Cleveland High student Annabelle Schwartz says she couldn't figure out why she seemed to be her school's only resource for classmates who reported to school officials that they had been raped by fellow students.

She had been sexually assaulted, she says, so she knew the problem firsthand. But as a student, she hardly felt prepared to be a victim's solution.

"I'm not a lawyer. I'm not even a full-grown adult," the senior told a school board committee in April. "There are many people out there who know way more about this than me, and I think that should include administrators."

It had been a long journey for Schwartz. She told the board of Portland Public Schools in November 2015 that a boy at her school had sexually assaulted six of her classmates, yet her principal said she was unable to take action because of insufficient policies. She thought someone would investigate.

No one did, she said. So she kept pressing the issue.

Now, a year and a half after her initial plea to the board, the panel is looking to reform how school leaders handle student-on-student sexual violence and harassment that intrude onto campus and impede education. District leaders say the changes are a direct response to Schwartz's advocacy.

Until now, the district has relied on a part-time administrator with such low visibility that students and many district leaders spoke as if there was no one in the role.

In the past couple years, U.S. colleges have faced their day of reckoning over federal requirements to keep students safe from sexual violence and its fallout. But so far, public schools serving younger students have lagged.

"One of the major drivers of the attention at the higher ed level has been really courageous and creative student activism," Fatima Goss Graves, president-elect at the National Women's Law Center, told The Oregonian/OregonLive. "But when we are talking about students who are as young as in elementary school who are experiencing assault, are experiencing violence, we can't rely on students to do all the work. Schools need to step up."

If passed, the policy Portland has drafted at Schwartz's urging will for the first time define sexual violence and outline actions administrators must take to respond to allegations. Current district guidelines address only sexual harassment and don't specify in detail how the district will respond.

As it is now, Oregon's largest district leaves enforcement of federal Title IX requirements to a part-time employee with a murky job description that no one seems to understand. The 1972 law mandates officials ensure girls and women can fully benefit at schools and colleges.

Cleveland Principal Tammy O'Neill says the charges of inaction are horrifying and untrue. O'Neill points to specific and immediate steps she took after fielding students' complaints of sexual violence, including calling police, limiting the alleged assailant's freedom to roam the campus and keeping victims' parents in the loop.

"When a student needs support, they are going to get it. I make darn sure victims are taken care of," O'Neill said. "Sexual assault and sexual harassment are happening, and as a community, we have the responsibility to educate and protect our kids."

Because Schwartz wasn't a victim in that instance, however, the school could not tell her about how it investigated or disciplined alleged perpetrators or helped students who said they had been victimized at school, O'Neill said.

Cleveland has been proactive on both preventing and addressing sexual assault, O'Neill said: Student activists and the administration have made awareness of rape culture a banner issue in recent years. The school has a partnership with Raphael House, an agency dedicated to helping domestic violence victims, to help educate students and staff about consent and healthy teen relationships.

Early in 2017, O'Neill gave three school board members and top district administrators a detailed account of what Cleveland did in response to a student's 2016 complaint that she had been assaulted by a fellow student during a previous summer and follow-up complaints that the same boy had sexually assaulted other girls, too.

O'Neill sent the emails after Schwartz in January reiterated to board members her unaddressed concerns about the district's lack of adequate sexual assault policies.

O'Neill's account shows a principal using every tool at her disposal to tackle a tough issue, running down every claim of harassment after police closed the case, frequently checking in with victims and their parents and creating safety plans to reduce the odds of accusers crossing paths with the accused at school. She also spurred creation of a robust anti-sexual violence curriculum now taught to every Cleveland freshman as part of an interdisciplinary health class.

That puts Cleveland far ahead of most K-12 schools. What school districts must do to protect students from intimidation or humiliation by fellow students who may have perpetrated sexual violence against them off campus is unclear to many school administrators. That is true even in large districts like Portland Public Schools.

A recent investigation by The Associated Press found about 17,000 official reports of sexual assaults from public elementary and secondary students over four years. The Associated Press' investigation also pointed to two Oregon districts, Forest Grove and Salem-Keizer, as being sophisticated and proactive in preventing and addressing sexual attacks.

Schwartz said in the absence of an adult who she felt would take sexual harassment and violence seriously, she worked to identify perpetrators of alleged rapes and sexual assaults herself, then convinced classmates to shun them.

"If I can talk to a survivor one-on-one and hear their story, that to me is enough proof for me to tell people the rapist's name and tell people we have to stop being friends with him," she said. "That has been a big part of this: getting people to stop being friends with rapists."

Schwartz's crusade to shine a spotlight on sexual violence in her school district started early in the 2015-16 school year. Knowing that Schwartz held herself forth as a survivor of sexual assault, her counselor asked her to help a Cleveland freshman who said she'd been raped by a classmate. Schwartz listened, then investigated. What she found, she later told administrators, was that six students all said they had been assaulted by the same boy.

None of the teens knew what to do, Schwartz said. Like many sexual assaults, what happened between the two students occurred when they were alone. It was not reported to medical or legal authorities until well after it happened.

Schwartz says when she alerted her principal to the girls' allegations and their discomfort at school, O'Neill cited policies she said left her unable to do more. Schwartz says she saw one girl's safety plan and judged it inadequate. In response, Schwartz says she set her sights on changing policy. She researched Title IX requirements. Then she went to the school board to ask it to make the district do better.

Schwartz didn't sugarcoat the situation. Teens had to endure daily vulgar slurs from their rapists and no one would help, she testified in November 2015, repeating one particularly offensive slur to make her point.

"I want to know why administrators will not use tools like Title IX to their full extent," she said. "I stand here to ask where should students go if both their school and their police department cannot or will not help them?"

Only one board member inquired further at the meeting.

"Is the harassment still continuing?" Steve Buel asked.

"Yes."

"Like in the last 10 days?"

"Yes, even today," she said. "It's unfortunate, but it has escalated, too."

Still, it would take the district more than a year to meaningfully respond. Schwartz continued to push, and eventually board member Amy Kohnstamm connected her with a school district lawyer who agreed the district needed new policies.

Kohnstamm said she wasn't sure why there was such a long lag between Schwartz's testimony and action.

"One of the things that I think that is really important about this change in policy is the district didn't have adequate guidelines in place for school staff on how to respond," Kohnstamm said. "When these issues were coming up people were just relying on their own best judgment. There wasn't enough guidance from the district on what resources were available."

Together, Schwartz and attorney Jeff Fish worked to craft change.

If the policy goes through, schools will be required to complete an investigation of sexual violence within 30 days. The district will assign an employee full time to track complaints, serve as an independent watchdog and makes sure training happens. The person is expected to be hired next school year.

Time matters, said Goss Graves, the incoming president at the National Women's Law Center. She noted that students can't take a break from school. They are required to be there, and a school has a duty to make sure the environment is safe. If students feel the environment is hostile, she said sometimes they take it upon themselves to create relief the school isn't providing.

"There is no way that a student should have to come up with a strategy to drive a rapist out of school," Goss Graves said. "In this case, you saw a student try to rise up. In many cases we see students drop out altogether. We see students stop being engaged in their activities. We see students withdrawing."

Principals and students aren't supposed to flounder with these issues on their own. By law, school districts must have a Title IX coordinator to make sure the district safeguards students from sexual harassment.

The district has such a coordinator listed on every page of its website, but Greg Wolleck, 66, a former principal and overseer of principals, works part-time. He came out of retirement to work as director of high school programs. During portions of this week and last, he was away from work and unavailable for an interview.

O'Neill seemed baffled last week when asked if she called the district's Title IX coordinator about the incidents at Cleveland. She strained to imagine a scenario in which she would loop him in, noting the school had access people with expertise in these matters. She said she supposed if she had some sort of policy question she might call him.

Schwartz, who has made it her mission for a year and a half to search for and tally allegations of student-on-student sexual assault, was surprised to learn the district had anyone filling the position.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights sent a letter to all school districts reminding them of their obligations under Title IX and, specifically, that they needed to have a Title IX coordinator with the authority to safeguard students.

The letter noted that federal authorities found some of the "most egregious and harmful" violations happened when coordinators didn't exist or were not trained or empowered to do the job. The letter recommended that the coordinator be full-time, informed of all alleged violations, and able to monitor outcomes and provide preventative training.

None of that happens under Portland Public Schools current structure, but would if proposed changes go through. Across Oregon, where most districts are small or even tiny, it is standard for the Title IX role to fall to the superintendent or another high-ranking administrator with a lot else on his or her plate.

Under the proposed policy she helped draft, Schwartz hopes students will be able to count on a district leader to keep watch and offer informed help so that students no longer feel they have to resort to haphazard hallway justice.

"I think it is important for other students to see if you care about something deeply, and you do something about it, you can see results," said Fish, the district lawyer. "Advocacy about these kinds of things can make a difference."

-- Bethany Barnes

bbarnes@oregonian.com

@betsbarnes