Feds Say Pflugerville ISD Failed to Investigate Rape of a Student at School

For five years, the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights has been investigating Pflugerville ISD for its handling of the alleged rape of a student in a school bathroom.

They say PISD ignored the matter, and on Monday, they announced that the federal office had reached an agreement with PISD.

That settlement will require PISD to do a lot of things. They will offer the assaulted student reimbursement; they’ll survey students to gauge the prevalence of sexual harassment in the district; they’ll provide the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) documentation of sexual harassment complaints filed since 2021; they’ll conduct training on sex discrimination; and they’ll hire a new coordinator solely focused on compliance with Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools.

All of those interventions are necessary, the OCR says, because of how poorly Pflugerville ISD handled the assault in 2018, “not only because [PISD] relied on stereotypes about how a person should respond to sexual assault but also because it failed to provide fair process both to the accused student and to his accuser,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon.

Pflugerville ISD disagrees with the federal agency on many counts, spokesperson Tamra Spence said in a statement. Spence said they entered the agreement anyway “to resolve this matter which continues to draw resources away from the District’s priority of educating students.”

Spence told the Chronicle that, contrary to the OCR’s findings, Pflugerville did not ignore the complaint. “We disagree that we failed to respond equitably to a notice that a child was sexually assaulted by another student; we disagree that we failed to provide a fair process to the accused and accuser; we disagree that we never undertook a Title IX investigation; we disagree that the Complainant was not provided accommodations related to his/her disability. Due to FERPA [student privacy law], we cannot specifically address those accommodations, but extensive accommodations were made to ensure that the student returned to school and completed the year.”

The OCR described that PISD did call local law enforcement who asked the district to temporarily stop investigating while the law enforcement agency completed their investigation. But, the OCR says, the district never undertook a Title IX investigation. PISD eventually hired a third-party investigator to conduct “a review of the administrative procedures followed in an alleged sexual incident.”

“The investigator reported to OCR that she interviewed only the student who alleged she had been raped, and no one else, because – based on the student’s responses to questions about the alleged incident and her physical demeanor – the investigator did not think the assault happened,” the OCR press release says.

As a result of the district’s trust in this third party’s findings, they failed to interview important witnesses and “failed to provide the accused student an opportunity to be heard,” the OCR said. Not only does the district disagree with this assessment – they also suggest there’s something fishy about OCR’s timing.

“During the five-year period that OCR investigated this matter, the district expended thousands of dollars and untold hours of staff time in responding to OCR’s requests for information,” Spence told the Chronicle. “Over fifteen individuals were interviewed by the OCR over multiple days. Then, inexplicably, the matter went unresolved for years. OCR only this year decided to pursue this matter that they did not pursue for multiple years.”