Note: This story includes descriptions of sexual violence.
He was 13 and halfway through seventh grade when he alleges that an older boy assaulted him in the school bathroom.
“He came right behind me,” said the student, who was attending School 45 on Clifford Avenue at the time. “He said, ‘Don’t make a sound.’”
When a serious incident happens at school — like an alleged sexual assault — it is supposed to be reported. Police get called. Parents or guardians get notified. The students involved get connected with support services and potentially transferred to different schools.
And a record is ultimately logged with the state.
What happened here, though, was something different — seemingly exposing gaps in how the Rochester City School District responded to the alleged February 2023 attack, but also what preceded it. And raising questions about district and state processes meant to safeguard students and ensure a safe school environment for all.
In this case, both are students with disabilities. To protect the children's identities, WXXI News is not using their name nor the names of family members.
The boy said he shared his account with three staff members that day but left school with the understanding there was nothing to be done. And he didn’t tell anyone else, including his mother, who later said her son expressed that he didn’t want to hurt her.
Going home was “a nightmare,” he said. “Because Mom was asking, ‘Why are you shaking?’” Then going back to school, “I was afraid he’d do it again. So that's why I had to hide and stuff.”
He stopped hiding 14 months later, in spring 2024.
A police report was filed. Legal proceedings involving the other student are said to be ongoing in family court, so much of the case is confidential. His guardian didn’t speak on the record.
District officials declined comment, citing student privacy laws, but acknowledged gaps generally with the reporting process that they are working to correct.
Now in ninth grade, the student alleging the assault is receiving home instruction because of an unrelated medical condition.
Early intervention ‘essential’
Seated on the floor of his living room, the family dog next to him, he recalled it was a gym day, a few days after Valentine’s Day.
“I said, ‘What do you mean don’t make a sound?’” he said he asked the other boy. “All I remember was I was on the ground. He was on top of me.”
He struggled, he screamed, “and nobody came looking for me,” he said.
“He wouldn’t let me go,” he said, though he added that he tried to get away. “He would not let me go. He would not let me go. He wouldn’t let me go.”
When he got out of the bathroom, he said, he'd wrapped a jacket around his waist to hide that he was naked underneath.
“I was in a lot of pain ... barely could walk," he said. “I had to crawl and try to run, and I kept on falling.”
The police report does not provide specifics on what the student said to the three staff members. And WXXI News was unable to reach those individuals, either because they could not be identified, located or reached through their union representative.
“I'm going to get raw about it," his mother said, alleging: "My son was raped.”
According to the report, police charged the other boy with first-degree criminal sexual act, a felony.
The district’s Code of Conduct outlines that a student is supposed to be connected to support services when they report unwanted and forced sexual contact, and law enforcement must be called. And in accordance with state law, a record of that incident is supposed to make its way from school staff to the district administration, and eventually the state education department.
“I didn't get a phone call. My son didn't get medical treatment,” his mother said.
The initial response to a sexual assault has consequences.
"It is absolutely essential that early intervention occur,” said Daniele Lyman-Torres, president at The Child Advocacy Center of Greater Rochester, formerly Bivona.
The mother told police the other boy had stalked and harassed her son with "unwanted advances," according to the police report. But the other boy told police it was her son who had the crush, and he denied they ever had a physical confrontation.
The police report states that a few weeks after the purported assault, school staff set up a mediation session for the two students. The report continues: “(The accuser) states he remembers that they spoke about personal space. (He) described feeling ‘terrified’ about (the accused) and the assault.”
Safety measures and support services need to be put in place as soon as possible, Lyman-Torres said.
“Recovery from child abuse is lifelong,” she said. “There are many milestones in adolescence that they still have to go through where their abuse may come back up. And sometimes that can really spiral youth back into a deep depression, or many other risky behaviors because of what they have experienced.”
Whether a child is sexually abused by a peer or an adult, “the impact on the child who has been abused is the same," Lyman-Torres said, adding that children accused of sexual assault also need early intervention and a safety plan.
“That child should also be being screened and served, because they're also a child. And so there definitely needs to be support services that get put into place, because that child is also at risk ... of further harm to others or themselves.”
A question of transparency
Harassment, bullying, assaults and other misconduct on school property are supposed to be reflected in School Safety and Educational Climate reports that the State Education Department collects from public school districts at the end of each school year.
The state uses data from those reports to identify when certain schools are what’s known as “persistently dangerous.”
WXXI News filed open records requests with RCSD and other school districts last June seeking those reports and other data for the past two school years. These are public documents that the state education department publishes on its website, but there is a lag time as the information is processed.
While other districts provided the reports, RCSD required multiple extensions before releasing a redacted version for the 2022-23 school year, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to protect student privacy. And after initially withholding the 2023-24 report, later released it with similar redactions.
The state Committee on Open Government, a kind of state ombudsman on matters involving open meetings and open records, weighed in at WXXI’s request. The agency advised that the reports should have been provided, as requested, given that “every district creates these reports and submits them knowing they will be made publicly available.”
The district has not changed its position, however. And when the state ultimately released the 2022-23 reports, it showed that RCSD had recorded zero sexual assaults at School 45. And that the vast majority of the redacted incident numbers across all categories and schools were, similarly, zeros.
RCSD recorded a combined total of two assaults of any kind across all 45 school buildings and 22,300 students for that school year.
Changes to the system
Not all incidents meet the threshold to be included in the School Safety and Educational Climate report, said interim Superintendent Demario Strickland.
“There are some times where it is reportable and then there's times where it doesn't reach that level,” Strickland said. “These, a lot of times, are like even the police had to get involved.”
In February 2023, Strickland was a chief of schools under then-Superintendent Carmine Peluso. But he oversaw only certain schools then, and School 45 was not among them. He was not aware of the alleged assault, nor what happened after, but said he recognizes that the reporting system needs to improve.
“All we can do is go forward,” Strickland said. “As you find certain kinks or ways to get better, you start implementing them to make sure that we are doing the best we can to protect our students and families.”
One of the things the district’s administration is implementing is a centralized reporting system for the whole district, something Deputy Superintendent Ruth Turner said began about a year ago but wasn’t the case before.
“The data was not often very clean, because folks were creating or having their own management system,” she said, referring to school building-level reporting. “We know that infractions are being reported because we have a high number of suspensions and disciplinary referrals. So it's not folks trying to hide what's going on.”
“What we have to figure out is where — if there is (an issue) — where is a disconnect?” Turner said. “We need to look at our system, especially in that particular school year. As we said, we just began by telling the schools, you must hold everything in one system.”
Turner made those comments in a November interview. An RCSD spokesperson declined comment last week when WXXI News asked what follow-up the district did, and whether it had amended its earlier school safety report.
That centralized system is called PowerSchool.
Turner said having everything in one place should keep information from getting lost as students change schools and the district changes administrations.
“All the infractions, all the discipline, all the suspensions, all the classroom referrals, even the referrals that don't lead to suspension,” she said. “We said you must do the referral — not just a little paper that gets lost — in the PowerSchool system.”
'Nothing else matters’
Ultimately, the superintendent certifies that a district’s school safety reports are accurate, according to a spokesperson with the State Education Department. And if errors are discovered, those records should be changed and publicly noted.
The state audits the reports to identify if a school is persistently dangerous for students and to identify where improvements are needed.
“Nothing else matters,” said Tracie Czebatol, director of reporting and compliance at Hilton Central School District. “If the school isn't safe, teaching doesn’t really matter because you're not going to get to teaching all students if children don't feel safe. ... The kids deserve a fair and safe place to be.”
In Monroe County, Hilton stands out with significantly high reporting numbers in School Safety and Educational Climate reports.
Czebatol attributes that, in part, to a very public abuse case involving elementary school principal Kirk Ashton, convicted in 2022 of sexually abusing nearly two dozen students over the course of years. Ashton appealed that conviction, but a panel of state Appellate Division judges upheld it.
“That was a very pervasive horrible thing that happened to our community," Czebatol said. “Believe me, reporting went through the roof because the bosses, all of us were saying, ‘If you see something, say something. Hold nothing back.’”
Hilton’s School Safety and Educational Climate reports show a spike in incident reports after that — from 70 to 174 within a year — mostly cases of bullying, harassment and intimidation that fall under the Dignity for All Students Act.
But Czebatol said even before that, a culture of reporting had been embedded in the district’s values and reinforced in school communications, meetings, and updated trainings every year.
"We know a lot about what it means if we don't report. We know a lot about what it can do to human beings,” she said. “I mean, the research is way too robust to ignore this type of thing.”
Research shows severe traumatic stress at an early age — like that caused by child sexual abuse — can dysregulate the body’s nervous system and harm physical and mental health. And longer interventions were associated with better health outcomes.
Documenting infractions over time can indicate when something escalates, Czebatol said.
An alleged pattern of negligence
“This is not the first time that something has happened to my son,” the Rochester student’s mother said, alleging a pattern of negligence at city schools. “This is just one of the most horrific things that has happened to my son.”
Back in November 2021, her son was a sixth grader at School 34 on Lexington Avenue. She sat down with school staff and Peluso, who was chief of schools at the time. Her son’s godmother joined by speakerphone, and they recorded the meeting.
“What I don't like is how the staff is not being attentive,” his mother is heard saying in the recording, and cites incidents she said had been occurring as far back as first grade. “My child got spat on eight times. My son was bitten in the back. My son was pushed. He was out for 48 minutes.
“My son has been called a n—,” she said. “There has been no repercussions.”
She asked to see incident reports, but none were provided. Because her son has an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, which outlines the special education services he needs, his options for another school placement were limited.
“He can't go to school. It's not safe for him," the godmother said. “I just see him deteriorating day after day with what he has to deal with, and it's not fair for him.”
Toward the end of the meeting, a woman spoke in a low voice to Peluso.
“She's obviously not happy,” the woman said. “So, I'm just trying to smooth her over and get her to realize that, let's just move him to another school and see what happens."
Peluso vocally agreed. Student transfers in cases like this are supported by state law.
The boy was then moved twice. First to School 3, and then to School 45.
Breaking the silence
It was after touring a high school that he was to attend, and seeing the boy he alleged attacked him, that he finally told a social worker and his mother what happened a year earlier, according to the police report.
He got a restraining order against the accused. But he has not attended school in person so far this year. Instead, he receives home instruction for an unrelated medical condition.
His godmother, a consistent advocate for him, was the person he wanted with him when he spoke with WXXI News. He described himself as funny, and said he wants to be a disco singer when he’s older. But this event changed him, he said, made him quieter.
“The other day, we sing together, and you know how good your voice is,” his godmother said. “You make me cry when you sing those high notes.
“I see who you are, and I know that makes you sad, what happened,” she continued. “But there's so many other things in life that make you happy, and you know people that you can come to and trust. ... You're going to keep singing, trust me.”
