All of that changed when Allen and fellow coaches showed up at a 2002 spring break trip by Little Axe High School students to South Padre Island, Texas, some 750 miles south.

Ashley Terrell, a 17-year-old senior, and a friend were coaxed to the coaches’ hotel room where a party with alcohol led to Ashley blacking out. She woke up to find Allen in bed with her while her friend cried out for her from the bathroom, alleging she had been abused by another coach. Scared and confused, the girls fled the room.

Ashley quickly told her mother and school officials, including a school security officer she confused with a police officer. They assured her the matter would be handled. But Allen was never arrested or charged with any crime. He resigned quietly from Little Axe in 2002. In the years since, he has coached or taught at seven other Oklahoma high schools, according to state records, a development Ashley found appalling.

“I watched them pass the trash right in front of me,” said the woman, now Ashley Rolen, 39, an Oklahoma City entrepreneur married to a pastor. She is working to publicize the problem of sexual misconduct, particularly among K-12 school employees. “My story is significant but not unique,” she notes ruefully.

Rolen’s case illustrates a shadowy and largely undocumented aspect of the national crisis involving the sexual abuse of K-12 students by teachers, administrators, coaches, bus drivers and other staff. Experts say the hundreds of school employees arrested each year and the more than $1.2 billion in related settlements paid out by school districts in just the last decade represent a mere fraction of the problem in a system that works to deny and hide the abuse of minors.

There is no national data for sexual misconduct involving K-12 school employees, according to the Department of Education. The most recent outside research estimates only 5% percent of K-12 sexual misconduct cases are turned over to law enforcement, and only a fraction of those result in prosecutions.

“Given what we already know, based on existing research, it is of epidemic proportions and is deliberately ignored by the powers that be,” said Terri Miller, president of the advocacy group SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse Manipulation & Exploitation).

Victims of sexual misconduct by school predators may number in the millions, which would surpass the size of similar scandals in the Roman Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts, according to reports from academics and think tanks.

The Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative advocacy nonprofit focused on education and workforce issues, concluded in a study last year that “the ease with which school officials can pass sex abusers to other districts” helps explain why complaints of sexual violence filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights more than tripled between 2010 and 2019. The U.S. had 49.5 million K-12 students in the last school year, according to federal figures.

News accounts as well as litigation surrounding K-12 sexual misconduct cases illustrate aspects of the problem Miller describes as “mobile molestors”:

• A January lawsuit against Clark County Nevada schools around Las Vegas alleges union contracts protected predators who would drift from one school to another, racking up new victims along the way.

• The Tahoma, Washington, school system settled a case last year in which it admitted it was “negligent in continuing to employ a former paraeducator after reports he was sexually abusing and grooming students.”

• An Oregon case was settled for $3.5 million in March, the state’s largest such settlement, after a judge ruled the plaintiff could proceed with a claim of “state created danger” because officials had failed to act.

• In Camden, New Jersey, Wasim Muhammad plans to resume duties this month as Camden School Advisory Board president two months after the district settled for $2 million a lawsuit from a woman who said Muhammad sexually abused her when he taught there decades ago.

• Also this month, a teacher hired by Stamford, Connecticut, schools was revealed to have previously been investigated for inappropriate behavior with students in New York City schools.

Such recent examples confirm a long-term and continuing trend. A 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office to a House Committee found that in a majority of cases it reviewed the predators should have been stopped earlier.

“At least 11 of these 15 cases involve offenders who previously targeted children,” the report said. “Even more disturbing, in at least 6 cases, offenders used their new positions as school employees or volunteers to abuse more children.”

The problem and the cover-up are not limited to public schools. The prestigious Horace Mann School in New York City covered up rampant sexual abuse by staffers in the 1970s, before reaching private agreements with dozens of former students and apologizing in 2013. A Boston Globe “Spotlight” investigation found widespread sexual misconduct buried in the records of hundreds of elite New England private schools, including extensive failures to act promptly  at St. George’s School in Rhode Island.

The ugly phenomenon seems to accompany sexual misconduct generally. The Roman Catholic Church passed predator priests among parishes for decades, and Dr. Larry Nassar of the USA Gymnastics national team finally went to prison after officials ignored allegations he abused the nation’s best gymnasts for years.

Many students are victimized after flares had previously gone up about a predator at a school, only to see them fizzle and disappear when the falsely cultivated good reputation of the predator snuffs them or the predator moves on to another school or district. The spring break incident involving Coach Allen and Ashley occurred after a mother had already expressed reservations about his relationship with her daughter — and the school community backed him, ironically including Ashley’s late mother, who was a school staffer at the time and is now deceased.

Indeed, many cases are not reported until long after the fact. The victims are young, and they can be intimidated and uncertain about what has happened. Or the victim may genuinely like the abuser, seeing a promised future that never materializes. And then schools will often attempt to bury allegations rather than tarnish the reputation of the person implicated.

‘A Pool of Mobile Molesters’

An offender may have scores of victims. The Government Accountability Office cited four reasons such predators are able to filter through the system, hurting students over many years in multiple locations:

• Resignations that allowed the school to consider the matter closed and then even recommend the departing employee to a new school.
• Failure to “perform preemployment criminal history checks.”
  
• Checking applicants’ fingerprints only against regional rather than national databases.
  
• And the simple failure to “inquire into troubling information regarding criminal histories.”

“Passing the trash has created a pool of mobile molesters in our nation’s schools,” said Miller. “And we won’t know about them until some brave person or bystander comes forward.”

Multiple explanations have been given for the system’s frequent failures to stop predators, ranging from bureaucratic inertia to contracts that protect teachers or administrators. Whatever the cause, Amos Guiora, law professor at the University of Utah, believes failing to address sexual misconduct at its source, and thus enabling predators to offend again, lies at the heart of the matter.

“All of these incidents would be preventable after the very first instance if the perpetrator were not protected,” he said. “If they know they will or might be protected, the pattern will continue. Bad as the perpetrator is, without the enabler, he can’t operate.”

Guiora said the problem is particularly infuriating because school employees are categorized as mandatory reporters, meaning they are required to alert authorities in abuse cases. At the moment, however, violation of the mandatory reporter requirement is a misdemeanor usually with a one-year statute of limitations, meaning prosecutors rarely pursue such cases.

“Even worse, in addition to the initial attack by the molester, the child is subsequently re-attacked by others whose aim is to protect the perpetrator and institution: bystanders, teachers, principals, special interest groups, government bureaucrats, and politicians,” Guiora wrote in a 2022 Texas Tech Law Review article. “It is a sea of laws and social forces that work to rebrutalize survivors of childhood sexual assault. For the child, it is a sea of destruction.”

The ways in which K-12 predators have maneuvered through the system has led some to conclude the professional education establishment is more concerned with its own welfare than protecting kids.

“What you have is people protecting the reputation of an institution rather than the safety of children,” Oklahoma Republican State Sen. Shane Jett said. “Instead of exposing something that is ongoing, they aid and abet the bad guy because what’s most important to them is making sure everyone is employed.”

Jett pointed to lobbying groups, the teachers’ unions, and an Oklahoma organization called the Center for Education Law that represents many school boards there as enablers. RealClearInvestigations sought comment from the center as well as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, but none of them responded to questions.

Others also pointed to the collective bargaining agreements districts make with teachers’ unions, or favorable contracts for administrators that offer protections for employees and complicate the ability of future employers to learn of past misdeeds. Union contracts have long forced school systems to keep paying people even after allegations have taken them out of the classroom.

Some are taken out of the classroom and put into so-called “rubber rooms.” In one infamous example, New York City taxpayers paid an alleged sexual harasser and toucher $1.7 million as he sat idly for two decades.

Federal law already mandates that states pass laws against systemic elements that contribute to “passing the trash” — confidentiality agreements, separation agreements, or employment contracts that allow for the scrubbing of files when someone leaves a school. 

The  federal mandate stems from a clause in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act that federal regulators have failed to mandate, according to SESAME President Miller.

In 2022, the Department of Education said SESAME’s proposed legislation should serve as the model for state legislatures seeking to combat repeat offenders, but to date only seven states have passed it, and all told only nine have such laws on the books, according Miller.

But the pattern of failing to act when credible allegations are raised against an employee can also be rooted in simple convenience or ignorance. Predators are aware of this kind of built-in shield and use it to their advantage, experts in the field said.

“Very, very often they get away with doing the wrong thing, and lots of times the wrong thing will make everybody happy for a short time,” said Melanie Blow, executive director of the Stop Abuse Campaign. “It’s common to see parents don’t know what to think, either. Mom and Dad are kind of in too much of a crisis, they go to the principal, and they assume the school will do the right thing.”

Predators not only benefit from entrenched bureaucracies, they also work assiduously to build their nest within a school, according to attorneys and advocacy groups. In short, the bad guys aren’t only working their victims: In addition to the careful work they put into identifying, isolating and then preying on the students, the predators are also nurturing their own positive reputations to protect them when flags are raised.

“They might be grooming the adults, too,” said Roger Dreyer, a Sacramento attorney. “These guys can be very sophisticated.”

In June 2023, Dreyer was a lead attorney on $52 million in settlements the Sacramento schools reached over repeated sexual abuse in an elementary school. For three years, an after-school aide, Joshua Vasquez, covered the windows of his room with black garbage bags and proceeded to abuse multiple kids. School officials ignored this and other warning signs about what Vasquez was doing to kids, leading to an apology in addition to the money after Vasquez was sentenced to 150 years in prison.

Dreyer and other trial attorneys said predators are often viewed not as “trash” but as figures students trust and value, and that helps perpetuate their criminal careers. This is especially true when school employees are trained to spot possible signs of abuse only at home, not in their workplace.

“They’re not trained to handle this,” Dreyer said. “Their training sells them on the idea, ‘oh, it’s weird Uncle Harold at home,’ and then they’ll ignore all sorts of red flags. Often, you’ll hear the district saying ‘we’re lucky to have him,’ and they’ll blame it on everyone but themselves.”

All of this can leave the victim confused as well as wounded. Michelle Denault was sexually abused by a teacher at New Berlin High School in Illinois for years. She thought they were in love and would live happily ever after; as with many victims, it took her years to process what had happened to her in high school.

Today, however, Denault is under no illusions about the improper nature of what her teacher did starting inher freshman year, and he went on to chalk up other victims, she said.

“These are things we’re uncomfortable with — we just aren’t comfortable thinking about teachers or coaches assaulting our kids,” she told RCI. “We defend the ‘occupation’ as a whole. But silence and complicity are huge in institutional settings. The damage is caused by those who turn a blind eye: How can you understand how good people didn’t help you?”

Rolen said she encountered elements of all this when, prompted in 2020 by the case of Nassar and U.S. gymnasts, she went public with her ordeal. After addressing the state’s education department, she began painstakingly tracking Allen and the other coaches who had been on South Padre Island. (RealClearInvestigations could not locate Allen for comment for this article.)

She learned that Allen had gone on to impregnate a student at another school, eventually marrying her, but he has never been arrested or charged in connection with K-12 misconduct. After hearings by the state’s education department he agreed to surrender his teaching license last month. The teaching license of the coach who reportedly abused Rolen’s friend that night is scheduled for a state hearing next month.

“I had to do the investigation and that was almost worse than the rape,” Rolen said. “I wanted to die inside.”

Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.

For a variety of reasons, ranging from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public.

“In any given year they have failed to report thousands of these situations, and instead they’ve papered them over, acted like it’s not an issue,” former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told RealClearInvestigations. Stunned by a 2018 Chicago Tribune investigation that found 523 incident reports of sexual misconduct by employees of the city’s schools during the past decade, DeVos during the Trump administration launched the process of including specific questions about such cases in the Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection, a process it undertakes every two years. Previously, the Office for Civil Rights asked only general questions about sexual misconduct incidents, without a breakdown of alleged perpetrators.

The Biden administration initially sought to remove those questions, saying it wanted to avoid data duplication, but it backtracked after fierce criticism it was doing so as a sop to teachers unions. Consequently, the question will be included on future questionnaires, but, as of today, the Department of Education “has no data,” a spokesperson told RCI. These days, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, even a cursory review of local news reporting brings disquieting revelations of teachers accused of or arrested for alleged sexual relations with a student. In just the past month:

• In California, multiple students filed a lawsuit against a male music teacher who had taught at three different schools in the San Jose area. The teacher is already serving prison time for previous convictions in sexual misconduct cases with students.
• In New Jersey, a female middle school teacher was arrested for an alleged ongoing sexual relationship with a student.
• In Texas, a male teacher was arrested for allegedly having a sexual affair with a 12-year-old student.
• In Illinois, a female substitute teacher faces charges of “grooming and predatory criminal sexual assault” for an alleged relationship with a sixth-grader.
• In Washington, the arrest of a male high school teacher on charges of sexual misconduct with a minor represented a repeat nightmare for a school district that previously had a psychologist convicted on the same charges.
• Just last weekend, a 36-year-old New Jersey teacher was arrested on multiple assault charges involving a sexual relationship with a teenage student.

These stories hold a lurid appeal to some. Sensational accounts of seductions of students by teachers, typically by high school female teachers, are tabloid catnip. The topic has provided material for standup comics, Hollywood writers, and pop tunes that didn’t begin or end with Van Halen’s 1984 hit “Hot For Teacher.”

But experts who track the problem don’t take the problem lightly. Pointing to research from Hofstra University that found roughly 1 in 10 students in K-12 schools have suffered “some form of sexual misconduct by an educator,” Terri Miller, head of the advocacy group SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation), said the number of victims is staggering.

“The rate of educator sexual misconduct is 10 times higher in one year’s time than in five decades of abuse by clergy,” Miller said, noting that in 2021 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reported it had received nearly 4,300 sexual abuse allegations. “Another striking contrast is we are not mandated to send our children to church; we are mandated to send them to school.”

The extent of the problem may shock many Americans. The topic has long been shrouded by a curtain held by various actors in the drama: schools reluctant to go public with embarrassing and possibly criminal activity, unions fighting for members’ privacy and sometimes state laws that protect it, and a government reluctant to ask hard questions that would gather reliable data.

But the cases and tactics often used to cover them up have become common enough to earn an ugly nickname: “passing the trash.”

“DOE does not and never has tracked sexual misconduct committed by adults against students,” said Billie-Jo Grant, a professor at California Poly State University who is one of the nation’s top researchers on the topic.

“DOE has never aggressively worked to stop teachers’ unions and administrators from passing the trash,” she told RCI. “DOE does not hold accountable the many enablers who have created a pool of mobile molesters in our schools nationwide. Your questions should include why? Why? Why?”

Grant and Miller attended a Department of Education conference on the topic in D.C. in October 2019, and it was out of that meeting that its Office for Civil Rights decided to ask more specific questions in its Civil Rights Data Collection, according to Miller.

And while the government may be groping toward more clarity, as a DOE official acknowledged having “no data” the Department would make public, he insisted the matter is viewed with concern.

In 2004, then-Hofstra professor Carol Shakeshaft did a report for the DOE that assessed the data available on the topic. From a handful of regional studies and media reports, Shakeshaft’s report found some broad parameters of the problem.

For example, while stories involving female teachers may be more titillating and gain more media attention, about two-thirds of the predators in schools are male. While no region seems to be immune from the problem, about half of the reported incidents occurred in southern states, Shakeshaft’s report found. Most of the victims are female (56%), and the majority of incidents involve high schools (62%).

The problem is not confined to public schools, although the public school student population dwarfs that of private and parochial schools. Incidents of sexual misconduct at tony schools like New York’s Horace Mann, or at St. George’s in Rhode Island are but two of the most publicized examples of the problem.

Protecting kids in school from inappropriate or criminal sexual activity involving employees and students would seem a surefire winner, but instead DeVos and her team found it was a political football. Union contracts and in many cases state law protect the privacy of employees. What that meant, DeVos explained, is that even if credible allegations of sexual misconduct were leveled against an employee, unless authorities were called in or an arrest made the alleged perpetrator was often free to leave one school and work in another.

The definitions of what constitutes sexual misconduct could be broadly construed, and the proliferation of social media has not only loosened the boundaries of contact between school employees and students, but provided more opportunities for wrongdoers.

Still, for the most severe conduct, the Trump administration finally introduced on the 2020-21 school year questionnaire specific questions regarding “a school staff member and rape or attempted rape.” Answers for the initial year were optional, as is common with new reporting requirements, and the DOE declined to make the results public. But, in any case, those figures would be hopelessly incomplete because of the widespread school closures that were part of the COVID response.

Even with the new questions, Miller wondered how clear the picture provided might be, because for now OCR is asking only about incidents that occurred on school grounds.

“That means incidents that happen in a car, or an apartment, or anywhere off-campus, won’t be included, and that’s where the majority of these attacks happen,” she said.

The same problem had confronted one of DeVos’ top lieutenants, Kimberly Richey, when she served as chief counsel to the school system in Oklahoma. Even in a deeply conservative state, Richey found few supporters when, surprised by how many complaints were reaching her desk, she approached lawmakers in Norman about changes.

“I met with resistance from the very beginning,” she said. “And I had complaints, 95 percent of the time coming from parents, about a school or a teacher, and when I contacted them the teacher would immediately resign, travel five miles to the next district and start working there.”

Several people who spoke with RCI said teachers unions’ contracts were a major obstacle to both moving forward with credible allegations of sexual misconduct and blocking future school employment for alleged perpetrators. Neither the American Federation of Teachers nor the National Education Association responded to questions from RCI about this topic.

Teachers aren’t the only obstacles to reform. While Superintendent of Public Education in Oklahoma from 2011-2015, Janet Barresi said, state groups lobbying on behalf of school administrators and board members were much more vociferous opponents than teachers unions of laws that would force schools to disclose information about prior allegations and cases involving school employees.

“If the system would be more open and honest about all this, then parents would feel more relieved and it would get rid of a great deal of rumor and conjecture,” Barresi said.

It is those employee protections that produce the pattern known as “passing the trash,” several experts told RCI. This is particularly relevant in cases where state or local law enforcement agencies are never notified of allegations. A school may launch an investigation after a parent or student files a complaint, but that investigation would cease when the employee resigned, and then state law or bargaining agreements often prohibit officials administrators from relaying such information to any new school where the alleged perpetrator applied or began working.

Miller said SESAME has model legislation states could pass to confront the problem, but thus far the group has found limited success.

The Enough Abuse Campaign, which did not respond to RCI’s questions, notes that age-of-consent laws and the definitions of what constitutes sexual misconduct have created a complicated legal and regulatory map. Still, the campaign seems more optimistic about legislative progress than SESAME, declaring that “over 75 percent of states have now passed legislation specifically outlawing educator sexual misconduct,” in recognition of the power imbalance that exists in a teacher/student relationship.

And there are some signs lawmakers are grasping the enormity of the issue.

On July 1, an Oklahoma law went into effect mandating any verbal or social media contact between school employees and students be done on platforms the school controls, which state Rep. Sherrie Conley called a “long overdue” regulation.

Similarly, in Michigan, state Rep. Brad Paquette, himself a teacher, has proposed legislation appointing a state ombudsman to deal with sexual misconduct complaints.

“It’s just a beginning but we have to start somewhere,” Paquette told RCI. “I first heard back in 2012 or 2013, when I started teaching, that I had to join the union because I might have an accusation filed against me. But I thought, ‘No, I should be fired if I did something wrong.’”

“I think we need to be engaged aggressively to root out the problem,” he said. “There’s no good reason for us to take a lax approach. You see these headlines all over the place and it’s unacceptable. People need to start asking questions.”

While Richey said she did not recall any credible allegations crossing her desk during a brief stint as an attorney with Virginia schools, Paquette’s “everywhere” assessment seems on the mark.

In Texas, for example, the online site Texas Scorecard started looking at the issue in 2022 after administrators in Prosper, a swanky Dallas suburb, attempted to cover up alleged repeated sexual offenses by a school bus driver. Since then, Texas Scorecard has kept an unofficial tally of such incidents, and the Lone Star State has had more than 100 cases every year since.

The Prosper superintendent is currently under investigation by Texas agencies, in part for the 2022 coverup, as Texas law requires officials to report any credible allegations of child abuse within 48 hours. In May, two Prosper high school coaches were arrested for allegedly covering up another sexual assault that involved students.

Separating student-on-student sexual misconduct is key to understanding how deep the problem may run with school employees, according to Grant and other experts. For example, in the more general questions DOE’s OCR would ask regarding improper incidents that fall under Title IX, troubling trends emerged. For 2015-2016, there were 9,649 incidents of sexual violence, and of that figure 394 cases were categorized as rape or attempted rape. In 2017-2018, those numbers skyrocketed, with overall incidents rising by 43% to 13,799 and the most serious category 74% to 685.

As alarming as that trend may be, there is no way of knowing how many of those cases involved school employees, and Richey suspects that, given how the questionnaire was traditionally perceived, the majority of them are student-on-student.

Nevertheless, Grant pointed to multiple studies that came to similar conclusions to that reached in the 2004 Hofstra report. That study found that 9.6% of the U.S. student body fall victim to educator sexual misconduct.

Looking at California data from 2010-2021, Grant of Cal-Poly found 2,497 “school employees disciplined, reprimanded or arrested for sexually abusing K-12 students.” Between 2012 and 2018, the DOE received 280 complaints of adult-on-student sexual harassment in Chicago Public Schools. A Texas study from 2008 to 2016 found 1,415 Lone Star State educators “sanctioned for sexual misconduct.”

These academic papers and sometimes salacious news accounts of teacher/student relationships do send up flares from time to time. In 2007, the Associated Press declared that “sexual misconduct plagues U.S. schools,” after its investigation “found more than 2,500 cases over five years in which educators were punished for actions from bizarre to sadistic.” In December 2023, Business Insider looked at the issue and concluded “shoddy investigations, quiet resignations, and a culture of secrecy have protected predators, not students.”

Last year, the Defense of Freedom Institute released a report titled “catching the trash” that concluded sexual misconduct by school employees has raged in the school system for decades.

“Various actors – school and district personnel, teacher unions, and the federal department charged with enforcing laws against sexual assault in public schools – bear responsibility for a systemic failure in preventing, and responding to, sexual assaults in public schools,” the report said.

Pointing to the Biden administration’s attempt to remove specific questions about the issue from the OCR questionnaire, report author Paul Zimmerman told RCI the public should not expect much daylight on the topic in the near future.

“The Biden administration has gone dark on this, they’re not interested in pressing this issue as evidenced by trying to discontinue the efforts made on this front by the previous administration,” he said.

These political bumps, and the wreckage the COVID shutdowns unleashed on education in America, means there is no way of tackling the problem’s dimensions, let alone the problem itself. “It takes so long to get these numbers that in the end they’re not that helpful,” he said.

The best way to block the passage of trash is through the SESAME Act, which DOE has cited as “model legislation” for states. To date, only a handful of states have passed the act, most recently Illinois in 2023. It requires the prohibition of non-disclosure agreements in personal or collectively bargained contracts, as well as deep background checks on all applicants.

Only such thorough steps will break what Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah who has worked with Miller and SESAME, calls “the complicity of silence.” While the parameters of the problem may be hard to find, Guiora said he was stunned when he recently published what he acknowledged is a niche book on a West Virginia teacher exposed years late as a pedophile murderer. The limited book sold out on Amazon and his podcast has now topped 1 million views.

“That tells you that what’s happening is something that is touching a chord,” he said. “It is so goddamn egregious what they have done to protect people who do this. Lawmakers will have to break the institutional complicity that surrounds this or they’ll just be protecting the perpetrators.”