In a phase of life as tumultuous as your teenage years, all you can hope for is a safe space to grow and learn who you are as an individual, a learner, and a member of society. Unfortunately, for both myself and many others as I later learned, Barry Goldwater High School did not provide such a space. As a sophomore in high school, I remember feeling like a teacher’s behavior of adding students on social media was “off.” I cautiously asked one of my teachers about it, and they told me “No, we as teachers absolutely cannot be friends with students on social media.” While I never filed a formal report regarding this behavior, I recently learned that the teacher I told this to had reported his behavior to administration. The Barry Goldwater High School administration’s solution was to have him make separate social media accounts; one for students he was actively teaching, and a personal social media account where he was free to add anyone, even students, so long as they weren’t taking one of his classes.
Since this teacher’s habit of adding students on social media and “meeting up” with them after school at various coffee places was widely known, I began to assume it was safe. After all, if adults knew about it, who was I to be overly paranoid and question this teacher who seemingly just wanted to be involved and provide support to high school students?
All throughout high school, I tried very hard to normalize his frequent messages to me on social media, his persistence in asking me to hang out with him, and the fact that he treated me, a 17 year old girl, like an incredibly close confidant. I remember my friends and I seeing him when we went to Dutch Bros, just sitting outside, seemingly waiting for us to show up and hang out with him while we drank our coffee. We would talk, sometimes in groups, sometimes when I was grabbing a coffee alone. He would make comments about how “hanging out” with me was wrong, and about how if asked about it by other adults, I should lie and say that we didn’t see each other at the coffee stand. While this should have raised alarm bells, it seemed as though his behavior was widely known and accepted at that point, and previously, nothing had alerted me to just how deeply disturbing his behavior truly was. As a child, you accept the reality that has been normalized for you by the adults in charge of you, and the reality of him befriending 15, 16, and 17-year-old students was so extensively normalized at my high school that it felt almost safe to me at that time.
Nothing seemed out of place until one of my friends, who graduated the year before me, started getting texts from him asking her out to dinner immediately after she had graduated. Neither of us knew how to interpret these messages; maybe he was just being nice. My friend chose to politely decline, saying that she was uncomfortable with going out on dates with a former teacher. The teacher proceeded to tell her that he wasn’t asking her on dates, and that she was reading too much into his invitations. Those messages opened my eyes to what he was doing: Waiting until it was legal to pursue us, and immediately pouncing on the opportunity to do so, no matter how unwanted and uncomfortable it made us as young women.
Around two years ago, I began going viral on twitter frequently, causing other students from my former high school to message me to help them deal with a problematic teacher they assumed I had negative interactions with. While they were correct that I had experienced problematic behavior from the same teacher, it alarmed me that they saw me, a twenty-year-old who absolutely did not have her life together, as a person who held the solution to this incredibly complex problem. I remember feeling like I had ignored a problem for three years, and suddenly the extent of how deeply horrifying it was for a man in his thirties to manipulate and coerce TEENAGERS into being his friends dawned on me. Realizing I had been groomed and that I felt some amount of responsibility for making sure other girls didn’t experience what I had experienced was overwhelming, especially at a time in my life where I should have simply been responsible for trying to figure out my own identity and path as an adult.
In the spring of 2019, I began creating group chats of people from my high school I assumed would feel similar to me about the teacher, that I knew I could trust. In these group chats I gained so much information and was able to gauge how everyone else around me felt about him. This was a huge step in my own personal healing process with this situation; being heard and validated is the first step to recovering from abuse. Once I discovered that others had at the very least seen what I had seen, or at worst experienced what I had experienced, I knew I had to make a plan.
For two years, I grappled with how to handle what I had come to understand was grooming since I had very little evidence of my experiences with the teacher, so filing a complaint with the police or Department of Education seemed like a re-traumatizing headache that would get me nowhere past an extra therapy session. I realized that reporting it to the school district would also likely get me nowhere, seeing as they were well aware of his social media behavior, especially since his social media had been an element in a highly-publicized media story about the school district four years ago. My only option seemed to be putting enough public pressure on the district via my online presence by speaking out. This wasn’t something I wanted to do, because as anyone who has ever been on the internet knows, the comments and backlash directed at young women coming forward is often toxic and almost as traumatic as the abuse itself.
The final straw that pushed me to publicly come forward was when I received several DMs at the end of this February of people sending me an Instagram story that the teacher had posted. In his Instagram story, he said he had received a “final” write-up from the district over his continued use of social media in order to interact with students. He described how his actions had been misinterpreted and how he meant nothing more than supporting his students. If there truly was no wrongdoing and no ill intent behind one’s comments, most people would simply refrain from commenting, accept that they had made people uncomfortable, and work to move forward in a way that makes their students feel more comfortable. Instead, in an effort to manipulate and groom more young women, the teacher played the victim.
Three days later, I posted my first thread vaguely detailing what had happened to me. How this teacher would message me as a high schooler calling me beautiful, coerce me into hanging out with him, and as soon as I turned 18 and left high school, attempted to match with me on dating apps. The tweets didn’t go viral, but they received responses from other women who had gone to my high school saying that they had experienced the same, if not worse behavior from the exact same teacher. The district obviously ignored this thread, despite being tagged multiple times, so I decided to make one last attempt to call and file a formal complaint.
I called the Deer Valley Unified School District and talked to six different employees, none of whom would take my report upon hearing that I was a former student. Knowing the abuse and manipulation I had endured was still occurring to other young women and still being completely ignored by adults in power made me feel an indescribable level of sadness and disgust. I decided to gather every screenshot I had, drafted a lengthy Twitter thread, and hit send tweet.
The days following posting my Twitter thread were an intense blur. I woke up every morning throwing up from stress. I barely showered. I couldn’t eat. My friends had to do my laundry for me because I felt so anxious and overwhelmed. My messages on Twitter were overflowing with girls sharing stories about the same teacher, many ended up eventually publicly coming forward on their own. My messages were also flooded with journalists who were respectful and wanted to run stories on the ugly insanity of my hometown which I had managed to shine a light on. Telling several news outlets your trauma in the hopes of preventing the same trauma from being inflicted upon others is gross and deeply unfair, and quite honestly, the Deer Valley Unified School District is responsible for providing no recourse and backing me into a corner where that was my only option to get them to take action. The way that we as a society place the responsibility of child crimes on the child victim is a horrible and traumatic experience and DVUSD made sure to do nothing different.
The district never reached out to me following the thread, I had to contact them. I was quite literally met with an email that said “thnx” from the superintendent, a man who possesses a doctoral degree, when I emailed the district to report my own abuse after the thread. I remember reading a statement they gave to a local news station saying they had only been made aware of allegations with my twitter thread, despite me saying in that very same twitter thread that both myself and others had previously tried to alert the district to this man’s behavior. The fact that a school district’s response to dozens of victims coming forward was to subtly attempt to slander them and discredit their character to the press is shocking. At every point, from when I was 16 to when I was 22 and took a large personal risk in publicly speaking out, the district has treated myself and other victims with an abhorrent level of disregard, unprofessionalism, and gross negligence.
Feeling like I was solely responsible for the burden of stopping a teacher from preying on young women was a horrible, isolating, and life altering experience to go through as a college student. Realizing now that I actually was solely responsible for stopping a teacher from preying on young women brought about the most intense feelings of guilt and regret I have ever experienced. I should never have been placed in this position, a position that is so incredibly lonely and vulnerable, simply because adults were too lazy and complicit to make the morally right choice. I should not have had to come up with what was essentially a PR campaign involving my own social media, key public figures, and local news outlets when I was a victim with ample evidence of this man’s wrongdoings, and yet that’s what I had to do. The school district ultimately took very little action, this man resigned on his own. There was no update of this to myself or any other women who came forward, reinforcing the idea that the school district didn’t care about the harm that had been inflicted upon us at such a young age, they cared about their own public image.
To the other women who have come forward, I am so sorry you also had to experience this and I can’t thank you enough. I put my own personal safety, reputation, and future on the line to do the right thing by coming forward and the only reason it worked out was because you all decided to do what was uncomfortable and come forward as well. I’m sorry it came down to publicly admitting we were all groomed in order for us to be taken seriously, and I’m hoping we all heal from this as best as we can.
To the Deer Valley Unified School District, I hope you will re-evaluate your policies and procedures going forward. I also hope that regardless of the teacher’s employment status, you will continue to investigate how and why this was able to happen to so many women for so long and work toward implementing mandatory and comprehensive sexual harassment education for teachers, staff, and students. I hope that in the future, you do not continue to put your public image and personal comfort above the safety of your students, and that these past few weeks have been an uncomfortable wake-up call for all of the adults responsible for dozens of young women’s trauma. I also hope you consider publicly apologizing to the victims and working with some of us on strategies to make your district a better, safer place for all children.
