By Steve Giegerich ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
11/30/2008
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/education/story/EBEA86C8C54698DE86257510001BC2DC?
With nearly four decades of service in the St. Louis Public Schools drawing to a close, Richard "Rick" Sirna still felt the tug of his "calling."
Sirna, 60, figured he had two good years of remaining service to the city schools. And once his longtime tenure as the principal of Gateway Elementary ended, he planned to wind down his career at a less stressful county district.
Instead, Sirna's career flamed out with a three-day trial, a guilty verdict, a stern admonishment from a judge and an abrupt end to his career in the St. Louis schools.
It all came down to his decision not to make a phone call.
In the view of the city schools, authorities and the jury that convicted him, the former Gateway Elementary principal is a law breaker.
His crime: failing to immediately report the allegations of a 10-year-old Gateway student who said she was sexually assaulted by a computer instructor in a school storage area.
Because he did not call a state child abuse hot line as soon as he heard the allegations, Sirna was found by a jury to have violated the state's mandatory reporting law. That statute, which is rarely prosecuted, requires educators, medical personnel and others responsible for the welfare of children to notify the state of suspected cases of physical or sexual abuse.
Prosecutors contend that the law is clear: "If there is any suspicion that a child has been molested, you report it," said Philippa Barrett, an assistant city attorney who prosecuted Sirna.
Barrett and others say there are no shades of gray in the law.
But Sirna and those who support him say the issue isn't so simple. They maintain he's paying the price for an inexact statute that fails to clearly state on what terms hot line calls must be made.
Sirna, in a recent interview with the Post-Dipatch, contended that his case could have a chilling effect on other principals, who may call in even incidents in which abuse is not a factor.
"If I were (still) a principal," he said, "I'd be hot lining everything."
TRYING TO VERIFY
Professionally and financially, Sirna has paid handsomely for his convictions. He says his legal fees are in excess of $50,000.
A product of the St. Louis schools, Sirna returned to the system after college. He landed in a trajectory that took him from classroom teacher to building principal, with a brief detour as an administrator in the district's downtown headquarters.
Former Gateway assistant principal Marilyn Bailey said Sirna's influence extended across the district. "I'll bet 80 percent of the principals (in the district) asked him for assistance," she said.
Throughout his tenure in St. Louis, Sirna said, there were plenty of opportunities to move to better-paying jobs outside the city. But he stayed put. "This was always the best place for me, because this is where I was needed," he said.
Sirna says that in the course of 37 years as a teacher and principal, he contacted the emergency abuse hot line more times than he can recall. And he says that in every instance he attempted to verify the facts before picking up the telephone.
His conviction comes down to a decision to wait on calling as he tried to determine if a student should be believed.
"I had no reason to believe it, but I had no reason to disbelieve it either," he said. "I didn't know what happened."
The girl told him on Nov. 6, 2007, that Gateway computer instructor John Bender had touched her inappropriately four days before in a school storage room.
Sirna says he based his decision to delay on several factors, including the fact that staff members had complained about the girl's behavior in the past.
But of even more concern, Sirna said, was an incident, about six months earlier, in which the same student had made a similar accusation against a classmate. But that classmate was seated in an assistant principal's office when the assault allegedly occurred.
Also, the girl told Sirna that she'd reported the episode with Bender to her mother after returning home from school the previous Friday. Three days later, on Monday, she was back in class. The child then waited almost another full school day, on Tuesday, before approaching Sirna.
Why, the principal wondered, had almost four days passed before the child brought the allegation to his attention?
The earlier accusation weighing heavily, Sirna said, he walked the child through the sequence of events. She stuck to her story.
Still, believing there were "lots of questions and no answers," Sirna said, he summoned the girl's mother to the school.
It was approaching 5 p.m. when the conversation with the mother ended; any potential witnesses were already gone for the day.
Sirna departed, too, planning to pick up the inquiry where he left off the next morning. By Wednesday afternoon, he thought, he might have enough information to determine whether the accusation merited a hot line call.
He never got the opportunity.
The St. Louis Police Department, acting on a complaint from the mother — who'd gone to authorities after leaving the school — made the call at approximately 6 p.m. that evening.
"Our understanding is that the mother was frustrated because she felt nobody was listening to her," said Barrett. "That may not be the way (Sirna) perceived the situation. I think our perception is different."
The girl's parents did not respond to a message the Post-Dispatch left at the family address.
Sirna said police rejected his offer to call the hot line during a telephone conversation informing him of the mother's complaint. He resumed his own investigation, as planned, on Wednesday.
It was then Sirna learned that the girl's mother had told a teacher's aide in September 2007 that Bender had patted her daughter on the head and referred to the child as "sweetheart."
Had he been aware of that fact, Sirna said, he probably would have called the hot line the day the girl complained to him.
Still, Sirna believes that he had the latitude to examine extenuating circumstances before contacting state officials. He points to the state law's standard of "a reasonable cause to suspect that a child has been subjected to abuse or neglect."
He argues that he had justifiable reason to wait before calling the hot line.
The jury that convicted him this past September concluded otherwise.
He was found guilty of the misdemeanor crime of failing to notify the Children's Division of the Missouri Department of Social Services.
St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Barbara Peebles suspended jail time. She also set aside the educator's conviction once he meets the terms of a two-year probationary period.
Prosecutors say the details of the alleged abuse and whether the computer instructor truly assaulted the student is immaterial. In fact, the criminal case for that alleged abuse won't be heard in court for months.
Those who support the strictest interpretation of the law say Sirna was responsible for calling the hot line whether he questioned the abuse claims or not.
In declaring Sirna guilty, the jury based its decision, in part, on the testimony of the girl, who recounted for the court the abuse allegations that she described to the principal.
DEBATE OVER STATUTE
The investigation into the charges that roiled Gateway Elementary continued for nearly six months. Bender, 61, and an educator for 37 years, was suspended immediately. Sirna stayed on the job.
In late April, city prosecutors charged Bender with first-degree statutory sodomy and first-degree molestation. He was released after posting bond.
Bender's case is proceeding toward trial despite the sworn deposition testimony by the state investigator assigned to the case by Department of Social Services. The investigator determined that the accuser's allegations were "unsubstantiated."
Prosecutors, however, sometimes disregard the initial findings into sexual abuse allegations in deference to further investigation by police and other experts.
Officials say they know of only a few cases in which a teacher or school administrator has been prosecuted in Missouri for not reaching out about an abuse allegation.
By speaking openly about the circumstances, Sirna and others have moved the debate from the halls of justice to the court of public opinion.
Barrett, the chief misdemeanor officer, says the case raised red flags about Sirna's motive for delaying the hot line call.
"One thing that hit us particularly hard is if the defendant would have called right away if (Bender) had not been his friend," she said. "If the accused had been a neighbor or someone else he didn't know, would he have made the call right away? Does the law allow someone to make exception if someone is your friend?"
Sirna denies he and Bender were close.
He holds the view that if a mandatory reporter is prohibited from factoring "reasonable cause" into the decision to call the hot line, then legislation is needed to "take out those words, remove them" from the statute.
On that point, Rep. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, now headed to the state Senate, agrees with the former educator.
She suggests that a portion of the child protection legislation she is sponsoring be expanded to require teachers and administrators to call the hot line first and ask questions later.
"If you're a mandatory reporter, you can still do your due diligence," she said. "But call it in first."
At Sirna's sentencing, Peebles supported Cunningham's approach. "You second-guess kids in a playground fight or when something happens in the cafeteria," she told Sirna. "But you certainly cannot second-guess them when they come to you with allegations of abuse."
Penney Rector, the staff attorney for the Missouri Association of Elementary School Principals, sees some flaws in Cunningham's proposal.
Automatic disclosure, without even a cursory review, she fears, "will bog down the system" and divert authorities from investigating legitimate complaints.
Despite safeguards that unsubstantiated claims "will be placed in a closed record," Rector still fears that false accusations could smudge the reputation of a teacher or administrator.
Rector also believes it's easy to second-guess an administrator's actions after the fact.
"It is easy for someone to come in and say, 'You should have seen this and this and this,'" she said. "But at the time, you have to go on the information available and be true to the fact."
In the strictest sense, Sirna's interpretation of the law didn't cost him his career.
After his suspension last spring, Sirna, like Bender before him, proceeded with a planned retirement. The district, Sirna said, terminated him shortly after he informed administrators of the retirement decision.
Today, Sirna's plan for a second education life beyond the St. Louis Public Schools has all but evaporated.
Because he was convicted of a misdemeanor — and not a felony — his teaching and administrative certificates are still valid. Realistically, though, he doubts any district will want him.
"I'm going to find work in another field," he said. "But, to be quite honest, I'm not really sure what old principals do."
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