Tom Rawlings and I recorded a six-part podcast series for YSO Academy, and all six episodes are now available. The series is called “Cultivating a Culture of Safety.” If you advise youth-serving organizations, or if you are an administrator working through child protection policy development, this series covers the full process. The six episodes run…
Every incident report your organization files is a legal document, not potentially, not only if something goes wrong, but a legal document from the moment someone signs it. After three decades of advising youth-serving organizations through litigation, licensing investigations, and regulatory audits, I have seen more cases turn on the quality of an incident report…
Tuesday’s post on Doe v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University walked through what happens when an institution investigates itself amid structural pressures that make an objective result difficult to achieve. That case raises a question every youth-serving organization and its counsel eventually face: when allegations of misconduct arise, do you investigate internally, or do you bring…
On May 21, 2026, a federal district court allowed a former Virginia Tech student’s Title IX claims to proceed, after cataloguing a series of investigative and procedural failures that the court found raised a plausible inference of sex discrimination. The order is not a verdict. Virginia Tech may yet prevail. But the court’s detailed account of what…
How a youth organization responds to a parent complaint about staff can determine its legal exposure. Here is what the law requires.
A case from the New Jersey Supreme Court has some important lessons for youth organizations. The immediate issue involved defamation claims by a fired teacher against an Orthodox Jewish school. The trial court had concluded that resolution of the claims would require inquiry into the religious beliefs of the school and therefore the First Amendment…
When your youth organization faces allegations of serious injury or abuse, the first question you need to decide is whether to commission an internal investigation or an independent one. You will have to weigh several factors when deciding which is best. Internal Investigations – Some organizations faced with reviewing a child abuse claim prefer to conduct…
By now, most people have heard about the students from Covington Catholic High School, initially accused of harassing a Native American protestor at the end of the March for Life in Washington, D.C. A short clip of the encounter went viral, and a wave of criticism descended on the students. The school administration and the…
This post is part of a continuing series about responding to reports by a now-adult of past abuse at a youth-serving organization. The first post discussed general principles, and this one discusses first steps in an internal investigation. In many ways, the first 48 hours after you receive a report of historic abuse are the…
This post is part of a continuing series about responding to reports by a now-adult of past abuse at a youth-serving organization. The first few posts discussed general principles, first steps, and what not to say at the beginning of an investigation. This post discusses principles for interviewing the people involved. The most difficult and…