5 at elementary school suspended
Roxbury pupils allegedly violated sex harassment ban
May 20, 2006
Five students at a Roxbury elementary school – four girls in the first and second grades and one boy in the fifth grade – were suspended yesterday for sexual harassment stemming from an incident on a school bus that involved lewd language and touching, according to a spokesman for the Boston public schools.
The R.W. Emerson School students made ''explicit statements about and to each other, and there was some level of very minor touching going on," said School Department spokesman Jonathan Palumbo, who would not provide details.
John Chery, the father of a 7-year-old girl who was suspended, said his daughter told him they had choked, scratched, and touched one another during the Thursday morning bus ride.
Chery said the school principal, C. Sura O’Mard-Gentle, told him and his daughter yesterday that one of the other girls who was suspended had referred to the events as ''the rape game."
No one was hurt in the incident, said Palumbo. He confirmed that O’Mard-Gentle heard the term ''rape game" from one of the girls but said the principal told him she had never heard the phrase before.
After meeting with each child and his or her parents separately yesterday, O’Mard-Gentle suspended the children starting Monday for violating the school system’s ban on sexual harassment, Palumbo said. The disciplinary code bans ''sexually related physical contacts or offensive sexual insults or comments."
The girls got one-day suspensions. The boy got a three-day suspension because he did most of the touching, according to Palumbo, who said he was unaware of other cases where such young school children in Boston had been suspended for sexual harassment, he said.
School systems, by state law, must have policies barring sexual harassment. The policy is in a code of discipline approved by the School Department in 1982 and revised several times since then.
But Chery, whose daughter is in the first grade, and officials from ACORN, a neighborhood advocacy group, said the incident underscored a desperate need for monitors on Boston school buses.
''The Boston public school system is totally upside down," said Chery, a bank security guard who plans to drive his daughter to and from school from now on. ''They don’t have any supervision on that bus."
During school desegregation in the 1970s, Boston had at least one monitor on every bus. But the numbers plunged in the mid-1980s as a result of budget cuts. Today, Boston has monitors on about 7 percent of its buses, said Palumbo.
Owen Toney, a parent organizer for ACORN, said his group urged Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant a few years ago to provide more bus monitors. ''Kids are stressed when they’re on the bus," Toney said yesterday. ''They’re fighting and bullying. If there were a monitor on the bus, then it wouldn’t be happening."
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/05/20/5_at_elementary_school_suspended/