MPS Can’t Produce Staff Sexual Harassment & Sexual Assault Numbers

Milwaukee Public Schools does not know how many sexual harassment and sexual assault complaints have been made against MPS employees because it does not keep centralized records of the cases. MPS could not produce the number of complaints in response to a Media Milwaukee open records request seeking the numbers since 2014.

According to  the MPS website, the district had about 8,000 staff members educating approximately 77,000 students, grades K through 12, at 160 schools in 2017. In that same year, 80 percent of MPS students were economically disadvantaged and 88 percent were minorities.

“It’s incredibly surprising to find that a huge school district doesn’t know the numbers, and more importantly that they don’t want to know,” said Frank LoMonte, senior legal fellow at the Student Press Law Center in Washington D.C.

“They should just go ahead and make the tally,” LoMonte said. “That’s the right thing to do.”

Media Milwaukee filed an open records request in January with MPS seeking the number of sexual assault and/or sexual harassment complaints or reports filed against MPS faculty and staff members from 2014 to present. In addition, the news site asked for outcomes, such as discipline. UW System universities, such as the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, have produced such numbers.

In the case of MPS, though, the school district said it could not produce aggregate numbers and could only fulfill the request by conducting a file-by-file review. Under open records law, public entities are not required to create new records in response to open records requests. However, the district could choose to provide the numbers if it chose to do so, even if it was not legally obligated.

Read the rest of Media Milwaukee’s story here.