A federal judge last month agreed Jefferson County School District and two administrators will face a civil jury trial for allegedly failing to address the pervasive sexual harassment and assaults that occurred against female students at Everitt Middle School.

In a Feb. 21 order, U.S. District Court Senior Judge Christine M. Arguello determined a female former student, identified as S.T.C., presented evidence suggesting Jeffco Public Schools knew of the misconduct, did not respond adequately, and the continued harassment was severe enough to deny S.T.C. equal access to education.

“It is undisputed that multiple former students who attended Everitt from 2010 through 2017 — the year S.T.C. was in seventh grade — described a culture wherein male students touched female students’ breasts on Tuesdays and their butts on Fridays without consent,” Arguello wrote.

Lawyers for the district and for the two former administrators being sued, Principal Jeff Gomez and Vice Principal William “Tim” Carlin, did not provide a comment in response to the decision. Arguello has scheduled a 10-day jury trial beginning in July.

S.T.C., who filed suit in 2020 when she was 16, alleged she and female students generally were subjected to a culture of groping on a regular basis. The harassment was so routine that it earned vulgar nicknames referring to the touching of breasts and buttocks.

S.T.C. submitted declarations to the court from former Everitt students attesting to the behavior:

• “I never once saw a boy even told to stop, much less disciplined for their actions,” said one 2012 graduate

• “The school just didn’t take this seriously,” said a 2014 graduate

• “In response to this, I started wearing baggy clothing to school and would often wear my backpack slung low to try to block boys from touching my butt,” said a different 2014 graduate

• “This has affected my life even into adulthood. I have severe anxiety going into public places. I am constantly afraid of someone coming up behind me and touching me,” said a 2015 graduate

S.T.C. told her mother in May 2017 that two boys repeatedly assaulted her. Her mother, in turn, filed a report with the Wheat Ridge Police Department. The school resource officer assigned to Everitt spoke to Carlin, but she reportedly found him “argumentative.”

Once the two boys admitted to touching S.T.C., Carlin suspended them at the end of the school year. 

Over the summer, S.T.C. learned she would be in class the next year with at least one of the assailants, so the school altered S.T.C.’s schedule to move her from an advanced class to a remedial one.

Later that year, police arrested her assailants and they left Everitt. In response, friends of the boys began harassing S.T.C. by pushing her into lockers and calling her a whore and other sexist names. The school could not corroborate her claims, but Gomez met with a group of eighth grade boys to warn them about the consequences of harassment.

S.T.C. filed suit alleging violations of Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in educational programs. Specifically, S.T.C. claimed Jeffco Public Schools, Gomez and Carlin were deliberately indifferent to the culture of assaults and responded in a discriminatory fashion to S.T.C.’s disclosures.

In September, the defendants moved to end the case in their favor without a trial, arguing school personnel took action and provided support to S.T.C. once she reported her assault.

“Every former Everitt student deposed about (the harassment), including S.T.C., admitted that they never reported (the harassment) to a school administrator,” wrote the defendants’ attorneys, who include Democratic University of Colorado regent candidate Elliott Hood. “Former Everitt students testified that (the harassment) were ‘games’ done among ‘friends.'”

“Boys grabbing girls’ breasts in the hallways and slapping girls’ butts is not a game,” responded Edward Milo Schwab, an attorney for S.T.C. “A culture where students are assaulted in the hallways for nearly a decade while teachers watch without intervening is evidence of a failure by individual Defendants to train such teachers on how to respond to this troubling culture.”

Arguello, in her order, noted the former Everitt students who submitted statements made clear the sexual harassment “game” by the male students was not a game for them. She determined the routine harassment and assaults had undisputed effects on the female students.

“S.T.C. did not take her final exams at the end of seventh grade, in eighth grade she took a remedial level science class to avoid being in the same honors class,” Arguello wrote, adding that the male assailants were not penalized in the same way.

Arguello permitted some of S.T.C.’s claims against the district, Gomez and Carlin to proceed to trial. At the same time, she concluded Carlin and Gomez did not intentionally fail to train staff to react to the harassment, nor did they respond inadequately to S.T.C.’s reports of harassment during her eighth grade year.

The case is S.T.C. v. Jefferson County R-1 School District et al.