Deaf School abuse

• By SONIA SMITH
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Sep 28, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Fourteen years ago, 13-year-old Daniel Lewis enrolled as a boarding student at the Louisiana School for the Deaf, a place that was supposed to give him the skills to engage with the world. 

That August, Daniel — with bright blue eyes and blond hair, but borderline mentally retarded and smaller than his peers — moved into a room in the middle school dorm on the school’s Baton Rouge campus with three other boys. 

During Daniel’s second week at the school, one of his roommates, a larger 13-year-old of normal intelligence, began crawling into his bed at night to rape him, Daniel recounted recently.

Susan Lewis, Daniel’s mother, pulled him from the school after only three weeks, when Daniel, despite not completely understanding what had happened, managed to tell her. 

“I came home and told my mom what happened, all of it,” Daniel said. 

Daniel’s rape was one of several at the school in the early 1990s, court records show. A four-part WBRZ series in 1999 uncovered “numerous and unabated” sexual incidents among students at the school, including rapes and molestations, many of which were not reported to police. 

That series prompted state officials to form a task force to investigate those allegations and make recommendations for changes. 

But a spate of recent incidents suggests that problems with sexual misconduct persist at the school.

A five-month Advocate investigation has revealed that in the past five years, seven adults — three teachers, a dorm worker, a counselor, a Sunday school teacher and a former student — have been accused of improper sexual behavior with four girls at the school. 

Additionally, hundreds of pages of police and school incident reports show at least 32 incidents of sexual misconduct among students in the past five years, ranging from rape to sexual battery to inappropriate touching. 

“That’s unreal, why hasn’t it stopped? Why hasn’t anybody in an administrative position stopped this?” Susan Lewis asked after hearing about the recent incidents. 

School and state education officials maintain that they have adequately addressed the problem by reporting incidents to authorities, holding workshops with students and meeting with parents.

In a recent interview, state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek stressed that the five arrests of school employees were for alleged crimes that did not involve actual “skin-on-skin” sexual contact with students. Investigators have said that there was no skin-on-skin contact in the other two arrests either.