THE DEPARTMENT OF Education will oversee a sweeping redesign of the Title IX procedures in Chicago Public Schools to protect students from future sexual assault and abuse, putting to rest a years-long investigation that uncovered thousands of mishandled complaints in what officials described as “deeply disturbing” and likely the most comprehensive investigation ever undertaken on sexual violence in a major public school system.

“Over the last several years, American have become increasingly aware of sexual violence on colleges campuses,” Kenneth Marcus, assistant secretary for civil rights, said Thursday. “This may be a wake-up call that the problem exists on elementary and secondary schools as well. This is something we cannot tolerate.”

The investigation, which examined complaints dating back to 2012, uncovered 2,800 student-on-student sexual harassment complaints and 280 adult-on-student complaints at more than 400 schools in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest school district.

In one instance, a teacher told a student he’d secured a paid after-school job for her to build her skills, but when she showed up for it, he said the job had been canceled. He took her to dinner instead, purchased her alcohol and kissed her, according to the investigation filings. She asked the teacher to take her home, she said, but he “parked his car, kissed and fondled her neck, legs and breasts, removed her pants, and performed non-consensual oral sex and digitally penetrated her while she cried and begged him to stop.”

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights established that Chicago Public Schools was entirely unprepared to handle complaints related to Title IX, the federal statute prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funds. For a period of time, it didn’t even employ a Title IX coordinator, which is a federal requirement, and failed to properly respond to thousands of complaints. The district hired a Title IX coordinator in March, but that person wasn’t given full authority to carry out the district’s legal responsibilities, which for years had been outsourced to the district’s legal team instead.

“These are a very basic and longstanding requirements of Title IX law,” Marcus said.

Among other things outlined in the resolution agreement reached with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights on Wednesday, Chicago Public Schools is required to review the actions of current and former employees who mishandled complaints, review its Title IX procedures and develop a process for responding to all complaints and provide a process for those who believe the district mishandled their complaints to have those complaints newly reviewed.

“This is a robust, significant and extensive resolution agreement that reflects the severity and gravity of the findings we have made,” Marcus said. “It is developed to ensure that this will not happen again.”

The Education Department withheld $4 million in federal funding from Chicago Public Schools last year after the inspector general’s report was published, but the terms of this specific investigation, Marcus said, don’t allow for financial settlements.

Marcus said that if Chicago Public Schools doesn’t comply with the requirements outlined in the resolution agreement, it could ultimately face a loss of all federal funding – though he said he doesn’t expect that to happen as school officials have already begun to fulfill certain requirements.

“These changes amount to an overhaul,” Marcus said. “They are not tweaks to policies. They require a significant rebuild.”

During the 2018-19 school year, 458 allegations – nearly 3 per school day – relating to “leering, ‘creepy’ or other concerning behavior” of educators, security guards, other staff members and volunteers, streamed into the Office of Inspector General, the independent oversight body for Chicago’s approximately 650 public school, according to a report it sent to the city’s Board of Education in July.

The report concluded that 18% of the claims involved penetration, groping, fondling or other physical sexual abuse. The majority of cases are still active, but out of the 160 completed, 116 were not substantiated.

As a result of the investigations, 23 employees had been fired as of July – 13 who were under investigation either retired or resigned, 15 substitute teachers have been blocked from teaching in the school system and an additional 97 adults have been pulled from the school pending an investigation, all according to the inspector general’s report.

In 2018, The Chicago Tribune published, “Betrayed,” an investigation into the widespread failures in how school district officials handled claims by students of sexual misconduct by educators, staff and other students. The investigation prompted the inspector general’s office to take over the district’s investigations of such allegations, rather than referring them back to a principal or other school official, as had been the standard operating procedure, and also hire a global law firm to review two decades worth of old cases, nearly 1,000 in total.

The Education Department action Thursday marks the second high-profile Office for Civil Rights investigation concluded this month. Last week, the department slapped Michigan State University with a $4.5 million fine and demanded a complete overhaul of the school’s Title IX reporting procedures following its mishandling of reports of sexual abuse of students by Larry Nassar, former sports doctor for the school and for USA Gymnastics.

“What is true of college and university campuses is not less true of elementary and secondary schools,” said Marcus, who went to great lengths to frame how severe the problem of sexual violence and sexual harrassment has become in K-12 schools.

“We have seen a steady and substntial increase of both sexual harrassment claims in general and also sexual violence claims in particular,” he said. “The rate of increase of sexual violence is significantly greater than sexual harrassment. [We are receiveing] several times more sexual violence complaints than we were getting a decade ago.”

“But this [case],” he continued, “is unusual even among the increasing numbers in that it is a case involving not one or two students, but a problem we found at schools throughout an entire district. This was the largest that we have done and it is an eye-opener and should be an eye-opener.”