Government schools across Texas are protecting child rapists and abusers, even allowing them to be legally shifted around to other schools to abuse more children, according to official documents and data compiled by researchers. Thousands of alleged perpetrators are involved in the Lone Star State scandal as public revulsion with “grooming” in public schools grows across the nation.
The horrific details first emerged when a whistleblower in the state education agency sent the Open Records Project a list of over 10,000 teachers accused of various crimes. The list included over 2,300 accused of raping and sexually abusing children. A small percentage of those were placed on a “do not hire” list, but over 90 percent were considered eligible to return to the classroom by the state’s teacher certification agency.
Critics and researchers investigating the scandal refer to this phenomenon as “pass the trash,” Open Records spokesman Russell Fish told The Newman Report. “We call the statewide situation a ‘Weinstein, Epstein, Diddy’,” said Fish, who has been speaking out about this for years across Texas. “Lots of people knew, but knew to keep their mouths shut…. This is basically a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ system for teachers.”
Perhaps even more unbelievably, this all appears to be legal under Texas law. There is an obscure, decades-old statute that allows schools not to report child rapists and other criminals to law enforcement. Under Texas Family Code 261.103a(2), education officials have the option to report child-raping teachers to the State Board for Education Certification instead of police.
That is because of the way the statute is written. Rather than requiring education authorities to report criminals working for school districts — including child rapists — to both law enforcement and the certification agency, the code uses the word or. In practice, that has resulted in districts refusing to report the accused to law enforcement, merely notifying the state’s teacher certification agency.
Fish described this all as a “parallel criminal justice system created for teachers, enabling essentially penalty-free felonies.” The two main teachers’ unions in the state, along with their Democrat allies in the legislature, have been supportive of the parallel system and were reportedly responsible for getting it enshrined in law decades ago without much public discussion.
In an effort to help parents when authorities will not, the Open Records Project created a search engine so parents can check their own school districts to see how many accused pedophiles are working for it. Dallas Independent School District (ISD), for example, had a stunning 115 accused child rapists working for it, according to the most recent data available.
Critics warned of dire consequences for children. “Enablers and the act of enabling cause significant harm that has two primary consequences: perpetrators continue perpetrating, and victims fail to receive protection from those best positioned to protect them,” explained University of Utah law professor Amos Guiora with the Bystander Initiative, which focuses on the role of bystanders and enablers of sexual assaults.
This crisis must be urgently dealt with by lawmakers, he added. “This is a vicious cycle with no path to resolution absent legislative action,” continued Guiora in an emailed statement sent to The Newman Report. “Doing so would more effectively protect the vulnerable by minimizing the protection enablers provide to perpetrators.”
Recent efforts to pass legislation punishing misbehaving teachers were shot down thanks to behind-the-scenes efforts of teachers’ union bosses and lobbyists. But now, a growing coalition of parents, activists, and lawmakers have had enough. In fact, the attorney general’s office is looking into the matter, according to people familiar with the matter.
Sources in Texas who work in the legislature and in law enforcement told The Newman Report that this situation was unacceptable, and that it was time to fix it. As such, lawmakers are considering multiple pieces of legislation that would mandate reporting to law enforcement, in addition to the state teacher certification agency. One simple bill would simply change the “or” to “and,” thereby requiring reporting to police.
The scandal in Texas comes amid national outrage surrounding the “grooming” taking place in government schools. From schoolbooks for children glorifying monstrous perversion to “comprehensive sex education” seeking to normalize every conceivable sex act, government schools have been sexualizing children in increasingly extreme ways for years. Critics note that these are similar to tactics used by pedophiles to groom victims.
As The Newman Report documented last summer, the epidemic of child sex abuse in government schools has been a problem for decades. In fact, estimates based on government data suggest many millions of children have been sexually abused and exploited by school faculty. The numbers make sex abuse scandals involving the Roman Catholic Church seem minor by comparison.
In 2004, the U.S. Department of Education released the most comprehensive review of the data on sex crimes by educators against children. The “Shakeshaft Report,” authored by Carol Shakeshaft based on a survey of existing research, found that about one in ten children were victims of sexual misconduct by government school staff. Over a third of the victims were below high-school age.
More recent estimates suggest the numbers are even higher, though the department has stopped tracking the numbers—probably because it fears Americans would revolt if they knew how bad the problem was. If those conclusions from the 2004 report were correct, that means tens of millions of American children have been sexually abused, raped, molested, or attacked by government-school employees in recent decades.
The Open Records Project, the group leading the effort to expose Texas’ scandalous teacher-protection system, was launched in 1997. The mission was to improve government by making public documents available for free online. The organization has exposed fraud, abuse, and more in its many years of operations, and has scored big wins. But this effort to stop the abuse of children may be among its most important projects to date.
The fact that government schools even in conservative states are deliberately protecting and enabling child rapists should show parents clearly that these institutions are not safe. Obviously, reforms are needed — immediately. But unfortunately, this scandal is merely a symptom of a much deeper rot that permeates the system from top to bottom. Small-scale reforms are not enough. It is time for drastic, systemic change.
Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist and the Founder of Liberty Sentinel.
Editor’s Note: ‘Silence hasn’t worked’
David Fiorazo, author and host of Worldview Matters, discussed the necessity of Bible-believing Christians not remaining silent on the issue of protecting children.
“At the risk of stating the obvious, these teachers are simply acting on sexual desires and sinful impulses that have been promoted and normalized by Hollywood, social media, school books and sexualized curriculum in the classroom,” Fiorazo wrote. “The government-run school system replaced any Christian influence with atheism, secular humanism, globalism, moral relativism, sex, and the big three: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The war against Christian values is not going to stop, and our children will remain the greatest target.”
“The godless are grinding down public morality and dragging children down with them,” he warned. “Silence hasn’t worked. Ignoring evil in society has not caused it to go away. The church has lost important battles and the country is teetering in many ways. Assuming we truly love our neighbors and believe in protecting children from evil, we have work to do. They need us to take biblical stands and speak up as often as necessary.”
