187. Buying deception

The Seattle Times' series on "Your Courts, Their Secrets" deserves a couple Pulitzers: one for the reporting, and a second one for proving that it's possible, after all, for newspapers to write sensibly about the courts.  (See post 183.)  Earlier articles in the series documented judges illegally sealing cases to protect their buddies on the bench or in the profession.  (See post 157 and post 94.)

Last Sunday the Times' latest entry described the enormous lengths to which officials in the Northside School District, just north of Seattle, went to avoid dealing with a predatory elementary school teacher.  The principal, upon being told of the teacher's gropings, promptly set about reinforcing the lesson about betrayal of trust, calling the 10-year-old girl into the his office where he confronted her with the molester at his elbow.

The teacher did everything humanly possible to demonstrate his unfitness.  His application letter was barely literate, he touched prepubescent girls' breasts in front of witnesses, he demeaned his students and taught them sexually-charged words - and yet his principals protected him, because "principals don't like problems." 

For a careerist bureaucrat, not having problems is the ultimate goal, and the principal who called the 10-year-old into his office was suitably rewarded for his determined efforts not to deal with, or even know about, what was going on in his school: "He's now principal of Skyline High School in Sammamish, one of the state's top high schools."

Families of three of the girls, who had to endure nearly-daily gropings - one described how much she dreaded sitting at the computer in the classroom, because there was no escape, and another wore heavy sweatshirts even on the hottest days - sued the school.  The amazing thing isn't that the district shoveled tons of money their way, but the type of secrecy the district insisted on:

It required the families and their attorneys to gather whatever documents they had about their allegations, and turn them over to be destroyed. They also had to "purge all computer records" related to their claim.

Even though the Northshore School District is a public entity — making its finances public record — the agreement forbade the parties from disclosing the settlement amount. It also prohibited any party from disparaging another, and set the penalty for any violation at $10,000.

According to the Times, "The secrecy agreement even restricts what they can tell any therapist."  The school district had two levers with which it could extract that agreement out of the families.  First, as mentioned by the families' lawyer, unless they accepted the settlement "these 'very vulnerable girls' would have been exposed to depositions and a possible trial".  That is, the school district was applying the same pressure routinely exerted by pedophiles, who hold their victims' psyches hostage during plea negotiations: agree to my terms or we'll really give her something to cry to her therapist about.

The second reason, of course, was that the lawyer himself was mostly interested in getting top dollar.  For his clients, I mean.

A superior court commissioner (apparently a kind of adjunct judge) agreed to seal the court file, "signing an order that violated the rules governing open court records."  So here you had the court system using its power and prestige illegally to threaten schoolgirls with $10,000 fines if they opened up to their therapists. 

The parents and taxpayers of the school district weren't to know what their principals and teachers did to their children.   The public wasn't to know what its government was doing, when it was doing the public's business.  The institution that exists to educate the young was teaching them instead a bitter lesson about justice.  And the institution that exists to enforce the law was violating it.

The Northside District has posted a letter to parents that largely avoids the temptation to blast the Times for raking this muck.  I don't believe for a minute that there's anything really out of the ordinary about the district.  Nor do I think there's anything out of the ordinary about the casual way King County courthouse officials violated the law about sealing court files.  Which is to say, your courts are doing it, too.  You just don't have a Seattle Times to tell you about it.