EVANSTON, IL — Two security guards hired by Evanston Township High School had sex with students, and administrators and police assigned to the school failed to protect girls from sexual violence, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
Lawyers for a former student and her mother filed the complaint in federal court in Chicago the day before the start of the new school year. It names as defendants ETHS District 202, Superintendent Eric Witherspoon, Principal Marcus Campbell, two former security guards, four Evanston police school resource officers and the city of Evanston itself.
Their conduct “not only gave sexual predators access to unlimited prey; it also created a culture whereby no ETHS employees voluntarily came forward to protect female students,” according to the lawsuit.
One of the security guards named in the suit, Michael Haywood, was arrested and charged with criminal sexual assault by a person in authority after he was fired in January after less than four months on the job. The other security guard named in the suit has not been charged and was fired in June 2016, it said.
The then-17-year-old student prosecutors said Haywood, 34, had inappropriate contact with in 2018 is not the same as the one suing him and the district, according to the suit, which alleges Haywood “sexually target[ed]” more than three students. It does not specify how many students may have had inappropriate relationships with the other security guard.
The ways the guards would “groom” the students, according to the suit, included rewarding or punishing them using their control of ETHS’s electronic pass system, providing them alcohol and marijuana and encouraging them to consume it, sending them pornography via social media apps during and outside school hours and soliciting students to send pornographic images and pressuring them to have sex against their will.
The guards also blackmailed the students with the threat “that their parents would know that they were sexually active, were smoking marijuana, and were drinking alcohol; that they were leaving the ETHS campus during the school day; and that they were coming to school late,” according to the complaint.
The student who filed the suit, who graduated in June and is now 18, first came into contact with the uncharged guard in 2015, during her freshman year. Over the course of the school year, the guard engaged in more than 50 “unwanted and unauthorized sexual acts and other contact” with the girl, according to the suit.
Administrators, teachers, police, counselors and staff “knew of or had reason to know” that the guard had “sexually groomed and had sexual contact” with the student but did not act fast enough to protect students from him, according to the suit.
According to the suit, there were more than 40 instances of improper contact with the student involving Haywood from the time he was hired in September 2018 to his firing in January 2019. Some of them took place inside the ETHS school building. Another instance allegedly took place inside the home of an ETHS teacher who lived in the same block as Haywood.
An undated text message exchange between Haywood and the student included in the complaint suggested teachers were suspicious of their relationship.
“Like don’t say s— but a couple teachers mentioned you always looking at me a certain way and you being around a lot I’m like nah all the kids like that,” Haywood said.
“I can’t help it,” she replied, adding an upset emoji.
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“Lol I see bae And I don’t wanna help it either but just keep in mind I need that gig to spoil you lolbvs [laughing out loud but very serious],” Haywood responded.
After each guard was fired, Witherspoon and Campbell failed to disclose the allegations to the girl’s parents and suppressed information about his “harassing and sexually violent behavior” toward her and other students, the lawsuit said.
Evanston Patch obtained the heavily redacted termination letter to Haywood from Toya Campbell, the district’s chief human resource officer, through a request under the Freedom of Information Act. It said administrators first received a report Haywood was having an inappropriate relationship with a minor female student from one of the student’s friends on Jan. 8.
“During her interview with deans and social workers, additional information was shared about a second inappropriate [redacted] relationship you are having with a female [redacted] student,” the human resource officer said. The content of the electronic communication between Haywood and the student was “repulsive, manipulative and extremely [redacted,]” she told Haywood.
“[T]here are two (2) high school aged students who have come forward to confirm they had a [redacted] with you during this school year,” she said.
Despite issuing a brief statement regarding the opening of an investigation into Haywood’s conduct, district officials did not publicly disclose the existence of multiple allegations against Haywood — and administrators never disclosed any of the allegations against the guard who was fired in 2016. According to the lawsuit, even the victims’ families were kept in the dark.
At a Jan. 18 special meeting, four days after Haywood was terminated, the District 202 board approved a settlement with several men to resolve lawsuits over allegations of sexual abuse by another former employee — longtime drama teacher Bruce Siewerth — after at least half a dozen male former ETHS students came forward amid the #MeToo movement to describe groping and other inappropriate sexual conduct by the retired teacher starting in the late 1970s.
Under the terms of the terms of the settlement, the board agreed to devote $100,000 toward developing sexual assault prevention and intervention activities, including funding for teaching faculty and students about their role in preventing sexual assault and harassment, integrating sexual assault awareness into the ETHS curriculum and hiring a nationally renowned speaker on the topic to speak to the community.
“While the School District maintains that it did not have knowledge of any of the allegations made against Mr. Siewerth, since the filing of the lawsuits the School District has sought to work with plaintiffs, through their attorneys, to resolve these matters and avoid costly and drawn out litigation,” Witherspoon said, in a statement that was posted on and later removed from the district’s website.
Siewerth and the three men later reached agreements out of court and the suits against him were dismissed on July 31 and Aug. 19, according to Cook County court records.
The district’s conduct was “especially egregious” because it was engaged in litigation connected to allegations of sexual abuse involving Siewerth during the same period that it was failing to act to protect female students at the school, according to the lawsuit.
The 12-count federal complaint filed Aug. 20 alleges that one or more of the unidentified school resource officers assigned to the school should have known of the allegations. It allows for up to four of them to be held responsible in their individual capacity and holds the city responsible as their employer.
The suit accused the district of violating the student’s civil rights through a systematic failure to investigate allegations of grooming and sex with students by district employees, suppressing credible allegations against school security personnel and showing a “deliberate indifference to credible allegations of sexual grooming and sexual acts.”
The two guards had “good reason to believe their misconduct would not be revealed or reported by fellow personnel, including School Resource Officers (SROs) from the Evanston Police Department, or their supervisors, that their false, incomplete, and misleading reports would go unchallenged by these supervisors and fellow personnel from the highest level of the ETHS administration on down, and that they were immune from disciplinary action, thereby protecting them from the consequences of their unconstitutional conduct,” the suit said. It alleges there was a pattern of fabricating evidence, intimidating witnesses, falsifying reports and maintaining a “code of silence” among school security and officers assigned to the school.
School administrators responded to a request for comment with an unsigned statement from the district’s communications office saying it “cannot comment on any pending litigation.” It said it would forward all inquiries to the attorney handling the case, who has not responded to questions.
Evanston Communications Manager Patrick Deignan said the city “does not comment on pending litigation.” He declined to say whether any school resource officers had ever been reprimanded or disciplined for failing to properly respond to inappropriate conduct by ETHS employees or whether the city engaged in any settlement negotiations before the latest suit was filed.
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