When Drug Warrior Kelly Racca, who split her time as a teacher at Clovis North High School, decided that it was up to her to rid her school of demon weed, she saw no issue with using students as bait.  When her undercover plans hit the skids, she learned that the cops disagreed.

But at least the students who did as their teacher told them survived with their physical integrity intact.  A 14-year-old special needs girl wasn’t so lucky.

Court records indicate the 14-year-old girl was raped after teacher’s aide June Simpson told her to go into a boys’ restroom with the 16-year-old boy, who had reportedly been harassing several girls and asking them to have sex with him. Both he and the victim were special needs students.

Simpson told the girl that the school administration could punish him if they could “catch him in the act.” When neither Simpson nor any other school official followed the teens into the bathroom immediately, the girl was sodomized.

As it turned out, Teacher’s Aide Simpson wasn’t nearly as good at playing cop as she thought, and it all fell to pieces, with the young girl suffering not only an anal rape, but an educational one as well.

Vice Principal Teresa Terrell saw the photos of the girl’s injuries.  Look’s consensual to me, she said. No harm no foul. 

The matter ended up in federal court, where the judge dismissed federal claims in the case.  Shockingly, the DoJ has decided to join in as amicus before the 11th Circuit.  Not, as would be expected, for the school district, but on behalf of the young girl.

The Justice Department says [teacher’s aide] Simpson had alerted the administration of her plan.

“Simpson and (the girl) then went to Vice-Principal (Jeanne) Dunaway’s office, where Simpson told Dunaway about her plan to use (the girl) as bait to catch (the boy). Dunaway did not respond with any advice or directive,” reads today’s brief.

“(The girl) left Dunaway’s office, found (the boy) in the hallway, and agreed to meet him for sex. (The boy) told (the girl) to go to the sixth grade boys’ bathroom and she complied. No teachers were in the bathroom to intervene, and (the boy) sodomized (the girl).”

Had it just been some outrageously foolish teacher’s aide engaging in an insane scheme, it would be bad enough.  But this scheme had at least the knowledge of, and tacit approval of, the vice-principal.

When the scheme failed, because the boy took the girl to a different bathroom than the one the aide anticipated, and anally raped her because no adult was there to prevent the act, it officially never happened.

The federal brief argues school officials minimized the incident, listing it in the boy’s extensive record as “inappropriate touching.” The federal attorneys note one assistant principal, despite seeing photos of the injuries, contended school officials could not know if the girl had consented.

“Vice-Principal Dunaway testified that (the girl) was responsible for herself once she entered the bathroom,” wrote federal attorneys.

Both of the students involved, boy and girl, were special needs students.  The boy, apparently, had a series of prior incidents, but the school trivialized them in its reporting so, it would appear, they weren’t constrained to deal with the fact that he posed a serious and significant risk of sexual assault.  It bears noting that there is no group more vulnerable to sexual abuse than special needs students.

The U.S. Department of Justice argues administrators at Sparkman Middle School near Huntsville knew the boy was dangerous and showed “deliberate indifference.”

“According to Principal (Ronnie) Blair,” reads today’s brief, “June Simpson, a teacher’s aide, reported that for several weeks, (a 16-year-old boy) had repeatedly been trying to get girls into the boys’ bathroom and in fact had sex with a student in the bathroom on the special needs students’ corridor.”

Blair rejected the aide’s recommendation that the boy be constantly watched, “and told Simpson that (the boy) could not be punished because he had not been ‘caught in the act,’ short-hand for the school’s policy that students could not be disciplined without substantiation of student-on-student misconduct.”

As this begins to unwind, Teacher’s Aide Simpson begins to look less and less like the inane culprit of this absurd scheme, and more like a frustrated if inept protector of her charges in the face of a school bureaucracy that wants nothing to do with the problems happening under their noses.  While there is nothing wrong with a policy requiring substantiation of misconduct, requiring that someone be “caught in the act” bears no connection.

Yet this is what the administration demanded when confronted with Simpson’s concerns.  To the extent Simpson was horribly wrong in persuading the 14-year-old girl to risk anal rape, the principal and vices were similarly wrong in refusing to address Simpson’s fear that the boy would do exactly as he did.

What remains a mystery here is why the administration made the decision to ignore what was clearly a festering problem.  Both the boy and girl involved were special needs students, meaning that even though the boy may have had dangerous sexual impulse control issues, it remained the duty of the school to educate him while safeguarding other students from him through an appropriate behavioral control plan.  Was it too expensive to provide appropriate safeguards?  Was it too much trouble?

It seems inconceivable that these “educators” didn’t care, or were “deliberately indifferent” as the government contends, that this boy was a rape time bomb, and yet there is no explanation for their failure to protect girls in general, and this bait-girl in particular, from rape.

As Jeff Gamso notes, not only did the school district not severely punish these administrators for their failure, but either kept them in positions of authority or promoted, as in the case of Dunaway, to principal at Madison County Elementary. 

What would possibly give rise to this vote of confidence?  There is nothing in this story that gives rise to any rational explanation. Is this just a horrible story of neglect and covering up, or is there something, some reason, why the Madison County schools have chosen to take the route of burying the risk of rape?  Usually, there is an explanation or motivation, for better or worse, behind such bizarre and inexplicable stories.  Here, nothing makes sense.