Haines students’ presentation showing classmate as Jeffrey Epstein has parents questioning district’s response

10 hours ago

6 min read

By Rashah McChesney

Chilkat Valley News

Editor’s note: Two parents of school-aged children shared their stories on the condition of anonymity to protect the identities of their children. We are also not naming the student who was abused, the perpetrators, their grades, or their genders as all four are juveniles.

Parents in the Haines Borough School District are questioning the district’s response to an incident last month in which school staff learned that three students had created a document depicting one of their classmates as convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The document portrayed the classmate committing sexual crimes against other students at the school and against at least one student with a disability from a program outside of the school, according to parents of students involved.

The document was created sometime during the last spring quarter using, at least in part, school-issued laptops, according to a targeted student’s mother, whose name the Chilkat Valley News has agreed to withhold to protect the privacy of her child.

The document came to light after one of the students who created it left their laptop open. A targeted student’s mother said her child emailed the presentation to a teacher who then reported it to administrators on Sept. 25.

Parents say the district has both kept them in the dark about the content of the document, and also downplayed the document’s severity.

“They told us that it was very serious and that they were going to handle it seriously, but they didn’t say ‘there’s explicit content in this,’” said the mother of the student targeted by the document. “That was the part I later learned from community knowledge that felt really gross.”

Accounts of exactly what is in the document vary. Parents who spoke to the Chilkat Valley News said administrators refused their requests to view the document.

Superintendent Lilly Boron refused to discuss specifics of the nature of the document or the district’s response but said the district had spoken to its attorney. “I’m not going to speak to this incident. But anytime there is something that is serious, I make a practice of consulting legal counsel,” she said.

That leaves parents relying on administrators’ descriptions of the document and what their children tell them.

The targeted student’s mother said that the information vacuum is making the situation worse. Particularly, she said, because administrators, rather than sharing the contents of the document with her, left it to her child to explain the nature of it.

“First of all, don’t put it on my [child] to do this communication. That was unfair for [them] to have to give us that level of detail,” she said. “I only found out that it was an Epstein spoof from [my child], not from the school.”

She also said district administrators met on Oct. 2 with a targeted student and the students who created the document in a “restorative” session that was supposed to include an apology. She and her husband were not told about that meeting until days later.

Boron said that, as a general practice, parents should be told before administrators make decisions or meet with students. “That is the best practice,” she said. “Unless there is something so egregious … if there’s imminent harm.”

Ultimately, she said, the school is responsible for what happens in the school and is responsible for consequences but said that, “philosophically, the parents need to be part of that conversation.”

Because Boron would not say how the district responded to this case, it’s not clear which – if any – of its internal policies were followed. Several of them overlap, depending on how an incident is classified.

The mother of a child targeted by the document said she was told by district staff that the students’ behavior was disciplined as a technology violation.

A technology violation, in the discipline section of the school’s handbook, is a separate category from harassment and bullying, which is defined as students delivering disrespectful messages to another person that include “threats and intimidation, obscene gestures, pictures, written notes, electronic communication, or social media posts.”

When an incident is reported as harassment and bullying it requires a stricter response from the school and a multi-step process in which the principal has to investigate the incident, notify the parents of the students involved “by telephone and in writing,” and everyone involved has to be notified of their due process rights. Anything involving criminal activity has to be reported to law enforcement.

Boron would not say whether local police were notified of the incident while it was being investigated. But the mother of a targeted student said a local police officer met with her child and the students who created the document.

“He weaved his way around to saying this meets the criteria for harassment charges,” she said. She added that she and her husband have decided that they are not going to press charges.

District regulations require any employee who learns of bullying to report it to the principal, and they require the principal to forward a written report to Boron, who is the district’s designated Title IX coordinator. She said during an Oct. 21 interview that she has received a written bullying report from the principal. Parents who spoke to the Chilkat Valley News said they have received nothing in writing from the district.

Boron said there is no “single standard” for deciding whether something is a technology violation or bullying or sexual harassment. She said Principal Alex Van Wyhe and Dean of Students Tammy Hamilton assign discipline using the student handbook and that consequences fall along “a spectrum” by design.

“There’s context, there’s other factors that play into things that the public doesn’t know about,” she said.

“We’re guided by district policy. We’re guided by applicable law,” she said. “Coupled with that, we have our own ethics…we have our values, we have what we know to be acceptable. I think we want to be restorative in our approach, but we also want to be very explicit and clear and not let things slide.”

Two different parents said they were told by district officials and their own children that the students who created the document each received a one-day suspension as punishment.

The federal student privacy law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, limits what schools can disclose about student records, including disciplinary records, but does not restrict what families can share.

“That feels inadequate to me now that I understand the nature and the severity of the content of this presentation,” said a targeted student’s mother. “This is the kind of thing that normalizes rape culture.”

A second mother, whose name the Chilkat Valley News is also withholding to protect the identity of her child, said she has asked the district for access to the document because her child was also portrayed as a victim in it.

“These kids are bonding over the sexual abuse of their peers. They need an intervention. They need help. They need an evaluation and all of our kids need training on how to deal with a situation so that nobody is a victim, nobody is a bystander and nobody is a perpetrator,” she said.

She also questioned whether the district is appropriately monitoring the technology it assigns to students.

“I thought they had control of that,” she said.

But, when her child turned in their laptop for the summer, they got the same one back in the fall and it appeared that nothing had been done with it in the interim. All of their settings and browser tabs were still on it.

She said she spoke with Van Wyhe who initially told her he would share a redacted copy of the document with her. That has not happened.

“I want to know how they said they were going to sexually abuse my child,” she said. “I deserve to know that.”

Boron said the district monitors student laptops “when the need arises” and that she is researching software that would flag problems automatically, so that safety is “not dependent on somebody just happening to glance.”

Bullying and harassment can be reported anonymously through the district’s STOPit app or via a form on the district’s website. Additionally, Boron is the district’s federal Title IX coordinator which makes her responsible for handling sexual harassment complaints for the district. Parents who believe their child was sexually harassed can file a complaint with Boron at lboron@hbsd.net.