Court Opinion

ID: 9659966
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 21:59:44.498816+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:13.474442
License: Public Domain

COOPER, Justice,
concurring.
I fully concur with the majority opinion in this case. I write separately to dispel any suggestion that Appellees’ failure to report the alleged abuse to proper authorities resulted in “no harm done,” and to address the assertion that Appellees were following school “protocol” by not reporting the alleged sexual abuse to proper authorities.
The record in this case contains evidence that two sixth-grade girls were sexually abused by one of their teachers, Donald Mullins, in the fall of 1992. Appellees admit that this information was reported to them in November 1992 and that they, in turn, reported the information not to the authorities required by KRS 620.030(1), but to their school principal. He, too, failed to report the alleged abuse to proper authorities and has also been charged under KRS 620.990. In March 1993, after Mullins allegedly abused yet another sixth-grade girl, that child and several eyewitnesses reported the incident to an assistant principal, and all three instances were then reported to proper authorities. If Appellees had obeyed their statutory duty when they were informed of Mullins’s abuse of his first two victims, the third victim might have been spared the same fate. Thus, this case represents the perfect example of why the statute requires that suspected child abuse be reported directly to “a local law enforcement agency or the Kentucky state police; the cabinet or its designated representative; the commonwealth’s attorney or the county attorney;” and that a report only to a supervisor is insufficient.
Although I deem it to be irrelevant, the existence of a school “protocol” requiring Appellees to report alleged sexual abuse to their principal instead of to proper authorities is illusory at best. The only statement cited in support of this assertion is found at page 57 of the Bullitt County Public Schools Guidelines and consists of the following two sentences:
The first contact for any information should always be the principal in the school. Below is a fisting of services and the individual responsible for that service in the Central Office. (Emphasis added.)
Below this entry is the fist of those persons responsible for providing specific services, e.g., attendance, maintenance, busing, etc. All of those persons are identified by name, except the person responsible for “Child Abuse,” who is identified only as “ * Social Worker.” Since the remainder of the Guidelines were not filed in this record, I am unable to discern why this person is not identified by name or the reason for the asterisk. Could it be that the “ * Social Worker” is an employee of the Cabinet for Families and Children (formerly Cabinet for Human Resources), who would be an appropriate person to whom suspected child abuse should be reported pursuant to KRS 620.030(1)? Regardless, the statement that “[t]he first contact for any information should always be the principal in the school” connotes that the principal will be the source of the information, not the recipient thereof.
STUMBO, J., joins this concurring opinion.