'Hostile Classroom' Sparks Despair, Then a Lawsuit

By HOLLY CORYELL

Nov. 10, 1996 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

STAMFORD, N.Y. — Ninth-grader Eve Bruneau is in a new school now, earning high marks, serving as captain of her junior varsity soccer team and playing flute and saxophone in the band.

Three years ago, at South Kortright Central School, she was depressed, cried frequently and begged her mother to let her stay home. She didn’t feel safe. Previously a straight-A student, she had falling grades.

The reason she was forced to change schools, according to her lawsuit against South Kortright? Sexual harassment.

The federal lawsuit contends that boys in Eve’s sixth-grade class called her and other girls names such as “dog-faced bitch,” prostitute and lesbian.

The boys also snapped the girls’ bras, stuffed paper down their blouses and rubbed their hands up and down girls’ backs, according to Eve’s lawyers. One boy grabbed a girl’s breasts, while another cut a girl’s hair, they said.

“I started to think, maybe I am ugly and maybe I am a bitch,” Eve said in the Scoharie County farmhouse where she and her younger sister were born. “By the time I left, I was just like a wreck. I had really bad posture. I was depressed all the time.”

Eve’s case--one of a growing number of sexual harassment lawsuits involving schoolchildren--could be the first federal peer-harassment lawsuit to go to trial seeking punitive damages, said Eve’s attorney, City University of New York law professor Merrick Rossein.

A case tried under California law ended earlier this fall with a girl winning $500,000 in damages. Eve’s lawsuit does not specify a dollar amount.

Last month, the Supreme Court refused to take a Texas case that involved whether school districts can be held liable for harassment of one pupil by other pupils. Experts predict the court will do so as more appeals courts take up such cases and inevitably disagree.

“There is a difference between flirting and hurting,” said lawyer Brooks Burdette of New York City, who also is representing Eve. “What happened in our case was systematic. It was a lot more than childhood horseplay.”

Eve claims that her former school district 60 miles southwest of Albany failed to protect her from sexual harassment, violating Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibiting sex discrimination in schools.

“The fact that it hurt the girls a lot and silenced them and prevented them from participating in the academic program wasn’t recognized by the school,” Rossein said.

School officials have said they tried to correct any problems in Eve’s sixth-grade class. The district argues that at any rate, the law does not apply to sexual harassment among children. The district’s lawyers refused to comment further before the trial.

Some local residents back the school system. Shyamal Sen Gupta gathered 290 signatures on a petition to have the case dismissed. He said that even his own daughter has been taunted at school, but that doesn’t constitute sexual harassment.

“An 11- or 12-year-old child cannot deliberately and-or intentionally commit acts of sexual harassment,” the petition said. “We taxpayers believe that it is we who are really getting harassed.”

Eve transferred to another district in March 1994 after the South Kortright board refused to move her to another sixth-grade class. Now 15, she attends a private boarding school in Massachusetts.

“I’m not going to give them the satisfaction, you know, that they can get away with this,” she said.

Her mother, Pat Schofield, said Eve has found strength from talking about her experience. She has appeared on several television shows and received dozens of calls from girls and parents with similar problems across the country.

“It’s been part of the healing process for her, definitely, to have your voice heard and also to know that you’re helping other people,” Schofield said.

A 1993 survey of more than 1,600 public school students in grades eight through 11 found that 85% of girls and 76% of boys had experienced some sort of sexual harassment, according to the American Assn. of University Women Educational Foundation, which funds research on girls and education.

What’s new is that children and parents are going to court.

Litigation should be a last resort, said Verna Williams, an attorney with the National Women’s Law Center, which is representing a Georgia fifth-grader who has accused a classmate of sexual harassment.

The widely publicized cases of two little boys suspended for kissing girls this fall clearly don’t fit the definition of sexual harassment, Williams said. But many cases are harder to define or solve.

The long-term solution lies in training students and teachers about what kinds of behavior are permissible and providing counseling to persistent harassers, she said.

“Sometimes it’s not just a kiss on the cheek,” Williams said. “Sometimes it’s very, very serious and very, very damaging.”