Public schools have experienced a major increase in sexual abuse over the past decade, according to a recent report by the Defense of Freedom Institute (DFI), which blames the rise on local, state, and federal officials not doing enough to hold perpetrators accountable.
In many cases, agreements between school districts and teachers unions even promote hiding records of misconduct and sexual assault, DFI says.
The DFI report (pdf), titled “Catching the Trash,” is based on federal data from 2015 to 2018 for over 97,000 schools across the United States. Researchers found a 74 percent increase in rape or attempted rape at these schools.
“This report uncovers failures at every level to protect students from sexual abuse in public K–12 schools,” said Bob Eitel, DFI president and co-founder, in a statement. “What’s most shocking is the lengths to which teacher union leaders will go to protect their members suspected of abusing students and the number of states that have ignored their ESEA ‘pass the trash’ obligations.”
Local education agencies and unions use collective bargaining and nondisclosure agreements to hide the records of abusive employees, the report says, adding that union leaders use their influence in many state legislatures to lobby against measures that would hold perpetrators accountable.
Abuse Reports Increased
For the 2015–16 school year, the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection reported 9,649 incidents of sexual violence. In the 2017–18 school year, there were 13,799 incidents, a 43 percent increase in cases reported.
From 2010 to 2019, complaints to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights about sexual assault in K–12 schools more than tripled, according to the report.
Despite the fact that schools are mandated by law to investigate sexual abuse and to notify parents or document the investigation in the employee’s personnel file, very few follow through to hold the teacher accountable, which leads to passing the teacher to another school, the report said.
The practice is dubbed “passing the trash.”
The report aims to do three things: 1) assess sexual abuse policies at the state and federal level that allow for “passing the trash” in K–12 schools, with a focus on three key players—public school administrators and school district officials, teachers unions, and federal officials; 2) look at how the current system leads to a breakdown in accountability; and 3) propose strategies to overcome bureaucratic inaction and union obstruction at the state and federal levels.
There are attitudes and silent agreements that allow for the “passing of the trash,” or not taking action against perpetrators of sexual abuse at all.
According to the DFI report, incomplete background checks, the failure to share information between school districts, and collective bargaining agreements are all key contributors to the problem.
The DFI report cites the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) 2010 report on sexual abuse (pdf), which further illuminates why administrators resort to “passing the trash.”
According to the DFI report, one public school administrator told GAO that “it could cost up to $100,000 to fire a teacher, even with ‘a slam dunk case.’” Other officials told GAO that “depending on the terms of a separation agreement, school administrators may not be able to provide anything less than a positive recommendation for an employee for fear of a potential lawsuit.”
In spite of mandatory reporting laws that require school employees in certain capacities to report any suspicion of abuse, research has shown that teachers and other school employees report their colleagues to law enforcement or child welfare agencies in only about 5 percent of sexual abuse cases, the report said.
Past Efforts to Stop Abuse
Some of the more recent efforts by the federal government to stop the practice of “passing the trash” included former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos publishing Title IX regulations prohibiting sexual harassment, including sexual assault.
Prior to that in 2015, Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) introduced an amendment to Section 8546 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), requiring states to pass laws prohibiting school employees from “passing the trash.”
The Senate voted unanimously in favor of the amendment, making it law.
Despite these laws, few states and educational agencies complied with them for a variety of reasons, the main one being collective bargaining agreements. According to Toomey and Manchin, “three-quarters of all states have not yet enacted legislation while continuing to receive federal funding.”
In a letter to current U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Toomey and Manchin asked the department to provide answers regarding states’ inaction to protect students (pdf).
“This violation of the law must be addressed by the Department of Education immediately,” Toomey and Manchin said in the 2022 letter. “We must follow up with concrete action that starts with shielding students from predators in the classroom. … We urge the Department of Education to take immediate steps to ensure that all policies to protect children are enforced, including the ESEA’s prohibition on Aiding and Abetting Sexual Assault.”
The DFI report also asserts that the Department of Education has neglected to hold states accountable on this issue as part of its Title IX enforcement power.
“The absence of this information is a concern; it appears that, perhaps under pressure from teacher unions, state education agencies, and school districts, the Biden administration has silently delayed or even killed [the Department of Education’s] Title IX initiative announced in 2020,” states the report.
Reforms
The DFI report suggests reforms that could stop the cycle of “passing the trash” and finally hold perpetrators accountable and help stop sexual abuse in public schools. The reforms outlined would have to be carried out at the state and federal level.
Beginning with state legislatures, these state bodies need to create laws prohibiting secret agreements between school districts and public employees that prevent future supervisors from getting full records of the employee’s sexual misconduct. The prohibition would apply to provisions in collective bargaining agreements.
In addition, legislatures must create provisions that penalize school districts that knowingly assist perpetrators to find new jobs and also penalize those district employees that fail to report sexual misconduct by any other employee.
Beyond the state bodies, the Department of Education can reinstate the Trump administration’s Title IX policy, require that states comply with ESEA’s requirements, and withhold federal funding from states that do not follow the laws, the DFI suggests.
Congress can also do more to stop abusers moving from school to school.
The federal government should begin by passing a law that requires school districts to compile a report and inform teachers, parents, and students about sexual assaults each year, DFI says.
Congress should also “amend the ESEA to clarify penalties to be imposed upon states that fail to prohibit school personnel from aiding and abetting sex abusers in obtaining new employment, specifying a certain percentage of K–12 funding to be withheld for noncompliance.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.