Students outside the Evergreen Public Schools administrative offices in east Vancouver wave signs condemning sexual abuse. Students said the school has recently failed to respond to reports of harassment and abuse.
Troy Brynelson / OPB
About two dozen Evergreen Public Schools students protested Wednesday against what they say are repeated failures to protect students from sexual harassment and abuse.
It’s at least the second time this month that students – and others who joined the protest – flocked to the district’s administrative offices in east Vancouver to raise concerns.
“If the issue isn’t apathy, it’s like purposeful ignorance,” said Sami Allen, a 20-year-old recent graduate who joined several others in waving signs at passing cars and chanting for students’ protection.
The recent rallies have formed amid rising concerns from students. Lilly Lewis, a sophomore who helped organize the protest, said numerous students are concerned that reports of unwanted sexual attention have gone unanswered.
“They could have done so much more, and I just feel like they didn’t,” Lewis said.
Among leading factors for the protests are recent controversies involving teachers within the district. On Nov. 22, a humanities teacher named William Marsh was convicted for child molestation of his adopted daughter, according to court records.
Lewis, once a student of Marsh, said she and multiple students had complained to the district about other alarming behaviors about the teacher. According to Lewis and other students at the protest, school administration didn’t appear to handle complaints properly.
After Marsh’s conviction, Lewis created an Instagram page through which she has been organizing the protests.
Evergreen spokeswoman Gail Spolar said the district takes allegations of sexual misconduct seriously and investigates each one. She noted that school employees are mandatory reporters, required by law to tell authorities when they learn of potential abuse.
However, outcomes of investigations aren’t always as well-known as allegations, Spolar said.
“We also understand that students and parents may think complaints are not handled when they do not know outcomes and actions taken on staff or student investigations due to privacy laws,” Spolar said.
Still, the district has been fully battling the perception – and not just from students or former students.
Some members of YWCA Clark County, a group advocating for women and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, joined the protest Wednesday. The organization said it has been receiving a deluge of complaints related to incidents within Evergreen Public Schools.
Deputy Director Vanessa Yarie said YWCA Clark County regularly hears from the community, but rarely does it field as many complaints as it has recently about Evergreen. Yarie said the complaints are varied, but tend to focus more on peer-to-peer incidents than anything involving teachers.
Yarie said a common theme has been students’ frustration with a feeling of being ignored and doubted.
“We are hearing that there’s no process of accountability. There’s no follow-up,” Yarie said.
Students outside the Evergreen Public Schools administrative offices in east Vancouver wave signs condemning sexual abuse. Students said the school has recently failed to respond to reports of harassment and abuse.
Troy Brynelson / OPB
The calls led YWCA Clark County to publish a statement last Friday, calling on Evergreen’s elected board members to rectify any failures in the reporting system. Executive Director Dunetchka Otero-Serrano wrote the district is “miserably failing to bring forth any accountability.”
“You have cultivated an environment where sexual violence is allowed. Your actions have placed fault on survivors and punished them instead of believing them,” Otero-Serrano wrote.
In response, Evergreen School Board President Victoria Bradford wrote a letter calling the YWCA’s statement “misleading” for “accusing the school district of not properly handling and/or ignoring student complaints regarding sexual assault and harassment.”
Bradford wrote the letter had “propagated misinformation, and potentially harmed, rather than helped, students gain needed assistance.”
While YWCA has not publicly responded to Evergreen’s retort, school board member Rachael Rogers issued her own statement that said Bradford’s letter “100% does NOT represent my views.”
“As a district it is our duty to make the safety of children our number one priority,” Rogers wrote to YWCA. “If our children feel that we are not taking allegations of sexual assault/abuse seriously, then at a minimum, we have a problem with perception/culture/optics and that needs to be fixed.”
Bradford spoke again publicly on Tuesday. In her statement, she said she agreed the district needed to re-examine how complaints are handled at the district.
“In the last week, it has also become clear, after listening to our students, that we need to examine our processes and make it even safer and easier to report any unwanted or threatening behavior,” Bradford said. “We need to make sure every student in our care has the opportunity to step forward.”
Despite the statement, Lewis, the sophomore, said at the protest Wednesday that she doesn’t feel like administrators are being genuine.
“I just have a really big lack of trust with anybody in their district,” Lewis said. “I think that’s something they have to earn back from students and I don’t think they realize that.”