EDITORIAL: The Creepiest School in America

Saturday, September 03, 2016

EDITORIAL

If you haven’t read it yet, wait until you have digested - what the nearly 400-page report released this week reveals about St. George’s School's decades of abuse and its response is enough to make one sick.

St. George’s may be extremely wealthy - it has one of the largest endowments of any prep school in America, and it has sent many a privileged graduate off to live a life of incredible success - but along the way it has violated every possible religious and educational tenet out there. You certainly don't send your child off to prep school with any expectation they will be abused, molested, or raped - but that is what happened to many at St. George's, and not by just one pervert, but by a range of mentors and faculty, for years.

The school for decades was perverse. And the reaction to this abuse when unveiled to the administration was conflicted, demonstrated a lack empathy and true caring, and failed many young persons, their families, their futures, and everything any educational facility -- elite or not -- is entrusted in overseeing.

As the report states:

Many of these students remember St. George’s as a place where their abusers created a kind of private hell for them—a place where they suffered trauma and emotional wounds that, for many, remain unhealed. The abuse they experienced involved not only physical acts of sexual assault (as horrible as those were), but something that, for many, was even worse: betrayal at the hands of an adult entrusted with their care, at a school where they saw few, if any, places to turn for help.

The numbers are staggering. In one decade, one-in-five female students were sexually abused. More than 60 (to date, of those whom have come forward) were sexually abused. These were not isolated aberrations. St. George's fostered decades of abuse.

If you think the culture of perversion was in the past, then read the report as to how the pathetic board and professional leadership endlessly tried to cover the story up, and block or coerce the review process -- even up through 2015.

Today, St. George’s states, “The St. George’s Board of Trustees is the guardian of the school’s mission. It is the board’s responsibility to ensure that the mission is relevant and vital to the community it serves and to monitor the success of the school in fulfilling its mission.”

It is clear that for decades - including even the school's most recent history - that the governance of the institution has been fatally flawed.

The report offers many insights and some answers, but one question the report failed to answer is apparent.

Why should the school continue to operate?