Kids' Minds in Gutter, Adults' Heads in Sand
By RICHARD STEIER
There are more than a few shocking details in the sexual harassment complaint that Theresa Reel, a Teacher at the School for Legal Studies in Brooklyn, has brought against the Department of Education for failing to deal with her allegations of student misbehavior.

They include students loudly and crudely questioning her sexual habits and orientation, sexual propositions by male students alternating with threats of violence, and one female student warning that she and her friends planned to assault her.

Yet the vulgarity and the frequency with which it manifested itself — particularly stunning in an institution intended to prepare students for legal careers — seems almost mundane alongside the reactions of the officials running the Williamsburg high school. Their failure to address the problem, and their castigating Ms. Reel for daring to raise her voice about the issue, suggests a school administration that is either fearful that the Department of Education will blame it for the students' behavior, or has such low expectations for those students that it is willing to pass them through without taking the trouble to socialize them in preparation for life in the real world.

The Chief-Leader/Adrienne Haywood-James 'CAN'T LET THEM GROW UP THIS WAY': Larry Cary, one of the lawyers for Theresa Reel, was stunned that her Principal at the School for Legal Studies admonished her for ejecting a student who told her she was 'sexually frustrated and needed a man,' then asked, 'and how does that threaten you?' Mr. Cary remarked, 'How do we as a society allow our children to behave this way and expect them to grow up and be good citizens of this society?'

'How Are They Going to Grow Up?'

During an Aug. 6 interview in her lawyers' offices, Ms. Reel declined to speculate on why officials led by School for Legal Studies Principal Denise Morgan had greeted her complaints with hostility rather than trying to remedy the situation. But one of her attorneys, Larry Cary, remarked, "I think it's a bizarre effort to blame the victim, reminiscent of something from the 1950s. How do we as a society allow our children to behave this way and expect them to grow up and be good citizens of this society?"

Ms. Morgan could not be reached for comment through her school and her union.

Prior to Ms. Reel's filing of a formal complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, DOE responded to an earlier letter outlining her allegations with the claim that each charge of student misbehavior had been addressed. A letter from the school system's Senior Counsel, Lisa Becker, to Ms. Reel's other attorney, Josh Parkhurst, stated that an internal investigation found "that any time your client has reported a student for misconduct, negative behavior or making untoward statements to her, whether of a sexual nature or otherwise, the students have been disciplined and dealt with appropriately."

Ms. Becker went on to spray a little mud in Ms. Reel's direction by stating that "we were advised that on or about May 3, 2008, your client wore inappropriate attire to school in that she wore a low-cut, V-neck, lace top while teaching one of her classes."

Ms. Reel denied that allegation last week, saying, "It's very bizarre that they would accuse me of dressing like a hootchie." She believed that it was her Principal, Ms. Morgan, who made that claim in an effort to discredit her charges.

The reason is obvious: if Ms. Reel is telling the truth, Ms. Morgan has a lot of explaining to do, and should not be doing it in a position of authority in the public schools.

There is, for example, an incident cited by Ms. Reel from Nov. 4, 2005, early in her first year of teaching at the School of Legal Studies after the native of "very rural" McConnellsburg, Pa. spent six years as a Teacher in the Mississippi Delta and a year at the School for Public Safety and Law in Brooklyn's East New York section.

Chastised for Ejecting Student

A female student she identified in her complaint as N.S. repeatedly shouted an expletive during her class and announced to fellow students "that I was sexually frustrated and needed a man." When the disruptions continued, Ms. Reel said, "I told her to leave the room."

When the class ended, she said, Ms. Morgan confronted her and said, "We do not send students out of the room for talking" and only did so when they were a threat.

"I informed Ms. Morgan that N.S. was repeatedly directing sexual remarks at me," Ms. Reel said in her EEOC affidavit. "Ms. Morgan's only response was, 'and how does that threaten you?'''

But beyond the disruptive effect that behavior had on her class, Ms. Reel said during the interview, "I did feel threatened in the way that if one student can speak to me that way and get away with it ... I was really afraid that the situation would get out of hand."

Six months later, she was approached in the hallway by M.H. a former student of hers who on two previous occasions had brushed up against her breasts with his elbow. Because the hallways were crowded each time, Ms. Reel said, she thought the brushing was accidental, but on this occasion, with the hallway relatively empty, he went out of his way to get close to her and do it again while smiling at her.

She filed complaints against the student, and when no action was taken, spoke to one of the school's Deans, who told her that it was possible that the paperwork had gotten lost. "I did not hear anything until June 2nd, when I was approached by William Abreu," an Assistant Principal of Progress High School, which shares the campus of what used to be Eastern District High School with the School for Legal Studies, who also serves as head of security for the entire complex.

'Treat Me Like the Guilty Party'

"Mr. Abreu pulled me out of my third period class and appeared to be very angry," she stated. "He told me that if I were to insist on carrying the issue any further, that the Department of Education would send someone from the Office of Special Investigations to investigate the matter and that I would be treated as the guilty party."

She persisted in seeking discipline against M.H., however, and learned that he had tried a similar move on another female Teacher. He was briefly suspended, she said, but "I regularly see him in the hallways."

The threat she claimed Mr. Abreu made — that her complaint would bring DOE investigators running — is one that seems to weigh heavily on more than a few school administrations. It is why the exultant claims of a double-digit drop in school crime cited by Mayor Bloomberg last week have to be viewed with a measure of skepticism; more than a few cases have arisen over the years in which Principals were more intent on discouraging the reporting of student misconduct that was serious enough to attract attention than they were on dealing with the problem, fearing that any publicity would hurt the school and, not incidentally, their own careers.

Last Sept. 5, a student Ms. Reel calls R.C. was sleeping at his desk when Ms. Reel ordered him to wake up. He responded by cursing her and then making comments about "cold-blooded murder."

"After several days," Ms. Reel stated in her affidavit, "the only action taken by the school was to briefly suspend R.C. and place him in another class. I have since been accosted and harassed by R.C. in the hallways."

'Situation Out of Control'

A day after that run-in, she said, another male student cursed her so belligerently that she had security escort him from the classroom. The next day, Ms. Reel, who had become a United Federation of Teachers delegate, and the union's chapter chair at the school, Jessica Anaya, met with Ms. Morgan. Ms. Reel said they told her "the situation in her school was out of control, with students regularly harassing myself and other teachers. Ms. Morgan stated that she did not condone the behavior, but she did not promise any action to stop it."

In October, one male student repeatedly told a male classmate to perform a sexual act on him. Ms. Reel had the student removed from the class and taken to the Dean's Office, only to be subsequently told by Ms. Morgan that "she would have me investigated for corporal punishment."

The allegation, Ms. Reel said in her complaint, was found to be unsubstantiated. Asked whether Ms. Morgan had accused her of physical misconduct against the student, she replied, "I think the Chancellor's Office defines corporal punishment as hurting a child's feelings ... their self-esteem."

Three months later, her affidavit states, a student she called T.G. repeatedly shouted an expletive, and after she sought to have him removed from the class, he told her, "I'm going to bop you on the head," then changed course by saying, "I have a rubber, want to party?"

The following day, she and Ms. Anaya again went to Ms. Morgan, who implied that Ms. Reel was either imagining the harassment or provoking it, saying, "Ms. Reel, I'm concerned that you are the only person reporting these things."

Some Teachers Decline to Step Up

That did not mean, Ms. Reel said last week, that she was the only one experiencing them. She said one colleague had reported harassment to an Assistant Principal and a union official, but did not want to go further because "she was new to the school." She said a second Teacher whom she urged to come forward about the harassment she was subjected to responded, "Why bother? Nothing's going to happen."

It was only after she qualified for tenure last September, Ms. Reel said, that she became willing to take her complaints outside the school. One of the more-frustrating aspects of her ordeal, she said, is that the UFT contract does not expressly protect Teachers against sexual harassment if the offenders are students.

"If a male colleague was harassing me, there's coverage for that," Ms. Reel remarked. "If a male Principal was harassing me, there's coverage for that." A priority of her EEOC complaint, she said, is to make DOE "come up with an immediate, effective and enforceable policy to protect Teachers."

Last September, after she sent a memo to other Teachers at the school lamenting the lack of a procedure for dealing with student harassment, she was chastised by Ms. Morgan for the language she used and for failing to discuss the matter first with her.

Students Victimized, Too

If Ms. Reel's charges are true, the injured parties extend well beyond the Teachers suffering from harassment. The students at the School for Legal Studies are also being victimized, even the ones behaving so offensively.

It is only the context in which the bad behavior is occurring that makes it shocking. Even the tactic of "accidentally" brushing up against someone's breasts with an elbow is hardly new; Richard Price offered a discourse on the practice in his first novel, "The Wanderers," about growing up in The Bronx during the 1960s. In my junior high school years in Brooklyn late in that decade, teenage boys discussed their sexual fantasies about some of their Teachers, and took pride in the vulgarity they exhibited among themselves.

The difference was, you didn't display this crude behavior in front of grown-ups, and certainly didn't inflict it on authority figures like Teachers. It is as if the offending students at the School for Legal Studies, as street-smart as they may imagine themselves to be, are ingloriously ignorant of the realities of the adult world, and so feel free to engage in a form of adolescent Tourette's Syndrome, blurting out whatever enters their minds or acting strictly on impulse.

Keeping Themselves Down

Girls who call their Teachers a "son of a ho" or tell them they "need to get a man" aren't going far in life unless their attitudes are severely adjusted. Boys who make outrageous remarks in class about their Teacher's hygiene or respond to orders to be quiet with smutty sexual commands are headed for a lifetime on the corner, aimlessly wondering why the world has passed them by. Many of them discover too late that 50 Cent and Eminem succeeded not because of their vulgarity but because they had talent that transcended it, and that it's not easy to overcome an adolescence squandered on posturing rather than getting a good education.

Ms. Reel said that on several occasions she had tried to explain to her students what was wrong with sexual harassment. "In one ear and out the other," she remarked. "In this particular situation, if they don't see consequences being applied, then they [believe they] can get away with it."

But as Mr. Cary noted, "If you're training people to live as adults in the working world, what are you training them to accept if you don't address something like this?"

While the Teachers at the School for Legal Studies are a racially diverse group, Ms. Reel said, the student body is overwhelming black and Latino. That was also the case when she taught in East New York, which has always been a rougher neighborhood, but there, "I didn't feel threatened. They were very rowdy, but I never encountered the kind of disrespect I encountered in the Williamsburg school."

Won't Be Run Off

Yet she plans to return there in the fall, even though at the end of this past school year "I got a less-friendly vibe" from Ms. Morgan after the letter from Mr. Parkhurst that served notice that she would be filing the EEOC complaint.

"The school has so much potential," Ms. Reel said, with programs to prepare students for careers in law, law-enforcement and court reporting. "The School for Legal Studies, I love the mission." And going to another school, she added, would not assure that "I wouldn't have the same problem."

It would be nice, however, if her current one got some adult supervision at the top.

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