Baltimore City Schools might have a bigger problem, hard as it is to believe, than high-schoolers who can’t do math.
Maryland law permits rapists to attend school with their victims. And now, a juvenile rapist has been sent back to the school his victim attends.
Parents never would have known if a terrified mother hadn’t spilled the beans to the local Fox News affiliate.
Court Records
Court documents show that the 15-year-old rapist pleaded guilty on December 27 to second-degree rape in Harford County, Fox45’s Project Baltimore reported:
The 15 year old was not sent to juvenile detention. Instead, the Department of Juvenile Services recommended probation. He was given 50 hours of community service and counseling for “sex offense specific treatment”. As a convicted rapist, he was also ordered to have “no unsupervised contact with children under 15.”
But in January “he returned to class at Patterson High School in Baltimore City” because the court ordered school attendance or classes for a GED.
“This juvenile offender is allowed to continue to live his life completely normal,” the distraught mother told Fox45. “The Court pretty much gave him a slap on the wrist. There was no justice for my child.”
State law says juvenile rapists are not required to register as sex offenders, and so can’t be kept out of a “regular school program” unless they “pose an imminent threat of serious harm to other students or staff.” But a rapist’s absence from the list of sex offenders also means a school cannot notify parents that he’s on campus — most likely prowling for another victim.
So parents were in the dark. They didn’t know their daughters were in class with the rapist.
“She struggles. She is in therapy,” the victim’s mother told Fox45 of her daughter. “I wouldn’t wish what we have gone through on my worst enemy.”
Parents “don’t have clue,” she said:
I would have to say the state is protecting the rapist. I know if it was my child in a school with a convicted rapist, I would want to know. Because my daughter could be walking down the hall with him and not even know what he’s capable of. So, who’s protecting them?
The school system released this statement:
Under federal and state law, we cannot publicly discuss personal, disciplinary, or school assignment matters involving individual students. In addition, legal proceedings involving juveniles are sealed, and there are penalties for disclosing any information regarding those proceedings. While we are legally prohibited from providing any specific details, we can share, more generally, that Maryland law requires City Schools to provide an education to all students legally enrolled in our school system, including students found responsible for juvenile criminal offenses. In such circumstances, school systems can only remove a student from their school placement if they follow specific legal protocols and there is specific evidence of an imminent threat of serious harm to the health and safety of other students and staff. When making this determination, we review all available documents and work closely with the proper authorities to ensure we are meeting the appropriate standards.
That statement raises the question of why the school did not “follow specific legal protocols” to remove the student, and why a 15-year-old rapist doesn’t “pose an imminent threat of serious harm to other students or staff.” And parents might like to know just what documents school officials reviewed.
The legalese is the long way of telling parents that their daughters are going to school with rapists, and they can’t do anything about it.
Maryland Law
But the state Legislature can do something about it. After the Project Baltimore news team reported that a 21-year-old sex offender was roaming a high school unsupervised in 2020, the Legislature banned registered sex offenders from schools. The probe forced the state to act.
For, in 2020, the 21-year-old raped a 15-year-old girl at the school after his conviction in 2017 for “second-degree assault and a fourth-degree sex offense.”
A student who found about the rapist asked administrators why they permitted a rapist to attend school:
“I was like, ‘This guy is a sex offender. Why is he here?’ And one of our resource officers or one of the administrators, they were like, ‘Oh, he has a right to an education,’” the student said. “And in my head I’m thinking, what about me? What about all the other vulnerable girls in this school?”
In 2021, Maryland became the first state in the nation to ban registered sex offenders from public schools because of the Fox45 investigation. Anyone who knowingly permits a sex offender on a campus faces a $5,000 fine and five years in jail.
Maybe the state will be embarrassed into amending the law, and ban all sex offenders from campus, registered or not.
