Beginning last November, the school I attended for high school began a descent
into a massive scandal that, as the months went on, grew from alleged
sexual misconduct by a teacher to also include apparently unreported, on-campus,
student-on-student physical assault at the request of that teacher;
alleged cover-ups by the school and its administration; a federal complaint
describing how the school impeded the investigation and failed to
immediately report the suspected abuse (as they are required to do by
law); the suicide of the headmaster shortly before it came out in
the news that the victim's father had in fact shown the headmaster and
the school's lawyer screenshots of the texts between his daughter and
the teacher; and,
in May, the teacher pleading guilty to coercing a 15-year-old student
of his to send him explicit photos.
It's no secret to anyone with whom I talk about high school that, as a whole, I did not particularly enjoy my time at that school. In many ways, despite the excellent education it provided, the environment was not a good fit for me, and, though nothing like this was ever even hinted at during my time there and I have no reason to think there was ever sexual misconduct by a teacher there before, I would be lying if I said that the scandal and the apparent coverup by the administration particularly surprised me. I would have been more surprised if the school, known as one of the state's most elite and with a reputation of having some high-profile alumni and alumni parents, had NOT attempted to cover it up. However, while the news did not surprise me, it did anger me. A lot. I made several attempts to write about it, but my words never emerged in a form that could be posted publicly on a blog. All my personal feelings about the school during my time there mingled with the current events and resulted in a volcano of my sloppy personal emotions. So I let it marinate. I talked about the events and the coverup (which seemed to just keep growing and growing, and the full extent of which, as far as I know, did not come out until mid February) with my parents and my fellow alum brother.
And after four months, many e-mails and several cumulative hours of conversation, and weeks without reading or writing about it, the anger at a school that as an institution seems to have too frequently valued its reputation above the students it is charged with protecting is still there, but it is tempered by something else. I still believe the school and its administration made a series of incredible, disgustingly horrible errors in judgement, but since first writing about the scandal with nothing but condemnation for all involved, I one day found myself, while discussing and reviewing the events with another former student, in the curious position of defending a few of the individual human beings comprising the administration behind those decisions. They were all horrible people, this former student said, and, perhaps influenced by my fascination with complicated and multi-faceted villains in literature, plays, film, and history (don't even get me started on Richard Nixon -- no, really, don't get me started, because I'm reading a 600-page book on him and would jump at the chance to talk for hours about this guy whom history has so tritely labeled and dismissed as an evil villain, but no one will objectively talk about him precisely because they dismiss him with that label -- and how can growth and learning ever come from that? But I digress...), I maintained that they were not necessarily horrible people because of their horrible mistakes.
While I find their actions despicable, I am very much a believer that people are complicated, and frequently good people do horrible things, particularly in a group and when they've served a common goal for too long without having to think about what really matters. Making a wrong decision in a moment can lead down a slippery slope of increasingly awful decisions until you look back and can't believe what you've done. I do not believe people are so easily defined by one action or one mistake, or perhaps even one escalation of mistakes. When a 9/11 hero uses the local fire department to clear his driveway in a snowstorm, does that negate his heroism and the lives he saved? Absolutely not. Does his heroism excuse his corruption? Absolutely not. People are not black and white, not all good or all bad. In this case, a school administrator took his life, possibly because when he looked back at the cumulative damage his snowballed mistakes had left in their wake, he felt his errors were ultimately too massive to recover from, and while I find his mistakes inexcusable and appalling, I find his suicide tragic and so unnecessary. It would seem that he perhaps ultimately DID look back and realize how very far he had increasingly crossed the line from right to wrong; but rather than choose to fight his way back to the right side, he ended his life, leaving even more destruction and pain. The trail of escalating mistakes seems clear: he failed to report the misconduct immediately; he allowed the lawyer to take the laptop and copy its contents while failing to report the explicit photo; he allowed the teacher to resign with a confidentiality agreement; he allowed the teacher to take his computer off campus before returning it.... The list seems to go on, and while it doesn't take more than one of those mistakes before he should have lost his job, and while each mistake dug him and the school further into its hole and made it more difficult to climb out, none of them was worth his life. If he had been honest much sooner, the school's mistakes that became a dark snowball rolling down a hill, unstoppable and inevitably growing until it crashed and exploded, could have been stopped before further damage had been done -- before the victim and a friend had been physically assaulted on school campus; before people began to doubt the school's priorities and ability to keep its students safe; before parents read the criminal complaint and found they had been lied to by the school's lawyer.
It's no secret to anyone with whom I talk about high school that, as a whole, I did not particularly enjoy my time at that school. In many ways, despite the excellent education it provided, the environment was not a good fit for me, and, though nothing like this was ever even hinted at during my time there and I have no reason to think there was ever sexual misconduct by a teacher there before, I would be lying if I said that the scandal and the apparent coverup by the administration particularly surprised me. I would have been more surprised if the school, known as one of the state's most elite and with a reputation of having some high-profile alumni and alumni parents, had NOT attempted to cover it up. However, while the news did not surprise me, it did anger me. A lot. I made several attempts to write about it, but my words never emerged in a form that could be posted publicly on a blog. All my personal feelings about the school during my time there mingled with the current events and resulted in a volcano of my sloppy personal emotions. So I let it marinate. I talked about the events and the coverup (which seemed to just keep growing and growing, and the full extent of which, as far as I know, did not come out until mid February) with my parents and my fellow alum brother.
And after four months, many e-mails and several cumulative hours of conversation, and weeks without reading or writing about it, the anger at a school that as an institution seems to have too frequently valued its reputation above the students it is charged with protecting is still there, but it is tempered by something else. I still believe the school and its administration made a series of incredible, disgustingly horrible errors in judgement, but since first writing about the scandal with nothing but condemnation for all involved, I one day found myself, while discussing and reviewing the events with another former student, in the curious position of defending a few of the individual human beings comprising the administration behind those decisions. They were all horrible people, this former student said, and, perhaps influenced by my fascination with complicated and multi-faceted villains in literature, plays, film, and history (don't even get me started on Richard Nixon -- no, really, don't get me started, because I'm reading a 600-page book on him and would jump at the chance to talk for hours about this guy whom history has so tritely labeled and dismissed as an evil villain, but no one will objectively talk about him precisely because they dismiss him with that label -- and how can growth and learning ever come from that? But I digress...), I maintained that they were not necessarily horrible people because of their horrible mistakes.
While I find their actions despicable, I am very much a believer that people are complicated, and frequently good people do horrible things, particularly in a group and when they've served a common goal for too long without having to think about what really matters. Making a wrong decision in a moment can lead down a slippery slope of increasingly awful decisions until you look back and can't believe what you've done. I do not believe people are so easily defined by one action or one mistake, or perhaps even one escalation of mistakes. When a 9/11 hero uses the local fire department to clear his driveway in a snowstorm, does that negate his heroism and the lives he saved? Absolutely not. Does his heroism excuse his corruption? Absolutely not. People are not black and white, not all good or all bad. In this case, a school administrator took his life, possibly because when he looked back at the cumulative damage his snowballed mistakes had left in their wake, he felt his errors were ultimately too massive to recover from, and while I find his mistakes inexcusable and appalling, I find his suicide tragic and so unnecessary. It would seem that he perhaps ultimately DID look back and realize how very far he had increasingly crossed the line from right to wrong; but rather than choose to fight his way back to the right side, he ended his life, leaving even more destruction and pain. The trail of escalating mistakes seems clear: he failed to report the misconduct immediately; he allowed the lawyer to take the laptop and copy its contents while failing to report the explicit photo; he allowed the teacher to resign with a confidentiality agreement; he allowed the teacher to take his computer off campus before returning it.... The list seems to go on, and while it doesn't take more than one of those mistakes before he should have lost his job, and while each mistake dug him and the school further into its hole and made it more difficult to climb out, none of them was worth his life. If he had been honest much sooner, the school's mistakes that became a dark snowball rolling down a hill, unstoppable and inevitably growing until it crashed and exploded, could have been stopped before further damage had been done -- before the victim and a friend had been physically assaulted on school campus; before people began to doubt the school's priorities and ability to keep its students safe; before parents read the criminal complaint and found they had been lied to by the school's lawyer.
A mistake might not necessarily be irreversible or fatal; mistakes can in fact be one of the best ways to learn and grow in life. But the only way to learn from a mistake is to admit it, deal with the consequences, change the behavior that resulted in the mistake, and move on with new behavior. As with any elite school, while there are the parents who are mad and feel betrayed, there are also plenty within the community who remain loyal to the school and don't see the recent scandals as anything other than an isolated event that has unfairly damaged the school's reputation. Tuition for the school was raised, not lowered, after the recent troubles, and in the annual fundraising campaign this past spring for young alums of the school, participation was as high as ever, with two classes graduating within the last 15 years having over 50% participation. I hope these are not signs of denial of the existence of a problem -- because that can do nothing but perpetuate the pattern of snowballed mistakes. And I hope for current students at the school, this difficult and volatile time proves to be a valuable lesson by counterexample in how to learn from one's mistakes, take responsibility for one's actions, and grow into a mature adult open to life's lessons.
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