Santa Ana School District blames disabled student for her molestation
July 14, 2010 by Leslie E. Packer PhD
Filed under Advocacy
Muriel Kane reported on a disturbing case out of California.
When a teacher’s aide at Saddleback High School in Santa Ana, CA was arrested for molesting one of the special-ed students under his care, the school district’s first impulse was to cover the incident up and hope no one would find out.
Now the student’s parents have sued the Santa Ana Unified School District for negligently keeping on an employee that other parents had been complaining about for years. The district’s lawyers have responded by not only blaming the mentally disabled girl for her own abuse but asking that the judge dismiss the charges and make the victim’s family pay the district’s legal fees.
The seventeen-year-old victim, who has cerebral palsy, has the mental capacity of a seven-year-old and is confined to a wheelchair. Because she is unable to speak, no one knows exactly what was happening when another school employee found her alone in a room with Alonso Manuel Gonzalez, with her shirt pulled up and her breasts exposed, but the incident resulted in the aide’s arrest for a “lewd act with dependent adult.”
Read more on The Raw Story. Sadly, there are too many stories about disabled students being molested — in some cases by school employees and in other cases by fellow students. Parents need to be informed about such cases so that they can ensure that their child is in a safe school. All too often, however, it seems that districts are less than forthcoming about such incidents, despite provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act.
