Green Mountain Union High administrators did too little to protect five sisters from harassment at school after one of them reported being raped by a classmate, a lawsuit filed late last week in federal court alleges.
The lawsuit details a series of events that took place at the Chester school after Skylar White, then a senior at GMU, reported to school personnel that she had been sexually assaulted by Ryan Stocker at an off-campus party in May 2017.
Stocker was charged with the assault and his case is pending.
School employees reported the incident to law enforcement but never conducted their own investigation, according to the suit. And when White broached the subject with administrators of the class she shared with Stocker, she was told they couldn’t justify changing his schedule. Instead, White was told, she could do her work in the library. Meanwhile, Stocker and his friends often stood in front of White’s locker to discuss the assault, the suit says.
Karen Hewes, a Bedford, New Hampshire, attorney with the firm EdLaw New England, who filed the suit on behalf of White and her four sisters, said the school should never have placed the burden on White to stay away from Stocker.
“The idea of having to face your rapist on day-to-day basis, for a period of about two months, a month, and having to switch classes is pretty egregious,” she said.
But the school’s response was also “inadequate” where White’s four sisters were concerned, Hewes said. The 30-count, 69-page complaint describes how they, too, were the targets of escalating abuse from their peers, one of whom allegedly tried to run three of the girls over with his car in the school parking lot after school.
VTDigger does not name the survivors of sexual assault without their consent, but White has been public about her experience and spoken openly with the media.
In addition to the school district and school board, the lawsuit also names Two Rivers Supervisory Union superintendent Meg Powden, former GMU principal Thomas Ferenc, GMU associate principal Michael Ripley, and GMU guidance director Pamela O’Neil as individual defendants.
“I don’t think there is any merit to these claims,” Powden wrote in an email. “We will address them through litigation.”
Stocker was charged with two counts of sexual assault in June 2017 and stopped attending school afterward, according to the lawsuit. He was charged with additional counts of sexual assault later that summer, and prosecutors have also levied additional charges against him in connections with other victims. They include kidnapping, attempted aggravated sexual assault, lewd and lascivious contact with a child; and furnishing alcohol to a minor. His cases are pending in Windsor County Superior Court.
But even with Stocker and White gone from campus, White’s sisters continued to suffer from social fallout, according to the lawsuit. Two of Stocker’s friends would follow the sisters around, discussing the case and sometimes even calling Stocker to FaceTime, it says. One of the students took to social media to address the family.
“Dear Venissa and all ur children,” the message began, referring to White’s mother. “u and ur family are c—-, and everyone would like you to get ur ass outta Vermont and burn in hell.”
The girls were told a petition was circulating within the student body calling for their expulsion. Ripley launched an informal investigation, according to the lawsuit, but never interviewed the sisters and took no further action.
A bulk of the charges in the lawsuit fall under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that protects individuals from sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions. The law most often comes up in the context of college sexual assault, but Hewes said the suit is a reminder that rape often happens much earlier.
“I think it’s really important for people to know that issues of sexual assault, sexual violence, and and sexual harassment are not just happening at the college level. They’re also happening at the high school level, middle school level even,” she said.
According to the complaint, an independent investigation conducted by attorney Ruth Durkee into the school’s response to incidents in the year following Skylar White’s graduation found that GMU “fell short of its responsibility to create a safe environment” for her sisters. The school should have better separated students when they were conducting harassment and bullying investigations, and it should have reported some things to police, the Durkee investigation found.
The attorney recommended school personnel receive better training on how to conduct harassment and bullying investigations, as well as training to help employees better understand their responsibilities under Title IX. Durkee also recommended the school develop a safety plan for one of Skylar White’s sisters, which administrators did.
