Louisiana deaf school closes temporarily after bus attacks

From The AP:

BATON ROUGE, La. — The Louisiana School for the Deaf is shutting down temporarily to add new security after a string of arrests on sex charges involving students and staff, the state superintendent of education said Oct. 7.

The decision comes less than two weeks after a male teenage student was accused of attacking a preteen female student on a school bus.

Superintendent Paul Pastorek said he hasn't decided how long to close the Baton Rouge school, which has about 200 students. He said students who live on campus would be bused home on Wednesday.

"My goal is to transform this troubled moment into an opportunity to build a stronger and better school that not only meets — but sets the standard — for delivering world-class education to our state's deaf students," Pastorek said.

Pastorek's own expert consultant warned that the institution's top administrator must be replaced and an entire new operational system installed. The consultant, Alan Cohen, declined to estimate how long that would take.

Cohen's report placed no blame on the school's management or staff, and noted that sex crimes are common at deaf schools nationwide.

"But the fact that it happens frequently doesn't make it right, or acceptable," he said.

Five people were arrested between November and April on sex charges involving students at the school. Three are current or former teachers. A former teacher pleaded guilty in September to contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. He admitted exchanging sexually explicit e-mails and photographs with the same student.

Although Cohen recommended that interim director Kenny David be replaced, he called him "extremely competent and experienced." David lacked proper professional and academic credentials and "experience efficiently managing a program as complex and demanding" as the deaf school, Cohen said.

And David himself does not feel he's the best person for the job, said Cohen, a Cornell University-trained specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry.

Cohen's report found the school lacks key guiding principles: a clear sense of its function, a set of standards for how to handle students and how the institution should be run.

"We are concerned with the general lack of standards necessary to administer a school program that is attempting to meet the needs of such a highly diverse and complex population," Cohen said in the report.

Students at the school range in age from 3 to 21. Pre-elementary schoolchildren often mingle with adult students. Another challenge: up to 15 percent of students are "cognitively impaired" and require special oversight.

In the school bus assault, the alleged attacker was a 16-year-old mentally impaired student whose previous discipline problems meant he required constant supervision. His appointed chaperone was later fired because she failed to supervise him on the bus.

That assault highlighted another problem Cohen found at the school: a lack of direction on faculty training and the need for staffers to understand American Sign Language.

A student witness to the school bus assault tried to tell the chaperone. But she didn't understand and didn't respond to the student's attempts to direct her attention to the back of the bus, David has said. The chaperone was hired as a residential adviser without knowing sign language and had been trained by other staff in the year she worked at the school, David said.