By JEFF EPSTEIN
[email protected]
WINDSOR, Vt. — In the wake of the distribution of a survey to fifth-graders with “inappropriate language” according to the supervisory union superintendent, a nonprofit organization has been suspended from school.
WISE, an Upper Valley nonprofit group that deals with domestic violence and sexual safety, has been told it can no longer distribute any surveys or offer its sexual safety curriculum in Windsor schools, said David Baker, the superintendent of the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union. Both Baker and Windsor School Principal Tiffany Cassano posted letters to parents about the survey on the WSESU website Tuesday.
The incident occurred last week when a Windsor school counselor distributed the survey on behalf of WISE without getting permission from Cassano first. The survey was intended for distribution to fifth and sixth grades, but only one class actually received the survey before it was intercepted and pulled, Baker said. The survey included questions about sexual activity and sexual orientation, he said, that were not appropriate for 10-year-olds.
One of the students who received the survey told the counselor that he thought his parents should read it. The counselor told the student if they were not comfortable with the survey they could leave any question blank or opt out of the survey, Baker said. He said he was concerned that at least one parent involved went to a television station with the information instead of school administration. The station, WPTZ-TV, carried a story about the incident and interviewed the parent, Vanessa Beach, who was upset about the content of the survey.
“We’ve heard from about half of [the] parents,” of the class that got the survey, Baker said.
WSESU has “no written policy” for the dissemination of surveys in school. “We don’t give out that many,” Baker said. But he added that the survey should have been vetted by the school administration and was not.
“The administration was caught completely off-guard. The contents of the survey was never shared with the administration,” Baker stated in his message to school families.
The exact sequence of events remains unclear, and Cassano did not respond to a request from the Eagle Times for an interview. It is not even clear, for example, for whom the survey was originally intended. In her message, she refers to “Windsors’ 5th grade students” while Baker’s message says “some of our 5th and 6th graders.”
A permission letter was involved, Baker stated in his message to school families, but was “far too vague and did not include the specific content of the survey. It also required only ‘opt-out’ permission, which in this case, was totally unacceptable.”
The counselor is unlikely to be sanctioned or disciplined, Baker told the Eagle Times, as not showing the survey to Cassano was “an error in judgment,” he said. “The counselor … may have assumed the principal had seen it.”
Baker’s message says in part: “The survey was part of a research project conducted by the University of New Hampshire. It was created to evaluate the work WISE, as an agency, does in our schools. WISE is dedicated to the prevention of gender-based violence across the Upper Valley and over the last several years has partnered with all schools in our SU around child sexual safety. Our schools are required by state law to have a curriculum that addresses this issue. WISE has historically done good work helping us to comply with this law.”
However, pending a future meeting with between the administration and the group, WISE has been told to “cease and desist in the dissemination of this survey. We will be working to ensure something like this never happens again,” Baker said.
WISE did not return calls from the Eagle Times for comment.
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