gaddy escorts the sophomore by the hand in a school hallway. Standing 6 feet tall and weighing 200 pounds, Gaddy towered above the 5-foot, 97-pound girl. “Judge, you might notice in that picture there’s a security guard in a yellow shirt, and even the expression on the security guard is sort of one of astonishment. Like, ‘Hey, what? What’s going on here?’ ” Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Mikki Miller told the judge during Gaddy’s 2016 criminal trial. “I mean, it was blatant. The defendant thought he was invincible and blatantly was doing things in public places where people could see them.” On a bus ride home from a track meet in 2014, Gaddy was massaging the young athlete’s thighs when Gaddy’s adult girlfriend — an assistant girls track coach at Simeon — pulled him out of the seat by his hair and shouted accusations at the two in the presence of other school staff and students, police reports and other government records show. She “grabbed him by his dreads and made him sit by her,” one runner testified at his trial. “This was in front of the entire team,” prosecutor Miller told the judge. Yet it took an outsider to expose Gaddy: a woman who arrived at Simeon to run a peer health education program for female athletes and learned he had been touching them in inappropriate ways. With her encouragement, several athletes stepped forward. Gaddy finally was barred from Simeon in June 2014, and a month later police arrested him. From prison, he did not respond to a letter from the Tribune requesting comment. In response to the Tribune findings, CPS acknowledged “serious errors” allowed Gaddy to work at the school, including Simeon administrators’ failure to complete a full background check. Since 2014, CPS said it has strengthened its background check policies for teachers, coaches and volunteers. “As the Gaddy case shows, we believe our standards were not observed on a consistent basis in previous years and that is unacceptable,” the district said in a written response to the Tribune. However, CPS said its review of the case “did not find credible evidence that anyone (at the school) witnessed and failed to report sexual abuse.” Simeon Career Academy on April 2, 2018. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-building-simeon-05302018 ‘I enjoyed your birthright’ Simeon administrators had a reason to welcome Coach Babyface: The wrestlers got stronger and the runners faster under his conditioning regimens as the Wolverines piled up more trophies. “The first year he was brought on board the sophomores won the public league championship, and the next year as well,” said Marque Riley, former head track coach. “He definitely added to that.” Gaddy could intimidate the young athletes but he also was charismatic and funny, runners told police. He bought them cookies, drove them home from practices and offered to take them downtown and to the mall. “It’s a grooming process,” prosecutor Miller told the judge at Gaddy’s criminal trial. The nine Gaddy victims listed in police records declined to comment for this story; information about the abuse they suffered is drawn from their police statements, a report by CPS Law Department investigators, and testimony in criminal court hearings and civil court depositions. On April 9, 2014, on a bus returning from a track meet, Gaddy sat next to the 16-year-old he would rape 40 times, and won her confidence. The runner confessed to Gaddy she was attracted to him, according to her court testimony and statement to police. She assumed the coach would say he was flattered and dismiss it as a schoolgirl crush. Instead, Gaddy wanted to get physical. “He told me that he wanted to kiss me, but I told him I thought it was best to not have any type of physical contact until I was of age,” she testified at Gaddy’s criminal trial. Two days later, Gaddy coaxed her up to a secluded office marked by a Wolverines logo and the word STORAGE on a second-floor balcony overlooking the glistening swimming pool. He kissed her. Then he told her to pull down her pants and bend over, she told police. A police report said: “Gaddy was very rough with her, grabbing her hair.” He gave her a handwritten card the next day, prosecutors said at trial. “I enjoyed your birthright,” Gaddy wrote. “I enjoyed the moment you held me. I wonder what did it feel like when I embraced you in return. I enjoyed looking into your eyes. I enjoyed looking at your lips. ... I wondered if you would enjoy your birthright as much as I did, little sister.” Described in court records as a track team leader and honors student aiming for a law career, the girl started cutting seventh- and eighth-period advanced math and chemistry classes to follow Gaddy to his office. Over the next weeks, as his sexual demands became more painful, she began ditching school to avoid him, according to her police statement and testimony at Gaddy’s criminal trial. Her grades plummeted, her best friend deserted her and she began talking about dropping out of Simeon and even ending her life. “I began to become very disgusted with myself for doing this and disgusted with him for not wanting to stop,” she testified. In their last encounter, she said at Gaddy’s trial, he pinned down her hands as she asked him repeatedly to stop. It felt like rape, she confided to a friend, according to a police report. Warnings disregarded When Gaddy belatedly filled out a volunteer application in January 2011, he listed two of his four felony drug convictions. Simeon Assistant Principal Sterling Bolden knew those crimes were enough to disqualify the would-be coach, Bolden later testified. Still, Bolden said in a court deposition, he processed the paperwork and sent Gaddy’s application for a background check to CPS’ School Safety and Security office. DeLuna, the administrative assistant who oversaw the check, emailed the principal days later that Gaddy must not be allowed to do volunteer work. But no one at Simeon told Gaddy to stay out of the school, as DeLuna’s email instructed. And no Simeon official followed up to see if Gaddy took the next step and was fingerprinted at a police station for an additional level of checks, according to court and school records. Several months later, Simeon wrestling coach Dave Burchett discovered that a full background check had not been completed for Gaddy. Burchett restarted the process, and Gaddy again disclosed two felony drug convictions. Burchett said in a deposition that he checked with Simeon athletic director Reginald Brock and Brock told him Gaddy’s convictions shouldn’t be a problem because they were outdated and not child-related. Burchett took no further steps, court records show. Brock declined a Tribune interview request. Bolden and Burchett also declined to comment. CPS said Bolden, Brock and the Simeon wrestling and track coaches were not disciplined as a result of the Gaddy case. Track coach Riley told police and the Tribune that he never witnessed any inappropriate behavior between Gaddy and any girl on the track team. “I never did. Not even an inkling,” Riley told the Tribune. When the abuse came to light, “my jaw hit the table. I felt betrayed.” Background check failures like Gaddy’s were widespread at Simeon, records show. When Gaddy was arrested in 2014, only 46 people on a list of 80 recent school volunteers had undergone complete background checks, according to Simeon records later made public in court. The list of 80 volunteers also was incomplete. It did not include Idris Bridgeforth, who drove Simeon runners home from practices until 2012, when he was charged with abusing a 14-year-old girl from nearby Ashburn Elementary as he drove her to and from school sporting events, the Tribune found. Bridgeforth is serving a 10-year prison sentence for sexually assaulting that girl. Sounding the alarm Wanakee Trask arrived at Simeon in 2014 to run a leadership program for girls called Peer Health Ambassadors that paid female athletes small stipends to attend sex education classes and then coach younger girls on reproductive health. An Army National Guard member and recent college graduate who went on to teach algebra at a Chicago charter school, Trask declined to speak to the Tribune for this story. Her account is drawn from her 67-page 2017 civil court deposition as well as her court testimony and police statement. After lunch on her second day inside Simeon, Trask said, she spotted a runner walking alone in the hallway. The girl slowly revealed that Gaddy had groped her chest repeatedly in a sexual way while adjusting a weight vest for runners and that he had been touching and groping her and other girls for more than a year, police and court records show. The student had texted a fellow team member about the latest groping incident, but her mother had discovered the text and ordered the student to quit the track team immediately. The girl was upset, Trask testified at Gaddy’s criminal trial. “She was very distraught. She started crying. She was trembling.” Quitting the track team meant walking away from a shared enterprise that connected this athlete to her school, as well as losing the paycheck she would bring home by participating in the teen health program, Trask testified in her deposition. “This was a job for them, so she was making money,” Trask said in her 2017 civil court deposition. “She didn’t want to lose her job.” Trask immediately called the student’s mother, then walked the girl into the office of Principal Sheldon House and told him what was going on. House’s response, according to Trask’s court testimony, was: “Please don’t tell me you contacted the parent.” Trask said she had already made that call and planned to drive the girl’s mother to Simeon because the woman’s car wouldn’t start. As the girl spoke, House reacted initially with skepticism, Trask testified last year in a civil court deposition. “It was almost like he was upset with her for saying anything in the first place,” Trask testified. “He would say things like, ‘So this happened this long ago and you’re just now saying it?’ — almost like he didn’t believe it.” House “was definitely trying to make sure that he covered Simeon’s behind first,” Trask testified. “Simeon is known for sports and … this was something that could potentially have brought a really negative light to the school and sports in general.” As Trask left the principal’s office, she testified in court, “other girls from the track team, they just pulled me aside because they had other things that they had to tell me.” House did not respond to Tribune interview requests. CPS told the Tribune that House immediately notified authorities and banned Gaddy from campus after learning about the athletes’ allegations. “The suggestion that he was skeptical of the victims does not align with our records,” the district said in a statement. House told police that he was stunned as he absorbed athletes’ accounts one after the other. He said “he was shocked and could not believe it had been going on for two years and no one told him,” according to a detective’s report. House later took prompt action in two subsequent cases of alleged sexual misconduct by Simeon security guards, the Tribune found. A conflict of interest The Investigations Unit that probes reports that Chicago students were sexually attacked is housed in the district’s Law Department — which also defends CPS from legal liability in these cases, sometimes by blaming the student victims. It’s an arrangement that national experts say creates a conflict of interest. “That’s a problem. They’re policing their own. They’re not an unbiased investigative entity,” said Terri Miller, president of the advocacy group Stop Educator Sexual Abuse Misconduct and Exploitation. A report of abuse, Miller said, “needs to get to law enforcement, not the Law Department." When Gaddy’s primary victim filed a civil lawsuit against CPS for the abuse she endured, the district’s lawyers used their investigative files to implicate and discredit her. In court papers, CPS lawyers argued that the athlete was not credible because it took her weeks to tell authorities that Gaddy was abusing her and because she at first denied any sexual contact with him. She engaged in “repeated instances of active concealment, denial, and dishonesty ... in an attempt to ensure that the relationship would not be discovered,” CPS lawyers wrote in October 2017. They also argued in court papers that she “factually consented to the sexual relationship with Mr. Gaddy” — even though she was only 16 when he began assaulting her, below the age when consent to sex with an adult is legally possible in Illinois. She “was the individual who initiated such relationship in the first instance knowing full well that it was not appropriate and illegal,” CPS attorneys wrote. A jury last year awarded $515,000 to the girl and her family — $360,500 from CPS and the other $154,500 from Gaddy. Two other civil lawsuits from Simeon students are pending. CPS said it is common for school districts to house investigative units within their law departments and “believes it is an appropriate structure.” Still, the district said it would ask an independent evaluator to examine whether changes need to be made “to improve current practices.” Additionally, CPS said it will encourage its lawyers to use “language that is more reflective of victims who cannot legally consent, such as minors.” The track team star was “the victim of a horrible crime,” the district said. “CPS did not and would not suggest that a minor is capable of consenting to sexual activity with an adult.” dyjackson@chicagotribune.com

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Share this on Email The gift of silence CPS fails to tell parents about alleged misconduct by renowned choir director Agnes Lee / For the Chicago Tribune Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-illustration-weaver-20180522 Robert Jeffrey Weaver’s resignation from Chicago Public Schools was abrupt, occurring just weeks before the 2012 school year was to start, and it shocked many of the students and parents who admired and even adored him. Weaver had earned accolades as choral director and chair of the music department for selective-enrollment Payton College Prep, leading his singers in a concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and as they performed the national anthem at Soldier Field and traveled to China to sing “Lotus Flower” in concert with that country’s top young vocalists. Weaver also held “Boys Talk” seminars for male students and led its all-male a cappella ensemble, the Sounds of Sweetness. Still, when he left, there was no official explanation, no note home from the school. Robert Weaver Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-mug-robert-weaver-20180525-002 What parents didn’t know was that Weaver resigned just as CPS investigators were preparing a devastating report alleging sexual misconduct dating back more than two decades. That 37-page report from September 2012 found “credible evidence” that Weaver had oral and anal sex with one student over a five-year period, showed pornography to that student and another student at his apartment, and sexually harassed multiple students at Payton and at nearby Lincoln Elementary school, where he previously taught. CPS initially denied the Tribune’s Freedom of Information requests for basic records about Weaver’s career and his misconduct, saying it would be “unduly burdensome” to produce any of that paperwork. But after the Tribune threatened a public records lawsuit, CPS released a redacted version of the 2012 investigative report. The Tribune also has reviewed an unredacted version. Acting on the findings in that report, CPS sought to have Weaver’s state license revoked. But that process would take five years and remain confidential. It wasn’t until 2016 that the first hints of Weaver’s treatment of children would become public. He was charged that year with predatory criminal sexual assault of a child on allegations he abused the son of a family friend two decades ago when that boy was 8 or 9 years old. Weaver’s criminal attorney, Ellen Domph, told the Tribune that Weaver is innocent of all accusations of sex crimes, including those in the pending criminal case as well as the allegations raised in separate State Board of Education proceedings that led to his teaching license being revoked last year. “Our contention is the allegations against Mr. Weaver concerning sexual misconduct are false,” Domph said. Weaver, 60, has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial. He still has supporters among former Payton students and parents. One parent told the Tribune she believes he will be vindicated. She and others recounted the countless unpaid out-of-school hours he spent organizing activities for students and the inspiring and positive impact he had on many young lives. At the time of Weaver’s arrest, law-enforcement authorities stressed that the alleged victim was not a Chicago Public Schools student and that the charges were not connected to Weaver’s teaching career. But they soon added a former student to their case, identifying him as only H.E., as evidence of other crimes by Weaver. The court document describes H.E. as a 13-year-old when Weaver allegedly began sexually assaulting him over a five-year period. He’s the same former student identified by CPS investigators in their 2012 report. That former student spoke to the Tribune, saying he wanted his full name — Henry Eygenhuysen — to be used. In 2012 he wrote a Facebook post about Weaver that sparked the CPS investigation. “I feel the need to tell my friends and family that I was sexually abused by my ... music teacher,” it began, according to the CPS investigative report. It was on the playground of Lincoln Elementary in 1992, when Eygenhuysen was 13, that Weaver told him he had a great voice, he recalled in a Tribune interview. Weaver, who had founded the Lincoln School Junior and Senior Choristers while teaching there, offered the boy private vocal lessons at Weaver’s apartment on Roscoe Street. Eygenhuysen, now 38, remembers that his parents were thrilled. All the attention he began to receive from Weaver thrilled him too. “I felt special,” Eygenhuysen said. “I felt chosen.” Payton College Prep High School on March 8, 2018. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune) (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-building-payton-05302018 ‘A cool, open adult’ In the classroom, Weaver was the kind of teacher students responded to and remembered. He spiced up his lessons with sexual innuendos and jokes. His colorfully decorated Payton homeroom featured memorabilia from the animated sitcom “South Park” and boxes of novelty candy with raunchy jokes on the wrappers, Tribune interviews and government records show. “Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten,” one gum package said. He showed students cellphone pictures of penis magnets that were on his refrigerator, according to the CPS investigative report. He talked about his favorite bars. Students in Room 214 learned to tick off the hours on Friday afternoons as “Countdown to Weave’s Party Time!” “In school he brought forward this weird sexual jokiness,” one former student told the Tribune. “It got kids to laugh and let their guard down.” Weaver took male students to performances by the Blue Man Group, to Cubs games, to favorite dining spots like Perennial Virant — and even to his North Side apartment, former students told the Tribune. In 2004, a brief investigation of Weaver for misconduct led nowhere after a recent Payton graduate told a school math teacher about his relationship with Weaver. The details of his account would later be included in the 2012 CPS investigative report, and the former student gave the Tribune a similar account in a recent interview. The former student had known Weaver since he was 10 years old at Lincoln. Weaver had gotten him into the Harand Camp of the Theatre Arts in Wisconsin, where Weaver taught children over the summer, according to his account. When the boy was a sixth-grader, Weaver invited him to a Cubs game and then to Weaver’s apartment for some food. Then they watched hardcore pornography in the bedroom, according to the CPS investigative report. Five years later Weaver proposed that they masturbate together and he politely refused, the report said. The CPS investigation in 2004, triggered when the math teacher went to the school principal, didn’t last long because the student had second thoughts and then denied any misconduct had occurred. In a recent Tribune interview, the young man described the powerful reasons he kept silent then. For most of his life he had known Weaver as a positive figure and mentor, and not just to him. “He had helped so many young men,” the young man said. “There was all this evidence of him being a good person.” He knew that speaking out might destroy the beloved teacher’s career. “It’s like pressing charges against your aunt or uncle,” he said. “They might go to jail.” And he said he had no evidence that any child had been abused. “It wasn’t that I was aware that other things had happened and made a choice to do nothing,” he told the Tribune. “Nothing was bubbling up, and I didn’t believe that was even remotely possible, because nothing (physical) had happened to me.” At the time, he said, he saw Weaver as “a cool, open adult who talks about sex.” “Now I look back and see there was a darkness to it,” the young man said. “All our stories have parallels. I do think Jeff Weaver did care and take a real interest in his students’ well-being, but it was wrapped up in his desire to engage sexually. “He built up trust. He was playing a slow game.” “He built up trust. He was playing a slow game.” A former student of Weaver’s In 2012, in the wake of Eygenhuysen’s social media post, CPS re-examined that former student’s account. This time he acknowledged Weaver’s misconduct and the allegation was deemed credible by CPS investigators. A second, similar case came to light in the spring of 2012, before Eygenhuysen’s Facebook post. The mother of a Payton student complained to a teacher that Weaver had taken her son to Perennial Virant for “tutoring,” then invited the teen to his apartment. The boy told his mother he went along but soon felt “uncomfortable” and left. Then the boy got text messages from Weaver that made him feel “creeped out,” the CPS report said. Weaver also touched his lower back repeatedly when ushering him into the classroom. And he said Weaver had commented on a T-shirt he was wearing, saying, “You’re asking for a blow job,” according to the CPS investigative report. But the boy’s father emphatically told investigators that he did not want the student entangled in a legal proceeding or interviewed by investigators. He did not want his son “to be the kid who ousted Mr. Weaver,” according to the CPS report. Parents often decline to press charges because of the pain they feel the investigation might bring their children, said Charles Hobson, a professor of business administration at Indiana University Northwest who has studied student safety and abuse. “I can understand as a parent saying it was extremely traumatic when it happened and I don’t want to continue the trauma,” he said. “The overwhelming number of victims and their families never file a complaint.” But even in cases when victims stop cooperating, school officials who are put on notice of abuse allegations have a moral and legal obligation to notify child protective services and continue the investigation, Hobson and other experts said. “There are likely other victims,” he said. Robert Jeffrey Weaver, right, leaves the the Leighton Criminal Courts Building with his attorney following a court appearance Feb. 13, 2018, in Chicago. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-jeff-weaver-court-05312018-001 Nicknamed ‘347’ Starting in 1993 and for the next five years, the choir director trained his student in a simple routine, Eygenhuysen said. Weaver took him out for a bite, they watched porn and then Weaver had sex with the boy. “Lunch, movies and sex for dessert,” Eygenhuysen told CPS investigators. “I survived it,” he told the Tribune. “I would just say I survived it.” The court filing on Eygenhuysen in Weaver’s criminal case describes a pattern of pornography and sexual conduct, adding: “The defendant told H.E. that this was their secret and that he should not tell anyone.” In criminal court papers, Domph countered by arguing that Eygenhuysen’s claims “are plainly lies. ... This entire scenario rings false.” But over Domph’s objections, Judge Arthur Hill Jr. ruled that prosecutors could introduce portions of Eygenhuysen’s account in the pending criminal case involving the child of a long-ago family friend. Eygenhuysen told the Tribune he was still a teenager when he told his first girlfriend the story of what happened, then confronted Weaver. The teacher wrote a letter of apology begging Eygenhuysen not to tell anyone and enclosed $347, according to prosecutors’ court filings and Weaver’s license revocation case. That dollar figure had an intimate meaning, Eygenhuysen told the Tribune. At his apartment, Weaver kept a book of inspirational sayings called “Life’s Little Instruction Book.” Number 347 was “Never waste an opportunity to tell someone you love them.” Weaver even gave his student that nickname, calling him “347,” Eygenhuysen said. In taking the money, Eygenhuysen told the Tribune, “I felt confused, ashamed, embarrassed, disgusted. I had trouble getting through high school.” At age 18, Eygenhuysen revealed to his parents what had happened and showed them Weaver’s letter, according to the CPS investigator’s report. They urged him to call police, but by then, he said, he was abusing alcohol and drugs and didn’t feel he would be taken seriously. In July 2012, amid the news about the Penn State sexual abuse scandal, Eygenhuysen wrote the Facebook post about Weaver. A Payton student and fellow theater camp alumni shared that post with the Payton math teacher, who alerted the school’s new principal, Tim Devine. This time, police and the Department of Children and Family Services were called. Eygenhuysen sketched for investigators a floor plan of Weaver’s bedroom, with its homemade metal bookshelf and waterbed. When CPS investigators interviewed Weaver in August 2012, he admitted sending Eygenhuysen $347 but denied sexually assaulting him, according to internal CPS records examined by the Tribune. Still, within days the choirmaster resigned, which felt like a measure of justice to Eygenhuysen. “At least if he wasn’t in jail, he wasn’t teaching and he didn’t have access to any more boys,” he said. Now living in the San Diego area, Eygenhuysen told the Tribune that for years he carried the pain of his abuse. “I felt embarrassed and ashamed, some guilt for waiting so long. I could have reported it earlier. I just should have spoken up sooner,” he said. “It felt like he had gotten away with something and was still walking around. He was still teaching children.” It took years before Eygenhuysen realized he wasn’t at fault. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I was only 13,” he said. ‘You want to grab din-din?’ When Weaver invited sophomore Edgar Santacruz to dinner at a chic Chicago restaurant, his parents asked why this grown man was interacting socially with students. “It was kind of weird,” Santacruz, now 25, told the Tribune in an interview, “but the way I defended it was, he does it with everyone.” As director of the Sounds of Sweetness, Weaver gathered singers’ personal phone numbers so he could alert them to upcoming rehearsals and gigs. He urged them to contact him if they needed anything. Investigators who subpoenaed Weaver’s phone records counted nearly 7,600 texts exchanged via the personal phones of 20 Payton students over a two-year period. Soon, texts from Weaver became part of Santacruz’s school routine, he said. According to Santacruz, sometimes Weaver would text: “You want to grab din-din?” Santacruz said he and Weaver went to Morton’s The Steakhouse, to Chicago Fire soccer matches, to see the Blue Man Group. Weaver also gave Santacruz and his father tickets to a Cubs game, he said. Santacruz does not figure into prosecutors’ case against Weaver; nor is he part of the allegations that led the state to revoke Weaver’s license. The Tribune heard his account after reaching out to former students and their families. As a high school junior, Santacruz came to feel uncomfortable with Weaver’s dinner invitations and began ignoring them, he said, but he still viewed Weaver as an important friend who had helped him succeed at Payton. In 2011, when Santacruz was a senior, he accepted an invitation to dinner and stopped by Weaver’s house afterward. That was nothing unusual, Santacruz said. But then, he said, Weaver offered Santacruz a beer, which felt strange. As Santacruz took a few sips, Weaver began talking about pornography, Santacruz said, asking the student if he ever watched it and offering to show him a favorite clip. As they watched on a laptop, he tried to convince himself this was normal — that this is what guys do. Weaver delivered a running commentary, saying at one point of a woman on screen that “she knows what she is doing,” according to Santacruz. Then Weaver said: “The only person who really knows what a guy wants is another man.” Santacruz recalled saying: “‘I am straight.’ He said, ‘No, OK, that’s OK, that’s fine. This is just guys’ talk.’” Weaver used that phrase frequently in his seminars, to promise students that what they said in Room 214 would stay there, according to Santacruz. Weaver and Santacruz had one more dinner after Weaver resigned and before the criminal charges were filed. Then, Santacruz said, they never saw each other again, though text messages from Weaver kept popping up on Santacruz’s cellphone. Santacruz showed a reporter dozens of texts he said Weaver sent from 2014 through 2016. “I miss you and would love to have a beer with you!” said one. “347!” said another. Silence from the school The final sentence in the 2012 CPS investigative report offers this simple yet disturbing conclusion: “Between 1993 and 2012 Mr. Weaver engaged in the practice of establishing relationships with (students) for the purpose of enticing them into sexual relationships.” It was a finding that no one associated with Payton or with Weaver’s other endeavors as an educator and music director would see. “Payton and CPS did not notify parents or the broader school community about the misconduct,” CPS acknowledged in a statement to the Tribune. Several national experts told the Tribune that administrators should notify the school community in such cases, assuring parents that authorities are taking steps to protect students and encouraging any other victims to come forward. CPS also didn’t notify prominent institutions where Weaver held a position of trust over children, the Tribune found. Weaver was a founding director of the Chicago Area Studio Theatre (CAST) for Kids at the Menomonee Club for Boys and Girls, his Payton bio shows. Menomonee Club Executive Director Neal Bader said CPS told his organization nothing about the allegations against Weaver. “We were absolutely unaware,” Bader said. From 1982 through 2004, Weaver spent summers teaching children at the Harand Camp. Co-director Janice Gaffin told the Tribune she had never received any allegation of sexual misconduct. “Our own children and relatives attended camp and we would have immediately fired anyone involved in that kind of behavior,” she said. Weaver had been Scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 79, which some Payton students joined. In response to Tribune questions, the Boy Scouts said in a statement that the organization does not share information about leaders or employees. In response to the Tribune’s findings about the Weaver case, CPS said it will retrain all staff on mandated-reporter requirements to make it clear that state child welfare authorities should be notified even about allegations of past abuse. CPS also said it will develop and distribute guidelines beginning in the next school year to ensure that parents and the broader school community are notified of credible abuse allegations. CPS did not respond to Tribune questions about whether it was obligated to notify other child service institutions where Weaver volunteered or worked. One Payton mother told the Tribune she remained oblivious to any danger while her son, also a choir member, maintained a friendship with Weaver in the years after he resigned. She was shocked to learn of the criminal charges against Weaver when they were reported in 2016. “That upsets me to no end,” said the mother, who requested that she not be identified to protect her son’s privacy. “It was just, oh, he’s left the school.” dyjackson@chicagotribune.com

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Share this on Email His secret was safe Chicago fails to warn Florida district about educator who resigned under investigation Agnes Lee / For the Chicago Tribune Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-illustration-stapanian-20180522 A Chicago Public Schools investigation found that teacher Stephen Stapanian touched the crotch of one student, running his fingers down the zipper of the boy’s pants. He also taught disabled students how to circumvent the internet firewall to access pornographic websites, the investigation concluded, and asked them whether they wanted to look at “hard porn” or “soft porn.” He asked children to dine with him, to visit his apartment overlooking Grant Park and to watch movies in bed with him, the investigation by the CPS inspector general reported. He drove them places in his personal car. He plied them with candy and cash to keep quiet. And he “lied” on two occasions to CPS investigators, the inspector general’s report said. Stapanian denied the allegations in that report but resigned amid the 2011 investigation. Still, when a Florida school district looking to hire Stapanian just a few months later asked CPS directly whether he had resigned, a district human resources clerk marked the box for “No,” records from Florida show. The CPS clerk also offered no information about the misconduct allegations against Stapanian. He got the Florida teaching job. Stapanian, 64, is among educators across the nation who find enablers in school districts like Chicago, which fail to warn the next potential employer and allow teachers to quietly leave while under investigation. A little more than four years after he’d left Chicago, Stapanian applied for a second Florida job and that district asked CPS directly whether Chicago would rehire him. In fact, CPS had marked him “DNH,” internal shorthand for “do not hire,” according to CPS personnel records released to the Tribune. Yet on the Florida district’s employment verification form, a CPS clerk simply wrote “NA” — the common designation for “not applicable” or “no answer.” Many states require school districts to disclose an educator’s past misconduct to prospective employers, regardless of when it happened. But Illinois law prohibits school districts from disclosing employee records after four years have passed, including ones that show sexual misconduct with students. Florida school officials had nowhere else to turn for information because CPS did not comply with a state law requiring it to quickly share its findings on Stapanian with the Illinois State Board of Education, which can revoke or suspend teaching licenses. Illinois then took until 2017 to suspend Stapanian’s licenses. By then, he’d been teaching in Florida for nearly six years, records show. Although the CPS inspector general’s report on Stapanian’s misconduct was shared with other local and state agencies, it is not public. A copy was obtained by Tribune reporters through sources. It otherwise would still be secret. When the Tribune requested a copy of Stapanian’s personnel file through the open records act, the portions CPS released to the newspaper did not mention any abuse allegations. Informed of the Tribune’s findings, the district did not address why CPS provided misleading information about Stapanian to the first Florida district. But CPS said it would support changes in state law that would enable it to more readily share former employees’ discipline history with other school systems, including changes that would allow CPS to reveal disciplinary information that is more than four years old. The district’s statement also acknowledged that it failed to quickly notify the state that Stapanian had resigned after the inspector general concluded he had “inappropriately touched” a student and showed other students how to access pornography at school. “We are concerned by unacceptable cases like the Stapanian matter,” CPS said in a statement. The district said it will audit its process for notifying the state board as part of a “full-scale” examination of the district’s response to sexual abuse cases. The general counsel for the state board, Stephanie Jones, said she could not discuss any specific case, including Stapanian’s. In an interview outside his Tampa mobile home, Stapanian denied any misconduct with students and contended that administrators at his CPS school, motivated by racism and ageism, made up false accusations against him. “They wanted me out of the school because I was on the older end. I’m white. They wanted to bring in their own people — African-Americans,” Stapanian said. The school’s special education students also lied about him, he said. “I feel victimized by this. I felt the system goes off of what the kids say even though I tried to tell my side of the story; they didn’t seem to be supportive of my interpretation. It’s like they already had their minds made up about me,” he said. “How do you fight against that? You can’t.” Stapanian said many of his students came from troubled backgrounds. “They needed a lot of love, attention and respect … and I’m very nurturing as a teacher,” he said. A pact of silence Stapanian, an art major whose early teaching career was marked by stops and starts, spent nine years as an assistant manager at T.J. Maxx and Burlington Coat Factory before CPS first hired him in 1990, according to personnel records released to the Tribune. He left the district in 2002 in the middle of the school year. Stapanian said he quit for medical reasons. The Kenosha schools took him on in 2003, but two years later, then-Kenosha Superintendent R. Scott Pierce and teachers union representative Bob Baxter met with Stapanian to discuss unspecified “information or concerns,” records show. The single-page agreement that resulted said Stapanian would resign and the district would “destroy all information that led to the issues discussed or mentioned at the September 23, 2005 meeting.” Stapanian would be paid through December of that year and receive employee benefits for another eight months after that. The agreement was signed by all three: Stapanian, Pierce and Baxter. Two years later, Stapanian would be back working in Chicago. It’s not clear how CPS vetted Stapanian or whether the district tried to look into the agreement in Kenosha that led to his exit there. Baxter declined to comment on the agreement. Pierce, now superintendent of the Central High School District of Westosha in Wisconsin, said he does not recall signing the agreement, or what Stapanian’s “issues” were. “The name does not ring a bell. I don’t remember that agreement at all. As far as records being destroyed, that’s kind of surprising. I do not remember that at all,” Pierce told the Tribune. Stapanian said he left Kenosha because he was being harassed by a principal. “I’d sit in the lunchroom and eat with the kids and she’d be standing there watching me,” Stapanian told the Tribune. “So finally one day I said, ‘Listen, I can’t take this anymore.’” In Chicago, Stapanian was assigned to Montefiore, a school for students with emotional and behavioral troubles that has since closed. Stapanian’s Montefiore colleagues found him odd and thought his interactions with students were peculiar, which made them “very uncomfortable,” according to the confidential CPS inspector general’s report. But his fellow educators came forward only after students began to speak out, those records show. One child told a Montefiore social worker that Stapanian had invited him to his home to eat candy and watch movies in bed, the inspector general’s report said. The social worker told some other school employees to limit Stapanian’s contact with the student, but made no formal report of the student’s story, that report said. Stapanian told the Tribune that he actually did invite students to his apartment but “they had to be chaperoned.” “I said, I have a pool and if you want to come by with your parents you can,” he said. “It looks like I was trying to lure kids to my house. I was not.” The former Montefiore school on March 12, 2018. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-building-montefiore-05302018 Complaints about Mr. S In the fall of 2010, while out with a special education classroom assistant and a teacher at Simone’s bar in Pilsen, Stapanian asked his Montefiore colleagues whether it was OK to look at pornography on his school-issued laptop, according to the inspector general’s confidential report. The pair later told investigators they thought he was joking. Stapanian told the Tribune he was. Weeks later Stapanian, sweating profusely, approached the school’s technology coordinator and asked her to electronically scrub his CPS laptop of emails that included naked photographs of men from a dating website, according to the inspector general’s report. Stapanian told the Tribune he’d used his CPS email address to contact potential dates. “A lot of this stuff, because of my poor judgment, looks suspicious, but it wasn’t intentional,” he said. The Tribune found no record that any Montefiore staff reported concerns about Stapanian to anyone outside the schoolhouse until after a student “Peace Circle” meeting with administrators — a conflict-resolution session in which students take turns expressing concerns about school life. During such a meeting in December 2010, two students shouted out that “Mr. S” had been showing them porn, the inspector general’s report said. The principal later talked to the students in Stapanian’s class. One said Stapanian “always gets too close.” Later, both students separately showed the principal how Stapanian taught them to access a porn website using a proxy server, according to the inspector general’s report. They successfully accessed porn on the principal’s computer using Stapanian’s method, the report said. Stapanian told the Tribune that he did talk about pornography with students but didn’t teach them how to access it — they already were doing so. “I was sick and tired of it. I said, ‘Get off it. You can’t be on that stuff.’ You can’t have kids on that in the classroom. I know that. But in their opinion, they thought I was encouraging them.” Using public records and confidential sources, Tribune reporters identified the 14-year-old boy whose zipper Stapanian allegedly stroked as the late Stanley Bobo. Bobo ran out into the school hallway shouting to a teacher that he’d been groped by Stapanian: “You touched my dick!” he yelled, according to the report of CPS investigators. Stapanian allegedly offered Bobo bags of Snickers bars to keep quiet about the incident, according to the inspector general’s report. But child welfare investigators were never called in response to allegations about Stapanian, from touching a youth to helping students access pornography at school, CPS said in a statement. “We have no record of DCFS being contacted by the school administration,” CPS said. “The school administration should have contacted DCFS.” Attempts by the Tribune to reach those administrators and Montefiore staffers for comment were unsuccessful. Bobo’s mother, Bernadetta Brown, told the Tribune that she called the school after her son told her about the zipper-stroking incident but that she was ignored. “Why didn’t they call the police?” she recalls Bobo asking. Stapanian told the inspector general’s office that he did not touch students inappropriately. He said “he has touched students on their backs and on their heads” but added that “the students did not like that and would pull away from him,” according to the inspector general’s report. He said students told him they preferred fist bumps. He then “stated that he has never touched a student anywhere else,” the report said. Stapanian also told the Tribune he never sexually touched Bobo. He said he was breaking up a fight between Bobo and another student in his classroom when “my hands just went down to keep them apart and I brushed (him).” About four years after his encounter with Stapanian at Montefiore, Bobo was shot and killed on an Englewood street. Stephen Stapanian on May 1, 2018, at his home in Largo, Fla. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-stapanian-20180522-002 A new start in Florida Stapanian told the Tribune that before he resigned in 2011 a CPS official assured him that CPS would not tell other districts why he left. “They told me that on the phone — we only verify dates of employment if employers contact us. We do not go into the details,” Stapanian said. No details about Stapanian’s misconduct case would be coming from the state, either. Under Illinois law, the State Board of Education can release records related to educator misdeeds only in cases in which the educator decides to fight license sanctions in a hearing. Stapanian did not. Such hearings are rare: None was held in the 2014-15 and 2016-17 school years, state records show. That means little information is available to employers seeking to hire Illinois teachers or to anyone else who wants to know why an educator’s license was revoked or suspended. His Chicago record safely under wraps, Stapanian moved to the Tampa area in 2011 and found a job in Hillsborough County schools. “On the job application it says were you ever in a position where you resigned to avoid termination and I checked no. I lied on that,” Stapanian told the Tribune. “If I check yes I probably won’t get a job.” His Hillsborough County application included a glowing reference from former Montefiore Principal Mary Ann Pollett — who had no way of knowing about the allegations against Stapanian. “It’s shocking. I am very dismayed I sent a letter of endorsement,” said Pollett, who had left the school in 2010. “I had no knowledge of inappropriate action on his part.” Stapanian resigned his Hillsborough County teaching job in February 2014 — midyear again — for “personal reasons,” he said. “The assistant principal was riding me and saying I wasn’t teaching.” When Stapanian’s next school employer, Pinellas County, asked about his background, Hillsborough’s human resources manager checked a box to indicate that he would not re-employ Stapanian but offered no explanation, records show. Chicago didn’t answer the question at all, putting “NA” instead. He was hired. CPS told the Tribune that it will work with state legislators to remove obstacles to sharing misconduct reports with other districts — citing the Illinois’ Personnel Records Review Act, which limits districts’ ability to provide disciplinary records that are more than four years old. “Barriers should be removed to allow districts to more easily share discipline information about former employees so that people who pose a threat to students are not able to find work in a new district,” CPS said in its statement. In November 2017, six years after Stapanian began teaching in Florida, Illinois suspended his license for a three-year period. Illinois’ official notice included a short “Statement of Charges” drawn from Chicago’s 2011 investigation of Stapanian — the first public reference to the allegations of misconduct six years earlier at Montefiore. Stapanian’s conduct was described in Illinois’ statement as “unprofessional and immoral behavior.” After inquiries from the Tribune in January, the Florida Department of Children and Families asked the Florida Department of Education to look into Stapanian’s teaching licenses, a spokesman for the child welfare agency told the Tribune. Florida education officials would not confirm or deny whether the state was investigating Stapanian, but within days the Pinellas schools Office of Professional Standards filed a case report accusing him of falsifying his 2014 employment application by failing to mention that he left Illinois while under investigation for alleged misconduct. In February, Stapanian resigned. Outside his trim white mobile home adorned with angel and cherub statues, Stapanian said he is now unemployed, and added that he thought it was unfair that allegations from Illinois should affect his ability to teach in Florida. “Whatever happens in Illinois happens in Illinois,” Stapanian said. “I’m trying to leave that difficult past. It was all unfortunate.” gmarx@chicagotribune.com

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Share this on Email Teacher solicited sex via text Schools face a challenge in managing electronic communications with students Agnes Lee / For the Chicago Tribune Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-illustration-williams-banks-20180524 The substitute teacher with wire-rim glasses and a trim goatee gave off the air of a refined intellectual. But 28-year-old Aaron Williams-Banks had a daring edge. Once, during an eighth-grade algebra class at Black Magnet Elementary School, he lifted his shirt to show students the dragon tattoo inscribed across his rib cage. On another day he took 14-year-old Tamara Reed’s cellphone right from her hands during class, held it for a moment, then handed it back to her. Reed was startled: Her teacher had sent a text to himself, leaving a record of his private number on her phone. Aaron Williams-Banks Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-mug-aaron-williams-banks-20180525 A few days later, curious and a little flattered, Reed sent him a simple text: “Hey.” That launched a cascade of messages between the teacher and a student half his age. Soon he was texting her until late at night. His messages quickly slid from casual to flirty to obscene, records show. One evening, in a text sent just before midnight, he made his intentions clear: “I want to have sex with you.” The private contacts between Williams-Banks and Reed — detailed in court testimony and in Tribune interviews with Reed and her mother — lasted for several weeks and ended in February 2015 with his arrest. His efforts to groom a teenager underscore the growing challenge for school administrators as teachers turn to cellphones and computers to keep students engaged, share assignments and course material, and schedule field trips or sports practices. Across the country, educators and legislators are grappling with whether or how to craft laws and policies that guide adult communication with students through personal phones, social media platforms and messaging apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp and Kik. Tamara Reed: In Louisiana, teacher-student contacts through social media or personal electronic devices must be approved by the school district and documented. But a similar law in Missouri was repealed after a challenge from the state’s teachers union. Districts in New Jersey and Texas must have teacher-student electronic communication policies, but no specific rules are mandated, according to an analysis conducted for the Tribune by the National Conference of State Legislatures. “It is hard to craft policy that is not over-broad and chilling to speech,” said Janet Decker, an associate professor of education at Indiana University. She also cautions that the mode of teacher-student communication is far less important than the content. Most states do not require districts to impose electronic communication policies on teachers, but big urban districts including New York City have issued guidelines cautioning teachers to communicate one-on-one with students only via networks set up for classroom use. In Illinois, for instance, suburban Naperville has an 11-page set of guidelines that limits employees to in-school platforms when communicating with individual students; outside networks are allowed only with district approval. Chicago Public Schools addresses the matter in its broader computer-use policy, saying communication with students must be on the “CPS Network.” There’s no official policy on social media interactions, though CPS said it distributed “guidelines” to administrators last year that restrict staff interactions with students on social networking sites. In response to Tribune questions, CPS said in May that it will conduct an independent review that could add protective measures. While cellphone policies are currently left to individual schools, the district said it plans to create districtwide cellphone guidance and retrain staff. Recent cases show how quickly things can go awry when teachers communicate electronically with students. In 2015 and 2016, Noble charter school dance teacher and coach Angel Pagan sent Snapchat messages to three students that were innocuous at first. Soon, though, he was pressuring the boys for nude photos of themselves, and sending lewd texts and photos of his penis, court records show. Pagan was eventually charged with aggravated criminal sexual abuse and sexual exploitation for allegedly groping the boys, ages 16 and 17, and stalking them in the school showers. Pagan pleaded guilty to aggravated criminal sexual abuse and was sentenced to six months in jail and two years of sex offender probation. Attempts to reach him for comment for this story were unsuccessful. Paul Peatry, a Bowen High School janitor and assistant basketball coach, started sending friendly greetings to a 16-year-old special education student in 2013. Then came the blatant sexual overtures, court records show. “I was telling him, ‘I’m not ready for that,’ ” the victim later testified. But within weeks of those first messages, he took the girl into a classroom, blocked the door with a bookcase and sexually assaulted her, according to police and court records. Peatry also texted and then abused a second 16-year-old special education student before pleading guilty to aggravated criminal sex abuse of both students. He served two years’ probation and remains on the Illinois sex offender registry as a predator. Peatry told the Tribune he is innocent and was pressured by authorities into a false confession and guilty plea. “I didn't do anything,” he said. Tamara Reed outside Black Elementary School on April 13, 2018. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-tamara-reed-close-20180522 ‘Good night beautiful’ Initially, Reed saw it as no big deal when Williams-Banks reached out to her. “I didn’t think it was weird ’cause I’m always friendly with teachers at my school,” Reed recalled to the Tribune. The texts were initially “casual – a little flirtatious,” she said in court. “I told him about the cupcakes that my stepdad had brought home,” Reed, now 17, told the Tribune. “He asked could I bring him one? I said, ‘Sure.’ And he said, ‘What do you want in return?’ in a flirty way.” “Are you sure you don’t want a hug?” she said Williams-Banks suggested. “I said to him, ‘I’ll take a hug.’ ” They exchanged the cupcake and a hug the next day in school, and then several days later Williams-Banks texted her to ask if she thought “he was cute.” “I said yes,” Reed recalled to the Tribune. “Then he told me how he thought I looked ‘enticing.’ ” Soon she changed his cellphone contact name from “Mr. Banks” to “Chestnut,” for the color of his skin, and then to “LulBug,” her new and intimate nickname for him, according to her testimony. “Good night beautiful with your cute stomach and boobs,” one of his messages said, according to transcripts of his texts entered as court exhibits. Williams-Banks asked Reed via text if she had ever had sex before. He told Reed he thought about sex with her, the court records show. “I felt like, is this really happening? I can get a teacher’s attention like that?” Reed recalled to the Tribune. “I was also curious how far could this go.” One night in late January 2015, around midnight, Williams-Banks sent a text message to Reed saying, “I would love to see you naked.” He urged her to send him nude photos of herself. Reed was scared to do that, she testified. Instead, she downloaded several photographs from Tumblr of a naked woman whose face was not shown, and sent them. “He thought it was me,” she said. “I want you right now,” read another of his texts, before he went on to describe in explicit detail what he wanted to do to her. Things continued to escalate. In a classroom one day when they were alone, Williams-Banks grabbed Reed’s left arm, pressed a ruler against her buttocks and kissed her “like 10 to 15 seconds,” Reed testified. Williams-Banks sent Reed text messages describing sexual acts he wanted to perform on her, often using fruit and vegetable emoji to identify various body parts. Then he began trying to arrange to see her outside of school. In a late-night telephone conversation, Williams-Banks asked Reed if he could pick her up downtown after a youth leadership meeting or, if that didn’t work out, to meet at her home, according to her Tribune interview and court testimony. Reed agreed but then had second thoughts. Frightened, she made up an excuse. “I told him that my stepdad would be home that day.” ‘Where are the police?’ Reed had told a couple of close friends at school about Williams-Banks, according to her testimony and her Tribune interview. At least one classmate told her secret to teacher Dashe Rowland, who approached Reed, took her phone and read some of the texts. Rowland notified the school principal at the time, Andrew McIntosh, and the assistant principal. She did not immediately call the state child abuse hotline, as required by Illinois law and district policy, CPS records show. CPS confirmed that Rowland did not call the state child abuse hotline right away. “In this instance, DCFS should have been contacted immediately,” CPS said in a written statement. However, CPS stressed that “the teacher’s other actions were appropriate.” Contacted by the Tribune, Rowland declined to comment. She said CPS told her to refer reporters to the district’s communications office. McIntosh did not respond to requests for comment. The day after Reed confided in her teacher, McIntosh, Rowland and the assistant principal met with Reed’s mother, Lenett Reccord, and some other family members. Reed’s mother told the Tribune she was shocked by what happened in that meeting. Administrators began questioning Reccord about her daughter’s relationship with Williams-Banks, she said. Was she aware of the text messages? Had she known about the relationship? She had no idea what they were talking about. The principal had her daughter's phone; Reccord said she asked to see it. “I’m going through the phone and I’m seeing the messages and I said, ‘This man is a predator. … What the hell is going on? This man clearly is preying on my daughter and you all are questioning me when you need to be questioning him!’ ” “They started asking me about Tamara’s behavior,” Reccord said. “I was like, ‘What does Tamara’s behavior have to do with anything? Where are the police?’ ” A family member then called 911, Reccord said. School officials notified state child welfare authorities and police of the allegation that same day, CPS said. Less than a month later, in February 2015, Williams-Banks was charged with five counts of grooming and indecent solicitation of a child. In the weeks and months following Williams-Banks’ arrest, Reed was wracked by guilt and depression, according to Tribune interviews with Reed and her mother. “Is it my fault?” Reed recalled asking her mother. “No, you were a kid,” Reccord said she responded. “You couldn’t even understand the ramifications of what was going to happen. Everybody at one time has a crush on a teacher. But he targeted you.” Reed also said she endured harassment from fellow students. “There was constant bullying,” Reed recalled. “The students were talking about me. The teachers would shade me – like look down on me – like it was my fault.” Reed would go to the school basement to be alone for hours at a time. “I just didn’t want to be bothered. I dreaded going to school. I cried every night,” Reed said. Asked by the Tribune about the Williams-Banks case, the district said it was unaware that Reed was bullied. Now a junior at a Chicago high school, Reed said the crimes committed by Williams-Banks left her feeling depressed, isolated and “torn down.” “I don’t like teachers being close to me. I don’t like them in my personal space,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to focus in class. I still have bad dreams about it – just being in school and dealing with the aftermath.” Her red hair gathered atop her head, Reed spoke for an hour from the witness stand at Williams-Banks’ trial, her voice never wavering. In announcing the verdict, Criminal Court Judge Thomas Byrne said the 80-page transcript of text messages between the teacher and student was important, but Reed’s testimony clinched his ruling. “She was credible,” Byrne said. “Guilty as to all charges.” Byrne sentenced Williams-Banks on May 9 to four months in Cook County Jail and 30 months’ sex offender probation. But first he let Reed’s mother take the witness stand and read a brief statement to the teacher who lured her daughter using social media and text messages. “You have taken pieces and chunks of my little girl that I may never recover; you have destroyed my trust in the education system,” Reccord said, her voice cracking. “But today brings closure,” she added, wiping tears from her cheeks with a paper towel. “Today we can close a chapter.” gmarx@chicagotribune.com

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Share this on Email Questioned again and again Reporting a teacher's kiss and touch turned into an ordeal for a 14-year-old freshman Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-illustration-borde-20180523-001 The acting principal asked Morgan to show how the teacher had touched her. “It was very uncomfortable; I felt like I couldn’t breathe.” Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-illustration-borde-20180523-002 A CPS investigator asked what Morgan was wearing at the time. “I felt incredibly diminished. It was demeaning. It was nasty.” Agnes Lee / For the Chicago Tribune Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-illustration-borde-20180523-003 At the teacher’s job hearing, an attorney challenged Morgan’s story. “I thought this trial would be so in my favor I would barely have to talk.” When a 14-year-old freshman reported unwanted touches from her world studies instructor at Payton College Prep, acting Principal Michael Hermes put on his detective’s cap, questioning her and asking her to submit a handwritten statement. Three weeks later, Morgan Aranda felt relieved to be done with the questions and back to being just another freshman in the sunlit selective-enrollment school. But then she was pulled from her biology class and summoned for a new interview, this time with an investigator from the Chicago Public Schools Law Department, according to internal CPS records examined by the Tribune. “I was alone in a room with an old guy,” Aranda, now 22, recalled in a Tribune interview. “To my knowledge, my mom had not even been notified that I was being questioned. I was not given a choice about whether I wanted to talk to this person.” Once again, records show, Aranda said that teacher Sam Borde had kissed her on the corner of her mouth when he accepted one of the handmade Christmas gifts she gave to teachers in December 2010 and that, a few weeks later, he also had briefly placed the palm of his hand just above her knee. As the CPS investigator ticked through his questions, Aranda recalled, he asked what she had been wearing when Borde allegedly touched her leg. The freshman said she had the chilling impression that he was asking if she dressed provocatively and invited the sexual contact of a teacher four times her age. “I felt incredibly diminished,” she told the Tribune. “It was demeaning. It was nasty.” Morgan Aranda: When an allegation of sexual misconduct comes to the attention of Chicago school personnel, Illinois’ “mandated reporter” law and district policy require the worker to report possible child abuse immediately to the Department of Children and Family Services. The school employee who hears of the abuse can’t pass off that responsibility to the principal or other administrators. Yet over the last decade, the Tribune found, some Chicago administrators chose to first question victimized students on their own. In some cases, victims’ accounts paint a picture of principals focused on damage control or even clearing the perpetrator quickly. But even when administrators seemed to be doing their best to help, the practice harmed students and allowed lawyers to cast doubt on the victims in criminal trials, civil proceedings and employment hearings, records and interviews show. “It was like I should be recording myself, I should be practicing, because every time I said anything a bit different I would just get called out, and that broke me a little bit,” Aranda said. “I would rather have been in class with Borde than have to defend myself in front of a bunch of adults over and over again.” Experts on educator sexual misconduct say it is crucial for trained investigators to handle these allegations — including the police and child-welfare authorities. “If you have an issue, you pick up the phone, call them and ask, ‘Do you need to be here?’ ” said researcher Billie-Jo Grant, a board member of the advocacy group Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation. “You only have one shot to do that.” District officials sought to fire Borde in 2011 for violating the policy that prohibits sexual conduct with a student. But he challenged the move. At an administrative hearing conducted by the state Board of Education, his Chicago Teachers Union attorney questioned Aranda at length about details of her multiple interviews at school. Was the kiss on the cheek or on the lips? Was it a tap on her leg or a squeeze? “There are too many inconsistencies in (Aranda’s) story that call into question the veracity of her ... statement,” Borde’s union attorney argued, according to the hearing officer’s report. The administrative hearing officer ruled that Borde had behaved inappropriately but there was no proof the contact was sexual. He recommended that Borde be allowed to return to work after a 30-day suspension. The district instead chose to fire him, records show, and placed him on its internal “do not hire” list. Borde kept his pension. In response to the Tribune’s findings in the Borde case, CPS said it will retrain all staff on mandated reporting obligations to ensure immediate notification of child-welfare authorities. CPS also acknowledged to the Tribune that it erred in the handling of separate harassment allegations against Borde prior to Aranda’s case. Borde, now 63, told the Tribune that Aranda fabricated her allegations. “I think that she is creating a story that doesn’t exist,” he said. “The truth is, my relationship with her was completely professional at all times.” Borde added: “I would never think of being sexual with a student, especially someone who is underage. ... It’s just not tolerated and to be accused of that was horrific.” For her part, Aranda is left with an endless loop of jarring memories. As an eighth-grader, she had represented Illinois in the 2009 National History Day Contest, and Rep. Mike Quigley filed an honorary House resolution “to recognize Morgan and her achievements as a young historian. What she has accomplished already in her life are the beginnings of a bright and successful future.” At Payton, she participated in poetry slams and aimed for a career in international studies and diplomacy. But her experience in speaking up about Borde — the skepticism she saw from administrators and recriminations from fellow students — led her to detach from her studies, she said. “I became very uncomfortable about being in school. I could feel my anxiety just bubbling up,” she told the Tribune. “I tried to make myself as small as possible, to make myself a non-target.” She carried that uneasiness into her current college life, she said. “I can say my Payton experience changed me,” she said. “I lost respect and trust for a lot of my teachers, not just him.” Playing detective When Aranda told her mother in December 2010 about Borde’s alleged kiss, her furious mother wanted to go to the principal, but Aranda was reluctant. “I wanted nothing to do with it. I begged my mom to say nothing. I didn’t want to be dragged in front of the board and be a victim,” Aranda told the Tribune. “I didn’t want to get him in trouble. I wanted the whole thing to go away.” She said she tried to dismiss the incident as something not worth bothering about. “If Borde had stolen 20 bucks from my purse, I wouldn’t have hesitated to say anything, but because he touched my body, I questioned whether my person was valuable enough to CPS,” she said. Yet after the second incident in January — when Borde allegedly touched her leg — Aranda recounted both incidents to English teacher Molly Spooner. Spooner brought Aranda to the principal’s office but did not immediately call the state child abuse hotline as required by Illinois law and CPS policies. “In this instance, a call to DCFS should have been placed prior to notifying school administration,” CPS said in a statement to the Tribune. “That said, Spooner did show appropriate concern by notifying a superior of the allegations.” Attempts to reach Spooner for comment were unsuccessful. Aranda was interviewed by acting Principal Hermes along with Assistant Principal Naomi Nakayama, records show. Payton administrators told the CPS Law Department that they called the state child abuse hotline, but child welfare officials told the Tribune they could find no record of that call. The Law Department’s report said school officials made a second call to the Department of Children and Family Services about two weeks later but the agency declined to open an investigation based on the school’s description of the incidents. The Tribune was unable to reach Hermes and Nakayama for comment. During her meeting with administrators, Aranda recalled, Hermes asked her to demonstrate Borde’s contact. In his subsequent hearing testimony, Hermes noted that Aranda was nervous, emotional and crying as she touched her own thigh to demonstrate where Borde’s hand made contact, according to the hearing officer’s report. Aranda told the Tribune that as she demonstrated the touch, Hermes “was leaning forward. It was very uncomfortable; I felt like I couldn’t breathe.” After Aranda described the encounters, Hermes asked her to write out a statement. Aranda’s single-page handwritten statement said, in part: “He kissed me on the corner of my mouth” and “he squeezed my leg, just above the knee.” Two or three hours later, toward the end of that afternoon, the freshman returned to Hermes’ office and asked to revise her statement. At the bottom of the paper, she added, of the second incident: “After further thought, the gesture seemed more like a tap than a squeeze, located in the same area.” The next day, Aranda said, she returned to Borde’s class. She had no idea whether he knew she had reported him. “The administration didn’t really tell me anything,” she said. Records show Hermes and Nakayama were interviewing other students who might have seen what happened, as well as Borde. Regarding the alleged kiss, Hermes wrote in his notes that Borde said: “I would say that I did it so (Aranda) keeps her honor. I don’t want to call this girl a liar.” Of the alleged touch on the leg: “I don’t know if I did that or not. If asked if I did this in a court of law, I will deny it.” Hermes’ notes were quoted in the CPS investigative report. Borde remarked that he did “feel more affection towards her (Aranda) than any other student,” according to Hermes’ subsequent testimony at the administrative hearing. In response to Tribune questions, CPS defended how Payton administrators handled the initial investigation of the case. “It is standard practice for school administrators to have a student provide information regarding their experience in order to assess what immediate actions need to be taken in order to ensure the student is safe,” CPS said. “These conversations should be conducted in a trauma-informed manner.” Six days after Aranda spoke up to the English teacher, Payton submitted the details of its sleuthing to the district’s Law Department Investigative Unit, and a formal investigation was launched. The CPS Law Department investigator began by pulling Aranda out of class for more questions. In addition to asking what she had been wearing on the day Borde allegedly touched her, the investigator also questioned why she was speaking out, she recalled. “I tried to keep my voice even because it was so emotional,” she said. “After hours and hours of countless questions throughout the entirety of the case, ‘Why are you speaking out?’ seemed like the most insulting question to be asked. “I said, ‘I have a right to an education without being hit on by my teacher.’ ” Morgan Aranda “I said, ‘I have a right to an education without being hit on by my teacher.’ ” The CPS investigator also talked to Borde, and wrote in his report: “Mr. Borde admitted that he lightly kissed (Aranda) on the cheek after she handed him a Christmas gift. He said at the time, he meant absolutely nothing by it other than to show his gratitude for the gift.” Borde said in this interview that he didn’t recall touching her leg. Difficulty with boundaries Aranda was not the first student who felt uncomfortable around Borde, CPS records show. In 2009 he passed out Hershey’s Kisses and leaned toward female students as if to kiss them — until the third student pulled back her head and said, “Whoa,” according to records. “Mr. Borde has difficulty with recognizing boundaries between himself and his students,” a CPS disciplinary report concluded. “This does not demonstrate an appropriate professional relationship. There have been past situations presenting the same issue.” According to the report, Borde responded that students had misunderstood his gesture, which he meant as an expression of “love” that was related to his curriculum on various religions. The principal at the time, Ellen Estrada, recommended that Borde be fired for that incident because the action was “extremely unprofessional,” according to the state hearing officer’s later report. The matter was referred to the CPS Law Department, which decided his actions did not warrant termination and referred the case back to Estrada for “appropriate action.” But Borde never got a formal warning or any discipline, according to disciplinary records made public as part of Borde’s state board hearing. Estrada, who served as Payton’s principal from 2006 through 2010, told the Tribune she could not discuss personnel matters. Borde told the Tribune that Estrada had it out for him because he filed a grievance alleging improper evaluations of teachers and spoke out at a faculty meeting about onerous homework assignments and Payton’s “workaholic culture.” “I’ve been a good union guy my whole career. I filed grievances and I think it pissed her off,” he said. Morgan Aranda outside Payton College Prep High School on April 15, 2018. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-morgan-aranda-20180522-001 After investigating Aranda’s allegations for more than a month, CPS produced a five-page report finding “credible evidence does exist” that Borde “kissed her lightly on her cheek” then later “touched her knee, briefly, with the palm of his hand.” CPS moved to fire the tenured teacher for sexual misconduct with a student. But Borde fought the action, and so in February 2012 Aranda was summoned again, this time to give sworn testimony at a hearing convened by the state board. Under Illinois law, testimony from student victims is generally needed to remove tenured teachers in cases involving sexual abuse. Victim advocates question why students have to testify multiple times, and state education officials say many cases are dropped because students are unwilling to testify yet again. In response to Tribune questions about Aranda’s case, CPS said state law should be revisited and called for “additional safeguards to avoid retraumatizing students.” As Aranda took her place at a long table in the stark conference room on the seventh floor of CPS’ downtown headquarters, Borde positioned his chair so he was directly facing her, she recalled. Jennifer Poltrock, the union attorney who represented Borde, began by questioning Aranda about an incident in class when she told Borde she’d been to Egypt — then later corrected herself to say it was her mother who had been there. “Why did you lie to him?” Poltrock asked, according to the transcript. “Did the fact you had lied to Mr. Borde bother you?” Then Poltrock turned to the revision in Aranda’s handwritten statement. “Now you said it was more like a tap than a squeeze?” Poltrock asked, according to the transcript. “You don’t use the word lingering in there, do you? ... You don’t use a word like inappropriate, do you?” Poltrock declined to comment. Chicago Teachers Union attorney Thaddeus Goodchild said he would not discuss any specific case, but he defended tough questioning of students who make accusations, saying: “I think it’s important that victims are believed and are heard. But by the same token, when someone has serious allegations made against (teachers), they have due-process rights too.” Recalling that hearing today, Aranda told the Tribune: “I thought this trial would be so in my favor I would barely have to talk.” Instead, she said, “at 14, I was starting to see a system that privileges men over the victims who speak out about sexual violence. That was my first taste of the real world.” When his turn came to testify, Borde was asked under oath whether he ever kissed Aranda on the cheek. “No,” he said. Asked if he touched her leg in the second meeting, he said: “No, no.” A few months later, in June 2012, the hearing officer stated in a ruling that Borde had “gently kissed (Aranda) on the cheek” after receiving her gift, calling it “a spontaneous reaction to a kind gesture of a student.” “This was not a case of (a) teacher with nefarious intentions seeking out a student,” the officer wrote. There was insufficient evidence that the touch on Aranda’s leg “was sexual in nature,” the hearing officer wrote. Still, “by kissing a student, even in the spirit of the Holiday festivities and the acceptance of a Christmas gift, Mr. Borde crossed that line. … Mr. Borde should have known that his conduct was inappropriate.” CPS rejected the hearing officer’s recommendation of a suspension and terminated Borde in a resolution approved by the Chicago Board of Education. Poltrock filed a civil lawsuit to get his job back, but in 2013 a circuit court judge affirmed the board’s decision. Borde now receives a lifetime CPS retirement pension that is currently about $48,000 and includes a 3 percent increase each year, records from the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund show. “I’m a great teacher,” Borde said. “It was a very devastating experience for me.” Aranda was shocked to learn the outcome of her case from a Tribune reporter. All she knew was that Borde had disappeared from Payton in 2011, with no explanation. School officials never mentioned his name to her after the February 2012 hearing, she said. “They never came to me and said, here’s what happened,” she said. “I never got checked in on. I never got talked to by a counselor or a principal. No one ever told me anything.” At the time, Aranda said, she had hesitated to ask administrators what became of her allegations. “I didn’t go back into the Payton office and ask what happened because I didn’t want to be questioned again and have to relive it for umpteenth time,” she said. “I never would have positioned myself to be interrogated again.” dyjackson@chicagotribune.com

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Share this on Email Girls' courage brings guard to justice A high school security guard turned his hugs into something horrible Agnes Lee / For the Chicago Tribune Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-illustration-wells-20180524 For the first hug, Kyana Aguilar didn’t hesitate. She trusted the Hubbard High security guard, an adult and friendly face at school. “He was sitting down. He hugged me using his left arm,” she told the Tribune. “He had his hand on the small of my back, then squeezed my butt cheek.” The second time Walter C.J. Wells asked her for a hug, she had a strategy. Aguilar said she tried to force his arms above her shoulders so he couldn’t grope her. It didn’t work. Walter Wells Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-mug-walter-wells-20180525 “I tried hugging him under his arms, but he snaked his arm under and he pinched my left nipple,” said Aguilar, who was 17 and a junior at the time. These weren’t hugs, but violations. “I know I didn’t do anything wrong, and he did,” she said. It was Aguilar’s consistent description of the sexual abuse by Wells — told to school administrators, investigators and police — that helped stop him in 2014. Though she wasn’t the first person to complain about Wells’ behavior, her decision to come forward finally triggered forceful action and, eventually, his imprisonment, the Tribune found. Kyana Aguilar: About a month before Aguilar described her encounters with Wells, four other girls told the school and authorities that he had groped or sexually harassed them, district records show. During the investigation into the four girls’ allegations, Hubbard Principal Nancy Wiley temporarily took away Wells’ swim coaching duties and moved him from his regular back-door security post at the school to the front entrance, according to the district’s investigative account. Wells, however, remained in the school. He was removed only after Aguilar made her allegations, district records show. Wiley did not respond to requests for comment. But in response to the Tribune’s reporting, the district said it is now “immediately removing all employees who are accused of sexual abuse from schools pending the outcome of a full investigation.” Former Hubbard students, a former employee and a former student’s family — as well as students’ court testimony — described incidents that show Wells’ questionable behavior had been an issue for years. But there is no indication in CPS records that he had previously been investigated despite those concerns. And the district told the Tribune it knew nothing of allegations against Wells until 2014. In 2016, Wells was convicted of aggravated criminal sexual abuse and aggravated battery for his treatment of Aguilar. In letters from prison, Wells called his conviction a “ridiculous conspiracy.” “I intend to clear my name and recover from this injustice,” he wrote. At Wells’ criminal trial, Aguilar endured intense questioning on the witness stand. She also said classmates taunted her and doubted her, making school a difficult place to be. But she said she has no regrets about coming forward. “I have no shame in all that I said,” Aguilar said. “I know it’s true and it’s moral.” Complaints but no action Wells joined the school district as a lifeguard in 2006. A graduate of Morgan Park High School, he had been working as a delivery driver for a small pizza and ribs joint. In 2007 he became a security guard at Hubbard, then started coaching. His wife was already working at Hubbard as a swim coach and security guard. Wells was posted at the back entrance of the school, near the metal detectors. He ran swim practice and water polo and even helped out on the football team, students and former employees said. His supporters described him as bighearted and invested in students’ well-being. The students called him “Jay.” But the way he joked with kids didn’t seem right to some others; it seemed like flirting. A former Hubbard employee who spoke with the Tribune on the condition that she wouldn’t be identified said she was intensely uncomfortable watching Wells with girls. Wells would say overtly sexual things to them, like telling them he heard they performed oral sex well, she said. The woman said she went to Joyce Jones, a counselor and athletic director at the school, during the 2011-12 school year and described seeing Wells acting inappropriately around female students. She said she believed that something would be done. She spoke out again, this time to another top school administrator, after Wells said sexual things to her and made physical advances, she said. Jones and the former administrator did not respond to Tribune requests for comment. A little more than a year after the former employee complained, a student told his mother he’d seen Wells running his hands along the buttocks of the student’s girlfriend in a common area near the cafeteria, according to Samantha Paris, the mom. Criminal charges later were filed against Wells in connection with the incident. “He came to me like, ‘Mom, the coach touched my girlfriend! I’m going to beat him up!’” Paris told the Tribune. She said she advised him to take his story to school authorities rather than doing something rash. Paris also said that her daughter Andreanna, newly transferred to Hubbard, joined three other teenage girls in describing their experiences with Wells to school officials after winter break in early February 2014. Paris’ daughter, now 21, said Wells ran his hand from the small of her back to the top of her buttocks as she was picking up a Rice Krispies Treat from a vending machine near the cafeteria. Charges of aggravated battery later were filed in connection with her accusation. According to the district’s investigative report, the school notified the Department of Children and Family Services when the four girls came forward. Police were called too. Another girl, a senior, told Hubbard officials that Wells had been asking for hugs and then groping her bottom ever since she started at Hubbard as a freshman in 2010. Aggravated battery charges were brought on her behalf related to incidents dating back to 2011. The student, who spoke to the Tribune on the condition her name not be used, said she felt she could not avoid Wells. In court, she testified that she had told her counselor, Jones, before the 2014 investigation that Wells was often sexually inappropriate but felt like her story was brushed off. The counselor never mentioned it to her again, she testified. Scared to say anything else, the girl didn’t bring it up again either until she joined the group of four students who spoke out in 2014. “I just felt like nobody would believe me,” the young woman, now a college student, told the Tribune. Wells told CPS investigators that he hugged students but “never touched them in an inappropriate way,” the investigative report said. Wells said the girls wanted attention and misinterpreted his friendly hugs, according to that report. ‘Why did you tell?’ The CPS investigation by the Law Department left those who were interviewed at school feeling exposed. Aguilar remembers being summoned over the loudspeaker by the principal as she sat in her English class. She often spent time in the school’s administrative offices. “I felt like I missed school,” she said. “I was in the office two to three periods at a time. I brought my lunch to the office.” Other former students who spoke to the Tribune described nervously passing each other as one teenage girl left the makeshift interrogation room near the principal’s office and the next student entered, whispering, “What’s this about?” Several of the young women recalled that time with unease: sitting on one side of a long table in a room off the principal’s office, adults with questions and notebooks on the other side. Peers called the students liars, two former students told the Tribune; they say they were taunted and blamed for ousting the well-liked security guard. In the hallways, “people stopped saying ‘Hi’ to me and gave me dirty looks,” Aguilar said. “People knew it was me.” In response to the Tribune’s reporting, the district said in a statement that students should not be interviewed by CPS investigators in a public setting at school. The statement also said those interviews should happen during class time only when it’s an emergency. In May 2014, Law Department investigators found that “credible evidence” existed that Wells groped Aguilar and two other students but did not substantiate every student’s account. Wells was escorted from campus and suspended without pay that month, district records show. He was arrested three days later at home. Wells’ wife, Robyn, continued to work at Hubbard, and some of the students who accused Wells said she apparently felt free to confront them in the school. Andreanna Paris told the Tribune that Robyn Wells called her a liar in the lunchroom, with students all around. Recalling that lunchroom incident, Robyn Wells told the Tribune that a group of students was talking about the allegations against her husband, and she does remember saying one of the alleged victims was telling lies. Her husband is innocent, she said, and the girls “lied like wet rugs.” She said the school, and later police, were “gunning” for her husband. “(Investigators) at the time called every single female athlete in the building down and asked them, ‘Did he touch you? Did he touch you?’ using his name. That’s not a way to conduct an investigation. It was skewed just from that,” she said. “They pulled them out of class and asked them in groups.” The senior who testified that she had endured Wells’ hugs for years said it felt like Hubbard’s staff wished the girls hadn’t come forward. “All the people who worked there, you could tell they were upset. But not at him,” she said. The end of Aguilar’s junior year was hellish, as she felt she was being blamed for Wells’ arrest. Instead of memories of excitement over the approaching summer and of officially becoming a senior, she remembers the whispers and taking different routes to class to avoid former friends and classmates. “A lot of girls said, ‘Why did you tell? Why are you lying?’ I lost a couple of friends. I’m sure (Wells’ wife) was telling people that it wasn’t true,” Aguilar said. “There was a lot of talk around the school that the girls liked it, and wanted him to do it.” After Wells left, Hubbard administrators conducted training with staff about appropriate physical contact with students, the district said. Wells, initially charged with aggravated sexual abuse and aggravated battery involving six Hubbard students, was brought to trial in May 2016 on counts involving Aguilar alone. Two of the other six testified at trial as evidence of other crimes by Wells. Wells maintained his innocence, and his attorney in court characterized the statements of the Hubbard students as “stories, and nothing more. Uncorroborated, frankly outlandish stories that have no basis more reliable than high school girls concocting a story based on gossip.” Wells’ supporters wrote glowing letters to the court, depicting a devout Christian incapable of the indecent acts he stood accused of. During the trial, Wells’ lawyer worked hard to undermine the credibility of Aguilar and the other girls — weren’t there security cameras everywhere that would have documented this outrageous behavior? Wasn’t the spot by the vending machines a busy place? And no one else saw? The judge listened to the students and found Wells guilty. During the sentencing phase of the trial, Aguilar read a statement. She called Wells a “sad excuse of a man.” Kyana Aguilar on Saturday, March 10, 2018, outside Hubbard High School. Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-kyana-aguilar-201805-002 ‘My guard is up. Way up’ Wells is serving a three-year prison sentence and may be released in July. He will have to register as a sexual predator. Some of the young women who testified against him already are thinking about his release from prison. In interviews, they describe the lasting impact Wells had, including nightmares where they relive the abuse or run into him again. The young woman who as a senior reported being hugged and groped by Wells throughout high school said the abuse made her question whether she had brought his unwanted touches on herself. “I’d think, ‘Oh, I must have done something.’ After that, I thought it must just be something about me,” she said. With the trauma still lingering, she is struggling to find her place in college and worries about her sister’s safety at her high school. Aguilar also is in college. She studies psychology and wants to help other abuse victims. “I think about it when someone I don’t know gets close to me,” she said. “My guard is up. Way up. It makes me scared to open up to someone.” jrichards@chicagotribune.com

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Share this on Email Found guilty, kept job, abused again CPS does background checks on new hires, but checks on current staffers are lacking Agnes Lee / For the Chicago Tribune Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-illustration-ibarra-20180522 The 16-year-old lifeguard remembered the look on Juan Ibarra’s face as the Chicago Public Schools lunchroom aide began to touch him at a YMCA pool. After trying repeatedly to engage the boy in conversations about sex, Ibarra had stroked his arms and knees, and finally put his finger inside the waistband of the boy’s swimsuit and tugged at it, according to a 2007 police report. Ibarra, the report said, “was smiling at him all the time in an uncomfortable manner.” Juan Ibarra Image p2p slug: ct-cps-abuse-mug-juan-ibarra-20180525-002 Convicted of misdemeanor battery, Ibarra was sentenced to two years’ conditional discharge and was ordered to undergo sex offender evaluation. But there was Ibarra five years later, doling out extra ice cream and cookies to seventh-grader Joshua “Ben” Munoz in the lunchroom at Kinzie Elementary. Ibarra also lived near Munoz on West 59th Street, and the cafeteria server often was waiting in his minivan, ready to offer a ride when the student set out for school, Munoz recalled. By the time Munoz was in eighth grade, “he was there every time I walked by,” the student said. “I’d walk other blocks trying to avoid him.” CPS conducts background checks on newly hired teachers, volunteers and contract workers, who are barred if they have committed an offense on a long list of “enumerated crimes.” But it has not effectively checked teachers’ criminal files once they are hired and in schools, the Tribune found. Even if they did run new checks, the district’s list of disqualifying crimes does not include misdemeanor battery, and school officials acknowledged they currently do not always look further to evaluate the circumstances of misdemeanor arrests. States including Ohio and Indiana have systems in place to notify school districts when a school employee is charged or convicted of a crime. In Illinois, a “rap-back” system does allow state police to regularly run lists of fingerprinted school employees and notify school districts of convictions. But CPS told the Tribune: “There have been instances where this notification process was insufficient.” Reacting to the Tribune’s findings, CPS acknowledged it was unaware of Ibarra’s 2007 arrest and conviction. The district said it will now begin to conduct random background checks on current employees and also strengthen its system for evaluating new hires. “Keeping students safe is our primary obligation and CPS is furious with any instances that are not handled appropriately by staff,” the district said in a statement. In February 2015, Munoz w