Teacher’s Aide Sent 14-Year-Old-Girl to Bathroom to Get Sexually Assaulted by a 16-Year-Old Eighth Grade Boy So He Could Get Caught in the Act

June Simpson was a teacher’s aide at Sparkman
Middle School in Toney, Ala. in 2010 when she sent a 14-year-old
girl into the bathroom to be sexually assaulted by a 16-year-old
eight grade boy with a long history of discipline, and who had been
accused in recent months of sexually propositioning girls in the
school) so that he could be caught in the act and disciplined for
it,
the Associated Press reports.

Simpson, who quit after the incident, said she told an assistant
principal, Jeanne Dunaway , about her plan and that she
initiated it after the principal, Ronnie Blair, told her he
couldn’t discipline the 16-year-old eighth grader unless he was
caught in the act.

School officials claim the administrators weren’t aware of the
plan, but according to the AP the principal said he “may have” said
the boy had to be caught in the act, “but the point was it had to
be proven that he was guilty of something before it would have —
he could be punished for that particular situation.” 
Communication skills and note-taking, apparently optional for
school administrators in Toney.

Blair is still the principal at Sparkman and Dunaway has since
been promoted to principal at another school. The parents of the
14-year-old girl sued the school district but a magistrate judge
threw the lawsuit out because, he argued, the school couldn’t know
the danger the girl was being placed in. “Although it was foolish
to send (the girl) to meet (the boy), the court cannot say that it
was ‘extreme and outrageous.’,” the AP quotes Judge Michael Putnam
in his decision. “The scheme to catch (the boy) ended horribly and
tragically, but the idea of using (the girl) to catch (the boy) ‘in
the act,’ however foolish, was not so extreme or outrageous as ‘to
be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized
society.”

Putnam seems to have a different idea of a civilized society
than anyone who would find the idea of using one student to catch
another student victimizing them on its face disturbing.

The Obama Administration has joined with nearly three dozen
private advocacy groups in petitioning a the 11^th
Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn Putnam’s decision and allow
the lawsuit against the school district, filed under Title IX’s
prohibition of sexual harassment in schools, to continue.