Anatomy of a Debacle
A story fit for Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is the talk of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
The Debacle
June 2023—Lancaster Country Day School (LCDS), a private PreK-12 school, announced plans to develop a new Vision, Mission Statement, and Core Values. Leadership looks forward to the 2023-2024 school year and is confident they are doing everything possible to protect the students and the school.
November 2023 – New Vision, Mission Statement, and Core Values introduced.
LCDS received a tip via Safe2Say, a violence protection program, that an upper school student had gathered photos of female classmates and, using an AI program, attached them to nude images.
The alleged student denied the accusations, and no one was known to have seen the pictures. The matter was dropped.
May 2024 - The allegations were repeated via the Pennsylvania mandatory child abuse reporting program, and this time, the police were contacted. Some parents learned of the AI nude photos and that they had been posted in a chat room.
The ongoing investigation by the Susquehanna Regional Police Department found that 46 students were victims of the AI-generated images.
June 2024—In the first communication to parents regarding the pictures, LCDS noted that the November 2023 investigation was concluded because administrators hadn’t seen any of the images or known of any individuals who could corroborate the tip. When the second allegation was made in May, the school decided to reinvestigate the matter. The alleged perpetrator was identified as a ninth-grade male and permanently expelled.
August 2024 – An affidavit for a search warrant references the student “taking photographs of students and using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to portray the female juvenile students as being nude.” His iPhone 11 was seized. He has yet to be charged.
November 8, 2024—In protest of the LCDS’s handling of the matter, most of the 225 upper school students walked out and marched around the campus, chanting, “Hear us. Acknowledge us. See us.”
November 11, 2024: Some victims' families, through an attorney, demand that the head of school and president of the Board of Trustees resign within 48 hours.
The letter also maintained that the head of school, as a mandated reporter, failed to notify authorities in November 2023, when he received the first tip alerting him to the presence of child sexual abuse and pornographic material. In addition to the resignations, they requested an attorney-run mandated reporter training for all board members, leaders, faculty, and staff; a full-time certified resource officer; a reputable IT forensics firm to determine where the offending images have been sent and exist; third-party counseling services at no charge to all victims; and that no further interaction with the victims occur without prior written parental consent.
November 14, 2024 - The parents’ attorney initiated legal action.
November 15, 2024 - The Trustees announced the termination of the head of school and the president's resignation.
November 18, 2024—Classes were canceled for the day due to departures, legal challenges, and uncertainty.
The original parents’ attorney advises that despite the departures, the parents he represents would continue to pursue a lawsuit.
Another attorney with the firm that helped win a $60 million settlement from Penn State University for Jerry Sandusky’s child sex abuse confirmed that he would be filing a lawsuit against the former head of school, the president of the trustees, and LCDS.
(Ashley Stalnecker, LNP’s education reporter, provides the best coverage.)
Preliminary Observations
Every leader's first responsibility is to protect their people and organization. Federal law stipulates that an organization's "governing authority,” in this case, the Trustees, is responsible for implementing and maintaining an effective system to prevent and detect criminal acts. The trustees neither protected these students nor complied with federal law.
The right objectives and metrics to drive desired performance were not associated with the new LCDS mission, and feedback could have been more effective, especially for serious issues.
This matter was first reported using the youth violence prevention program Safe2Say, run by the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General. Kudos to the person who reported the pictures. They were not a mandatory reporter, and instead of not doing anything, they used a violence prevention reporting system. Having a separate system for different categories of reporters and incidents is fundamentally flawed. Anyone can call 911; there aren’t different numbers for different incident categories. (Also, any incident or condition category is 37% more likely to be reported using a notification protection system that processes all incident and condition categories than a system that processes just the reported incident or condition category.)
In Pennsylvania, like most states, mandatory child abuse reporting is confusing, problematic, and ineffective. People don’t need definitions, rules, penalties, and training to use the national 911 system. If they think they see something wrong, they call 911.
It’s an open secret: Most states mandatory child abuse reporting and elder abuse reporting discourage reporting. Convicted abuse offenders knew that they wouldn’t be caught by mandatory reporting.
Without a system that allows anyone, anytime, anywhere, to report any matter, an organization, and its people are not protected.
Learning at Lancaster Country Day School is at least disrupted, their reputation is savaged, and they can expect additional legal action.
But as despicable as this matter is, victims, including minors and the elderly, suffer far more every week in incidents that could and should have been prevented. Plaintiffs' lawyers estimate that more than 95% of these incidents are settled out of court. The only parties that benefit from the status quo are attorneys.
Colossal protection and trust gaps exist between what parents want and what organizations have. Until that changes, incidents far more horrible than this will continue to plague us.
Protecting People and Organizations
There are two ways for organizations to address what they don’t want to happen:
- Prevent it from happening.
- Detect it as quickly as possible and address it immediately.
Prevent and detect are inexorably linked: The greater the likelihood of being detected—caught—the greater the likelihood that it will prevent the act in the first place. The best way to prevent bad things from happening is to put all effort into detecting them.
Cameras over the cash register are extraordinarily effective in detecting cash skimming. They are so good at detecting theft that they prevent people from stealing from the cash register.
(Increasing the perception that you will be caught and punished for committing a prohibited act is a very effective deterrent. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter wrongful acts.)
What Organizations Can Do to Prevent Debacles and Incidents That Are Far More Horrific
DIY:
- Determine
- Why people don’t/won’t notify.
- What it takes to facilitate prompt and accurate notifications.
- Analyze over 700 wrongful acts in organizations, including over 220 cases of sexual abuse of minors.
- Interview offenders, including those convicted of child sex abuse in organizations.
- Build applications based on the research that:
- Allow anyone, anytime, anywhere, to easily report any matter.
- Automatically facilitates and documents compliance with mandatory reporting anywhere.
- Thoroughly test and collect feedback from people and organizations.
- Continually improve.
Or, let Look 1st do it for you and have the solution most likely to prevent and the first to detect wrongful acts and conditions.
Want proof? I welcome inquiries.