600 New Cases of Sex Abuse and Rape Reported at Chicago Public Schools Since June

Chicago Public Schools officials have received 624 new allegations of sexual abuse in their new office handling such complaints, 133 of them making accusations against adults.

That’s what a top CPS attorney told City Council members Wednesday afternoon at a long-awaited hearing on rampant sexual abuse problems in the country’s third largest school district.

CPS officials set up a $3 million, 16-person Office of Student Protections and Title IX in September to ramp up protections for kids from sexual harassment, abuse and assault, including a hotline for complaints. Staffed by experts in youth, special ed and sexual violence, the office has collected 491 complaints of student-on-student misconduct and referred the 133 complaints accusing adults to the CPS inspector general, whose office inherited the power to investigate them from CPS’ internal law department.

Inspector General Nicholas Schuler told the handful of council members present that his office has identified and is reviewing about 1,000 sexual misconduct cases at CPS since 2000. About 18 of them need more extensive review, and will likely be sent to an outside firm founded by former FBI director Louis Freeh.

Schuler also said within the next 12 to 18 months, he’ll be able to lay out what went wrong at CPS that led to the problems documented in June by the Chicago Tribune. To bolster strengthen public trust in the system rocked by the abuse scandal, Schuler’s office will make quarterly public reports on the cases.