Advocate calls for stronger laws to protect students from sexual predators

The grounds for his termination, however, don’t rest on the fact that this is the second time Jeremiah Mazo, 54, has faced charges of student sex abuse since joining the Clark County School District in 2003.

Instead, district officials plan to give the Hayden Elementary School music teacher the boot because he missed work after being jailed on April 24.

That may offer the swiftest solution to prevent Mazo from working in a district classroom again. But other districts he may apply to in the future will see only Mazo’s poor attendance as the reason for his termination — not the repeated allegations he faced in student molestation cases.

“That’s not on me,” CCSD Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky said on Friday. “I can’t control what other districts do, but I have to protect our children.”

Through interviews with district leaders, Nevada education officials and child welfare advocates, the Review-Journal discovered state laws and local policies that provide loopholes educators can use to evade detection and discipline in cases of suspected sex abuse.

The district, for example, cites stipulations in employee contracts that offer few options for dismissing teachers who ultimately aren’t convicted in court for various reasons, which may include entering a plea to a lesser charge or agreeing to seek counseling. In Mazo’s 2008 case, a North Las Vegas judge dismissed the charges and sealed the case file.

Similarly, the Nevada Department of Education cited limitations in state statutes when asked about its inability to revoke an educator’s license until a final conviction.

Those legal hurdles frustrate Terri Miller, president of Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct & Exploitation, or S.E.S.A.M.E., a Nevada group that lobbies lawmakers and agencies to better protect students.

“It shouldn’t be this hard to remove predators from our classrooms,” Miller said. “For them to sit there and say it’s so hard to fire them is a bold-faced lie.”

However, one state education official cautioned against a rush to judgment.

“The question becomes do we as a society want to suspend or punish someone without a conviction?” asked Dena Durish, director of educator effectiveness at the Nevada Department of Education.

FAILURE TO ACT

Since the late 1990s, Miller has pushed the Nevada Legislature to criminalize sexual misconduct against students, increase penalties for such offenders and close loopholes that permit troublesome teachers to fly under the radar and move to unsuspecting districts.

She had no idea that a 2007 mandate approved by lawmakers to create a notification system to track criminal cases involving school personnel was largely ignored for years by the Nevada Department of Education.

The creation of that system was unanimously approved by state lawmakers.But the department only started working on the procedures in the midst of a 2014 state audit — six years too late to trigger an investigation when North Las Vegas police first arrested Mazo in June 2008, alleging he inappropriately touched a student.

“That’s surprising, but not very shocking,” Miller said of the state department’s failure to immediately comply with the mandate.

“Here’s the problem…no one’s doing their job to make sure that the law is upheld,” she added. “This is a tough one, but my gosh, strong laws are only as effective as their enforcement.”

In fact, state auditors found little evidence of enforcement of the 2007 law at the Nevada Department of Education.

In 13 cases, the number of days it took the department’s Office of Educator Licensure to become aware of a teacher arrest ranged from one to 1,200, according to the performance audit released late last year. The average was 367 days.

In about 75 percent of the cases, auditors found applicable districts did not notify the office of an arrest, as required by the 2007 law.

Rather, office staff learned of the arrest through local news outlets.

REPORTING TEACHER ARRESTS

Durish said the state education department moved quickly to implement the 2007 law after state Superintendent of Public Instruction Dale Erquiaga took charge in 2013.

By October 2014, the department’s website had a notification form that allows districts to easily report teacher arrests.

It also soon will hold workshops and public hearings to craft a definition of “moral turpitude,” an offense referenced in state statutes that provides additional grounds for the revocation of an educator’s license.

“We think that we have some authority to develop regulations to help tighten the process,” Durish said. “We’re in the process of trying to figure out what we can do.”

Nonetheless, “right now, technically we cannot revoke or suspend a license until conviction,” Durish said. “So to be perfectly honest, that’s our struggle.”

In Carson City, lawmakers appear likely to pass new legislation that would require educators convicted of sexual misconduct with students ages 16 or older to register as sex offenders. Another bill would toughen sentences for those educators.

Miller applauded those efforts, but said she also hopes lawmakers consider granting student victims and their families the power to initiate license revocation hearings, something currently limited to the Nevada Department of Education, the State Board of Education and, in few cases, local school boards.

Additionally, Miller is pursuing the creation of policy that would prevent districts from shuffling their bad apples to another district or state.

‘PASSING THE TRASH’

To achieve that, Miller looked to Washington, where state law requires school districts to complete within a year of departure investigations into teachers accused of student sex abuse.

“Oftentimes, school systems will just drop the investigation,” Miller said. “They remove them from the payroll and claim no jurisdiction over them.

“That allows the perpetrators to obfuscate the law and move from school to school,” she added. “That’s called passing the trash, and that is deliberate child endangerment.”

It’s unlikely a law similar to Washington’s will make its way into the final days of the current legislative session in Nevada, which ends June 1.

On the local level, though, one Clark County School Board member sounded open to exploring a review of district teacher hiring and monitoring policies to try and keep sexual predators out of the classroom.

“The bottom line is we want our kids to be safe,” said School Board member Kevin Child. “If we have to change something, we’re all about that.

“Absolutely we will look deeper into who we hire, how we hire and how we proceed to vet these people over the course of their career,” he added. “We’re asking those questions.”

Contact Neal Morton at nmorton@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0279. Find him on Twitter: @nealtmorton.