{"id":97352,"date":"2018-10-23T18:50:26","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T00:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/office-of-civil-rights-to-investigate-fathers-complaint-against-durango-school-district-9-r\/"},"modified":"2018-10-23T18:50:26","modified_gmt":"2018-10-24T00:50:26","slug":"office-of-civil-rights-to-investigate-fathers-complaint-against-durango-school-district-9-r","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/office-of-civil-rights-to-investigate-fathers-complaint-against-durango-school-district-9-r\/","title":{"rendered":"Office of Civil Rights to investigate father\u2019s complaint against Durango School District 9-R"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"A
A father who claims his son was sexually assaulted at Riverview Elementary School filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education\u2019s Office of Civil Rights claiming Durango School District 9-R and Superintendent Dan Snowberger mishandled the investigation.<\/span>Durango Herald file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The U.S. Department of Education\u2019s Office of Civil Rights has announced it is opening an investigation against Durango School District 9-R after a father of a student filed a complaint that 9-R did not properly investigate a report about his son being sexually assaulted by a classmate.<\/p>\n

The Office of Civil Rights<\/a> notified the father of the alleged victim on Oct. 18 that the father\u2019s complaint, filed about two weeks ago, justified a full investigation.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlease note that opening the allegation for investigation in no way implies that we have made a determination with regard to its merit,\u201d the Office of Civil Rights wrote. \u201cDuring the investigation, OCR is a neutral fact-finder, collecting and analyzing relevant evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Durango<\/em>Herald<\/em> does not print the names of sexual assault victims without their consent. The name of the father is being withheld to prevent the identification of the alleged victim.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m cautiously optimistic that the Department of Education will prompt the district to take a hard look at their practices,\u201d the father wrote in an email to the Herald<\/em> on Tuesday. \u201cAt the end of the day, all anyone would want is for the district to take sexual harassment seriously. At present, the district doesn\u2019t employ best practices.\u201d<\/p>\n

The father of the alleged victim filed a complaint with the OCR on Oct. 3, saying that Durango School District 9-R<\/a> failed to properly investigate an incident he reported about his son being sexually assaulted by a classmate at Riverview Elementary School.<\/p>\n

The father also says Superintendent Dan Snowberger did not allow the family of the alleged victim immediate access to the district\u2019s Title IX compliance officer, the staff member trained in the civil rights law. Snowberger and the district\u2019s Title IX compliance officer, Laura Galido, investigated the incident and concluded there was no evidence to support that the assault happened as reported.<\/p>\n

Snowberger and Durango 9-R spokeswoman Julie Popp did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday morning. Snowberger in previous interviews declined any wrongdoing on the school district\u2019s part. He also has said if the Office of Civil Rights finds any misconduct on the school district\u2019s part, he would resign.<\/p>\n

The Office of Civil Rights had 30 days from the day the complaint was filed on Oct. 3 to decide whether to proceed with an investigation, dismiss the complaint or request additional information.<\/p>\n

There was no time frame for completion of the investigation included in the letter the Office of Civil Rights sent to the alleged victim\u2019s father.<\/p>\n

jromeo@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

OCR investigation notice (PDF)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

school district did not properly investigate alleged sex assault on his child<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":97353,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[1175,950,1086,5602,524],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-97352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-civil-rights","tag-durango","tag-durango-school-district-9-r","tag-riverview-elementary","tag-sexual-assault"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97352"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=97352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}