Child Abuse Related Communications 
 
 
 
 Read a letter to the HM community (October 6, 2013) 
 
 Read a letter to the HM community (May 24, 2013) 
 
 Read a letter to the HM community from the Chair of the Board of Trustees of Horace Mann School (August 6, 2012) 
 
 Read a letter to alumni/ae (June 24, 2012) 
 
 Read a letter to alumni/ae (June 14, 2012) regarding the following: District Attorney Robert Johnson is encouraging anyone with information about possible inappropriate behavior by staff members at the Horace Mann School to come forward. Here’s how the report starts: 
 
 On November 5, 2011 Jerry Sandusky, a football coach at Pennsylvania State University, was arrested and charged with 40 counts of sexual abuse of young boys. There were few to no official records kept by the school and she was not given access to Mann’s archives or allowed to interview staff, she said.  As many as 64 students at an upscale Bronx prep school Horace Mann were abused by as many as 22 faculty and staff in a decades-long sex abuse scandal, according to an independent report released Wednesday. (James Keivom/New York Daily News) 
 
 l Included among the abusers — both men and women — were a headmaster, coaches, teachers, a school chaplain, a dean of guidance and department heads. Horace Mann is, of course, not the only school where students have been sexually abused by their teachers and coaches, but there are questions about what made Horace Mann such a fertile ground for so much abuse. I asked Marc Fisher, who said: 
 
 The school, which was all-male until 1975, was, like many independent schools in that era, something of a refuge for gay teachers who could not find work in the public schools.
– "There was this widespread assumption that if you put your child in a private school that they were in safer space." That's the reaction of a professor who consulted on a new independent report into sexual abuse at NYC's elite Horace Mann School—an investigation that found worse abuse than previously thought, per the Wall Street Journal. The report released yesterday by the Horace Mann Action Coalition, a nonprofit alumni group, says the probe found 64 students were victimized by 22 staff members from the 1960s through the 1990s, per the Washington Post. Abusers included teachers, coaches, department heads, a school chaplain, and even a headmaster, though a Coalition rep says "there was no broad conspiracy," rather, "lots of small cowardly decisions." The Bronx DA originally cited only 25 victims and 12 employees in a 2013 report, the Journal notes. The school (which, the Post notes, has posted letters about the ongoing scandal on its website) says it cooperated with earlier investigations, as well as apologized and reached settlements with some victims, per the Journal. But the attorney overseeing the new report says Horace Mann denied her access to the school's archives and employees, the New York Daily News reports. The report also says that the school pressured ex-students into accepting settlements, threatened retaliation for abuse reports, and didn't forward those claims to the police. "This report does make us feel we’ve been believed," says one alleged victim, "and it uncovers as much of the truth as could be uncovered given the obstacles that the school has put in the way."