| In this study, cases involving the sexual harassment of students by teachers and other students in the past 20 years were identified, reviewed, and analyzed. Literature has shown that sexual harassment in the educational setting is prevalent and often ignored. The consequences of ignoring or improperly dealing with sexual harassment of students are enormous in their costs to students, teachers, and schools. Administrators in public schools are faced with the issue of litigation as a result of mishandling sexual harassment claims.; By doing a computer search, the researcher identified more than 125 potential cases occurring in the past 20 years from kindergarten through the university level. Those cases were narrowed to 55 cases by deleting earlier versions of the same case and focusing on the common threads that coursed through the cases as legal themes. The sample of the study comprised cases from the United States District Court, the United States Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court. These cases reflected one or more of the following issues: Title VII standards; § 1983 claims; 1st, 5th, and/or 14th Amendment rights violations; “the special relationship” between schools and students; the “deliberate indifference” principle; liability; and qualified immunity.; These cases revealed that the courts' opinion about liability, immunity, and schools' relationship to students had gradually changed. Whereas teacher-on-student sexual harassment was originally the most frequent premise, subsequent cases addressed not only to student-on-student sexual harassment, but sexual harassment by members of the same sex. Guiding principles to aid administrators, teachers, and students were developed from these cases in order to help them maintain safe environments where all students can benefit from the educational opportunities available to them. |
