It's been nearly a year since the county's school investigators were labeled "amateur sleuths" by the lawyer who reviewed the system's mishandling of suspected child sex abuse cases involving employees.
In that time, school administrators have reorganized the division responsible for investigating claims of employee misconduct and named one person, Florence G. Bozzella, to handle cases instead of having three people do them. But the additional training promised for the employee investigator hasn't materialized.
Minimum qualifications for special assistants for investigative services, as the school system's internal investigators are called, include counseling skills and studies beyond qualifications for a basic teaching certificate. The special assistant must be able to handle a heavy caseload. Last year, a record 195 complaints were filed in cases of suspected child abuse or neglect involving an adult or school employee. So far this school year, 38 suspected child abuse and neglect cases have been investigated.
Mrs. Bozzella has a bachelor's degree in hearing and speech science and a master's degree in speech and language therapy. From 1979 to 1985, she was a speech and hearing therapist for the school system and was promoted in 1985 to the post of pupil personnel worker (PPW) -- a position that requires working with families of students who have problems in school and is a prerequisite for becoming a special assistant.
She has been a special assistant since 1991. Since the release of the so-called Baron report last year, she has attended two additional training courses, according to documents provided by the school system: one course titled "How to Conduct an Internal Investigation"; the other one on sexual harassment.
However, sexual harassment complaints made up fewer than one-sixth of the 78 cases of employee discipline investigated this year.
Mrs. Bozzella acknowledged that at this point, the additional training provided to her has been "very sketchy," and that she's "not been able to do as much as I would like to do."
At the time Mrs. Bozzella became a special assistant, most investigative cases involved alleged student misbehavior.
"And that was something I felt real comfortable with because I had a lot of experience as a PPW in conferencing with kids who had behavior problems," she said. "As the number of employee cases increased, sometimes I was sent out because I was the only female, or because I had a particular skill in a certain kind of situation, and before I knew it I was doing all of them."
But she said her experience as a pupil personnel worker and a teacher have prepared her for the job.
"When you're a PPW and you're working with families you're doing a lot of interviewing -- the parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters -- and you're trying to see what the problem was, what possible solutions there are," Mrs. Bozzella said. "Those were really good skills and in my mind I see the natural evolution of the skills that I've used.
"Certainly I'm not a trained investigator, but I am a trained educator and I have a lot of skills that tell me what is appropriate educational behavior and what isn't," she said.
Mark Black, the new supervisor of investigative services and employee records, said he is "confident about what our investigators can do already."
"We have affirmed in many incidents that our investigators independently came to the same conclusions as the police did in their own report," said Mr. Black, who holds another position recommended by the Baron report. "We are taking steps to meet the Baron report requirements."
To that end, the school system has invited the director for the Investigative Training Institute Inc. in Annapolis to conduct a seminar in January for Mrs. Bozzella and her counterparts in other school districts.
To make her job easier, the school system has written a new manual of teacher discipline that will be put to a pilot test in January by school principals, Mr. Black said.
"It will outline the progressive steps for discipline. They're nothing new, but we're just codifying them now," Mr. Black said. In February, he will meet with principals to make revisions.
"I don't think the extent of the problems -- either with the special assistants or within the system -- has turned out to be anything of the magnitude Baron made it out to be in his report," said Joseph Foster, a school board member.
Mr. Foster questioned how much more training a special assistant investigating adult behavior problems would need "because the type of misconduct we're looking into is in areas between what qualifies for a criminal conviction and what is acceptable behavior for an educator."
"I don't think they need the same kind of training as a police officer because the kind of investigation they're conducting isn't the same," he said.
The Baron report, named for independent legal investigator Alan I. Baron, criticized the school system for failing to intervene in complaints when other agencies did not act.
"There are numerous reasons why a matter is not pursued by the criminal justice system or DSS [the Department of Social Services] which have nothing to do with the merits of the allegation," the report said.
In 1985, for instance, a student claimed a teacher grabbed her genital area. Confronted by a special assistant, the teacher denied it.
The matter was dropped by the school system, but the child's parents contacted police.
The teacher later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges.
Under state law, the special assistant should have reported the case to social workers or police, instead of investigating at the behest of then-Deputy Superintendent C. Berry Carter II.
Responding to the criticism, the Board of Education has completed two of three investigations into allegations made against Northeast High School teachers who were acquitted by a jury.
Science teacher Laurie S. Cook, who was acquitted of one charge of child sex abuse, is now the subject of a dismissal hearing. The investigation of Charles A. Yocum, also accused of nTC child sex abuse and acquitted, is completed and he awaits a decision by the school superintendent about possible disciplinary action. The investigation of Thomas Newman, acquitted of child sex abuse, is pending.
Other Baron recommendations included training for students so they recognize when they are in danger of abuse and better tracking of employees transferred for disciplinary reasons -- two things Mr. Black said are being done.