By Amelie McGowan and Hayden Gosch
In July of 2020, a Change.org petition titled “Hold the Roosevelt Administration Accountable” spread across student’s Instagram feeds. Underneath the post, comments revealed deep-rooted frustrations towards the Roosevelt administration. Students felt that complaints of racial and sexual harassment had been swept under the rug. A similar message was echoed across the platform: We have an issue, and it’s time to fix it.
But it wasn’t just the reporting process, it was how students felt while being pushed through the system. The Roosevelt community didn’t feel listened to, taken seriously, or understood. Stories of discrimination and harassment filled the page. In the end, the petition reached 5,026 signatures of its 7,500 goal.
This petition was just the beginning. During this time, an even bigger wave of unrest was happening. On Instagram and across the internet, stories spread like wildfire of fellow classmates treating each other with invasive and revolting behavior, and a seemingly indifferent response by administration.
Just this month, the Roosevelt administration released a new document to help students navigate the school’s reporting processes. The draft is now available to students for dialogue and was the topic of two assemblies in mid-May.
This document clarifies information that’s been unknown to many students, especially regarding legal protections for students who initiate reports. In particular, it describes the three levels of anonymity students have when reporting an incident, each of which results in different potential outcomes for the accused and the victim.
The first choice allows the victim to report anonymously. Because it excludes the identity of the victim, the administration cannot follow with disciplinary action. This also applies to online allegations, frequently from a nameless party.
The second choice, called confidential status, will ensure that the identity of the victim is kept from any and all involved individuals, with the exemption of the administration. This, similar to the last, also cannot lead to disciplinary action.
Only the third option can result in discipline. The non-confidential route requires the accuser to give permission for all individuals involved in the incident to report details.
The Roosevelt administration will only be able to potentially use disciplinary action when the victim is willing to be identified. Unfortunately, this leaves many who wish to remain anonymous or confidential without closure to their traumatic experience, and their alleged offenders off the hook.
The document then goes on to explain what the steps would be immediately after the report. Staff are mandatory reporters, meaning they must refer the incident to an outside source such as police, SPS, or other official personnel.
If a written report is given to police, the district, or officials, a school-based investigation is required to occur. These investigations include confidential interviews and are typically completed within five days of the initial report.
During this time, school administration may create a safety plan for the reporting student, which could include things such as a schedule change.
Over the next few months, this document will undergo changes based on public comment. To date, multiple groups have consulted on this paper. Among these are the Gender Equity Club, BSU, F-WORD, ASR Leadership Class, Rider Crew, Roosevelt Consent Culture Team, and the SPS Office of Student Civil Rights and Title IX. Criticism is also open to the public as of now.
This document is crucial for educating students on their own rights. The crux of this issue is the breach between already established policies, and how the student body is receiving them.
Even with these systems in place, some students do not feel heard or supported when going through the reporting process.
An anonymous student describes one problem with the reporting process — not knowing what it is. “When I reported, it was my second month of freshman year. I had no idea where to go and was unfamiliar with my counselor…. I wish I would have better understood the reporting system or at least known where to go,” says Roosevelt student.
While oftentimes teachers and administration are held back by laws and policies beyond their control, a lack of transparency can make the process feel dysfunctional to some students.
After filing a report, “That was the last I heard of it,” says senior Luci Campau. “There was no transparency, I didn’t hear anything again… The accusation clearly wasn’t taken seriously, there was no clear communication.”
Failures in transparency, communication, accessibility, and listening make the current reporting process an even more painful one for some students.
But when it comes to actual policy change, there is little Roosevelt can do. “Most of the district policies around bullying, intimidation, harassment, and sexual assault are likely pretty consistent across school districts,” says RHS Principal Rodgers. “They incorporate aspects of the legal system with due process rights and the need to investigate. All of those pieces are embedded in school board policy.”
Students have expressed frustration with a process they see as too lenient on the accused. But under the due process laws the district must follow, an accused student must be treated as innocent until proven guilty. While this system has faced criticism, it is unlikely to change anytime soon.
The school is further limited in the kinds of corrective action it can employ. SPS policy generally reserves expulsion from the district only for incidents of firearms brought onto school grounds. This has a number of reasons behind it, but is primarily based on the district’s legal obligation to provide all students with access to education.
“Roosevelt doesn’t really have the authority to implement anything different,” says Rodgers. “I think one of the things that we also want to do is to bring awareness to those policies, and how at times they constrain our response, right? That we are limited at times in what we can do, based on the fact that as a school we work within a system whose policies are, you know, much larger than just our school.”
Similarly, the district’s obligation to maintain the privacy and confidentiality of students’ reports can make some feel like nothing truly happens.
The biggest factor in this case is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). FERPA requires all schools in the nation to maintain the confidentiality of student records, including reports of sexual assault and harassment.
This is to protect the confidentiality of both the victim and the alleged aggressor. While it hides much of the investigation process from the outside, it’s a necessary policy to maintain the safety and privacy of students.
Increasingly, district staff are becoming aware of this disconnect between their policies and the students they serve.
“Our policies are kind of a mess,” Chandra Hampson, School Board President, said. “They’re confusing, and they’re not well tagged together. This is about your social, emotional, and sexual health. It is imperative. There’s some important work, and we need to bring it together pretty reflectively in policies.”
Seattle Public School’s Title IX Coordinator Tina Meade is one district member trying to solve this problem. She works in the SPS’s Office of Student Civil Rights and is a part of the Title IX Task Force.
“The role and the charge of the Title IX Task Force is policy and procedure changes. To make it in such a way that students do feel comfortable coming in to report, that they do feel safe, and that they get the end result of something that feels like they were heard,” says Meade. “If you’re talking about changes, with Title IX, that is still in process, and we’re still working on that. The biggest piece that we are trying to get is the students’ voice.”
Along with the district, school-based clubs and committees are hard at work on these issues. Much of their effort is in changing the culture of Roosevelt.
Roosevelt Consent Culture Team (RCCT) is a new group that arose out of Roosevelt’s Building Leadership Team. They are working to create a more effective, supportive system.
This group is made up of staff and students who have been meeting since October. They’ve been discussing exactly how to fight against something as intangible as a dynamic of hierarchy and power in school.
Carmen Zelaya, a Roosevelt science and Spanish teacher, BLT member, and one of the group’s founders, says that the RCCT has “…found that what we need is culture change, and the culture change is not going to happen top-down with teachers and staff telling young people how to behave. It has to be done by peers. You know, that’s why we have come up with this new club that will hopefully influence others in the school.”
Fellow teacher and RCCT co-founder Barbara Burton elaborates. “We’ve been talking about possible staff education and training programs. Shifts in ways to orchestrate curriculum change with that involved. And kind of general culture questions at large, how to better inform ourselves as a staff, as a culture, as a student body.”
Roosevelt Consent Culture Team has conversations regarding protocol for reporting sexual assault and harassment and how to better respond to the needs of survivors.
As a part of these conversations about protocol, the Roosevelt Consent Culture Team hopes to create a support and advocacy group for students reporting an incident. Burton says the group could look like “…a larger organization, like a consortium of staff and students that would dedicate itself, specifically to this challenge, along the lines of the way that the race and equity group has been working this year, and maybe build on that.”
It’s not enough that the laws exist, it’s creating them to be understandable, and translating them into something that is easy to exercise. Justice is elusive if individuals don’t know their rights. And without students knowing and being cognizant of their rights, the community’s reporting process fails to support students.
The recent reporting process summary is a new window into a complicated system, and possibly a step toward reform. As these district policies become open to the public and more accessible for students, it’s likely to fuel continuing and deeper conversations about how we navigate our own school experiences.
