Sex-Violence Allegations Rock Eli Whitney

Eli Whitney Technical High School’s response to complaints of sexual harassment and alleged rape have students and parents up in arms.

The past two days have seen a 100-student walkout and a charged parent-principal confrontation over the issue.

Monday, roughly 100 students left class and the building over the allowed presence in school of a 19-year-old student who multiple girls (primarily freshmen) said relentlessly stalked them and texted them unsolicited, lewd messages.

“Kick him out! Kick him out!” they yelled in front of the school building.

Then outraged parents gathered at the school Tuesday evening to air their concerns in a closed-door meeting with the principal.

Eli Tech, based in Hamden, is part of the Connecticut Technical High School System and takes students from throughout the region, including New Haven.

Eli Tech Principal Carlos Aldave did not respond to an email request for comment for this story. A message has also been left on his work phone as of Tuesday morning.

Aldave did send a letter to parents on the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 15, with the subject ​“social media incident.”

“Earlier this week a student informed the administration of allegations of harassment and physical threats between students, on- and off- campus,” he wrote. ​“We take these types of allegations very seriously at Eli Whitney and immediately investigated and acted in collaboration with local law enforcement … The students involved are facing disciplinary action in accordance with our school district’s discipline policy.

“I understand that false information about these incidents is now being shared on social media platforms. Repeating rumors and spreading false information with no credibility only creates fear and makes it more difficult for our school to respond on these situations. Hopefully, my email will help prevent the spread of misinformation and help reassure you that we have responded to the allegations to the fullest extent.”

Aldave wrote ten sentences in total. He did not reveal what law enforcement had discovered in responding to the case or who had been disciplined. He concluded the letter by encouraging parents to ​“speak to your child about the importance of responsible social media use, as well as school safety.”

Students on site directed this reporter to a public Instagram account with the handle ​“spilltea.203,” which contains some screenshots of explicit texts and statements of solidarity with targets of the harassment. Another post suggests the account was temporarily disbanded four days ago.

Jasmine Reed, whose daughter as well as her daughter’s niece, named A’Niyah, attend Eli Tech, was one of numerous parents and students to tell the Independent that the alleged harasser was suspended for two weeks at the beginning of October. They said that the principal told them during the private meeting Tuesday night that Hamden police performed an investigation into the matter, and that he repeatedly told them the student ​“is not a pedophile,” citing misinformation spread over social media. The principal denied at the meeting that A’Niyah or anyone else had been suspended, except for two students who allegedly pulled a fire alarm during the walkout, according to another parent present at Tuesday’s meeting.

However, Reed, who is a special education paraprofessional in New Haven, reported that A’Niyah was temporarily kicked out of school — which, according to Reed, was a punishment for telling the alleged harasser that if he tried to harm anyone again, ​“something’s gonna happen to you.”

After the all-day walk-out and demands from parents to find out what was really going on in the school, Principal Carlos Aldave announced that he would hold the conversation Tuesday night at 6 p.m. to fill them in.

The media was not permitted to enter the school building during the time of the meeting.

Around 7:30 p.m., parents began storming out of the Hamden school, calling the principal ​“a fucking liar” and criticizing the event, which included about 40 parents and 20 students. About 15 minutes later, two police cars arrived on the scene.

When concerned parents walked into the conference shortly before 5 p.m., they were looking for ​“the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” as mom Latoya Glasper put it.

An hour and a half later, parents said that not a single one of their questions was answered. They said they left with even more questions.

Andrea Hutchinson reported that during the meeting, parents primarily asked why the alleged harasser is still in school and how the school plans to protect students from similar harassment moving forward. Parents said the principal continued to say that the matter had already been taken care of, without providing details.

Joe Ely, 17, made it to the microphone to talk about an experience in which a friend told him she was raped her freshman year. Parents said they wondered: How many times had serious assaults happened to their kids in the past years? Why did so few of the parents know about it? How is it systematically being taken care of?

“They don’t want people to know what’s going on. Well it’s too late now!” said sophomore Kayla Blue, who said one of her friends had been the target of sexual and unwanted texts from the student who had returned to school.

What would make her feel safe? ​“To have him out!” she said.

“They tried to sweep it away. They tried to keep it hush hush,” Ely said of both the alleged rape and the recent outcry over continued sexual harassment.

Three years ago, Ely, then a 14-year-old freshman, called his own meeting with the principal (who was not, at that point in time, Principal Aldave), he said.

Ely said he told him what had happened the previous day: He was in the boy’s bathroom and saw ​“the toes of the shoes” of a girl on her knees in one of the stalls. He thought nothing of it, until he saw the girl — a person whom he described as always ​“bubbly” and someone who ​“always make you happy,” — come back to class from the bathroom looking ​“off,” with her clothes disheveled.

“Are you OK?” he asked her. ​“Yeah, I just need some water,” she said. A few hours later, he said she texted him a graphic description of the assault she had experienced earlier that day, looking for support and someone to tell the story to. The girl, like Ely, was also a freshman, and the person who assaulted her a senior.

Joe’s adoptive mother teared up remembering how her son handled the situation. She recalled him coming home and telling her: ​“A girl was raped, and I knew she was raped, mom.”

After he approached the principal about the problem, they referred him to the state police. ​“They went through my son’s phone,” Lynn Ely said.

Joe Ely said he doesn’t remember any public or intra-school response from the administration; there was never an announcement, he said, about what had happened, and the incident lived on ​“through gossip.” The girl never returned to school. He said that she texted him a month later to tell him: ​“My mom doesn’t think it’s safe for me to go to that school anymore.”

Ely said the problem is that kids, primarily young girls, are placed in situations with inherently disparate power dynamics. They go to school with men who are older and stronger than they are, and they are too embarrassed due to societal stigma to go to an unapproachable administration to tell them what happened. They are consistently not taken seriously because of their age, he maintained.

Parents said they were looking for information and possible solutions on Tuesday with the understanding that issues of sexual assault and harassment can be misconstrued, especially when they’re being discussed via social media. But the meeting, and the fact that the press was barred from entering a conversation that was originally said to be an open community forum, convinced them that the school administration is looking to keep things quiet.

Now Hutchinson said she is planning to start a petition to reinstate A’Niyah — though the principal reportedly said she was never suspended, according to parents — and to get the boy kicked out.

Reed argued it was A’Niyah’s right to ​“stand up” to the kid the way she did, given the context. Other parents said they fear their own kids wouldn’t tell them about what was happening or whether or not anything had happened to them, Reed said she seeks to create a safe and open relationship with her daughter to ​“break the generational curse” of over disciplining and not listening to children. ​“We have self-care Saturdays,” she said, and the two get matching haircuts at the barbershop every week.

That’s part of the reason, she said, her daughter, who is 15, and A’Niyah, who is 17, came to her and admitted that they had confronted the boy. They worry about sexual violence regularly occurring in their school, she said.

Hutchinson told the Independent that kids were locked out of the school and prohibited from using transportation to get to their homes if they participated in the protest.

Parents whose children had to walk home from school said it was unacceptable that they would be denied regular government-funded transportation home, especially when they were protesting a boy following them during their usual pathway home and reportedly taking pictures of their houses.

Principal Aldave did not respond to a message asking for confirmation regarding those allegations — or any others.

“If we have to pull our own kids out, we’re going to!” Hutchinson remembered several parents telling Aldave, herself included.