Washington Public Schools Know How to Prevent Sexual Abuse—But Many Choose Not To

This spring, the Washington Schools Risk Management Pool (WSRMP), which provides liability coverage to more than a third of the state’s school districts, stunned its members with an average premium increase of 45 percent. The primary driver: the rising cost of educator sexual misconduct claims. According to the Department of Education, Washington has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in K–12 schools nationwide.

The problem isn’t that Washington public schools don’t know how to prevent educator sexual misconduct. It’s that many are choosing not to—in part by participating in Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SB-SBIRT), a school-based behavioral health program implemented in more than 60 King County middle and high schools across 13 school districts. Seattle Public Schools is a major participant: SB-SBIRT operates in all 12 of the district’s comprehensive middle schools and nine of its high schools. Since its launch in 2018, the program has screened more than 75,000 students.

Originally concentrated in King County, SB-SBIRT has expanded to at least eight schools in Spokane County. This is cause for concern: not only do its standard operating procedures undermine WSRMP’s own guidance on sex-abuse prevention, but it also employs, for reasons of “equity,” unlicensed individuals as behavioral health “interventionists,” some of whom have criminal records.

Two legal developments also preceded the recent wave of multimillion-dollar settlements against Washington school districts, which precipitated WSRMP’s rate hike. First, in 2020, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in W.H. v. Olympia School District that school districts are strictly liable for employee sexual misconduct. Then, four years later, the state legislature expanded the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse claims.

WSRMP CEO Deborah Callahan has warned that the resulting rise in legal payouts and insurance premiums is unsustainable. But rather than calling for a plan to prevent sexual abuse in K–12 schools, she has recommended three reforms to reduce districts’ exposure: overturning W.H. v. Olympia School District, eliminating joint liability, and establishing a state compensation fund.

Yet Washington State knows what effective child abuse prevention looks like. State law, district policies, and WSRMP’s own resources provide clear guidance that aligns with federal standards and the recommendations of leading child abuse experts. Schools must recognize the signs of sexual grooming, intervene appropriately, and ensure that staff maintain clear professional boundaries. Staff should not single out students for special attention, meet alone with them out of the view of others, become confidants, disclose personal problems, or communicate beyond legitimate school business. By implementing these guidelines, youth-serving groups like the YMCA and Boy Scouts of America have successfully reduced the rate of sexual abuse within their organizations.

But many of the districts affected by rising civil claims—including those insured by WSRMP—continue to participate in SB-SBIRT, which flouts the state’s own guidance on preventing sex abuse.

According to Seattle Public Schools, schools participating in SB-SBIRT administer the controversial Check Yourself questionnaire to students in sixth through tenth grade, screening for psychological issues, substance use, “gender identity” confusion, and other “risk factors.” A “Prevention and Intervention (P&I) Specialist” then reviews the completed questionnaires and “connect[s] with students” whose responses indicate “a potential need” for “additional support.” Roughly half of all participants are flagged for a “brief intervention”: this involves one to eight “semi-structured” private “encounters” designed to establish the P&I specialist as the student’s “trusted adult.” In practice, these one-on-one meetings are often “ongoing,” according to the district.

Public descriptions of the P&I role are misleading. Grant documents state that the SB-SBIRT program “will be staffed by licensed behavioral health specialists.” However, SB-SBIRT team members often lack professional qualifications—though they are required to have “[k]nowledge of equity and social justice principles and practices,” according to one job posting. King County Ombudsman Jeremy Bell has defended the staffing model, arguing that SB-SBIRT should “reflect the community” it serves and citing a “pro-equity basis for not requiring specific licensure or clinical training.”

That “pro-equity basis” has inspired many poor policy and staffing decisions. Louis Eaglestaff, for example, has been arrested at least nine times (most recently in April 2026) and has multiple criminal convictions, primarily for drug- and alcohol-related offenses. In 2016, he also faced criminal charges for property destruction in a domestic-violence case. Eaglestaff is currently in his third year as a middle school P&I specialist.

Criminal records are not the only concern. Tavar Proctor previously worked as a P&I Specialist at Franklin High School, where he also coached basketball. His online presence raises serious questions about whether he was an appropriate candidate to work with adolescents—and whether schools are following recommended screening practices. WSRMP’s latest sexual abuse prevention guidance, obtained through a public records request, advises member districts to identify “trustworthy candidates” for “employees and high-access volunteers” by supplementing traditional hiring practices with “social media checks”—a “background screening solution” that compiles applicants’ “problematic online conduct,” including “sexually explicit material.” Yet Proctor’s public Instagram account, which is followed by high school students, is littered with explicit and disturbing content, including photographs of nude women, jokes about rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence, rank misogyny, and numerous posts expressing admiration for R. Kelly and Chris Brown. Internal emails between Seattle Public Schools administrators overseeing SB-SBIRT, obtained through a public-records request, document ongoing problems with Proctor’s conduct.

Asked about Eaglestaff and Proctor, a spokesperson for Seattle Public Schools told me that “the district conducted hiring due diligence consistent with its policies,” including background checks and criminal-history disclosure reviews, and “did not identify a basis that would have disqualified either individual from employment.”

Even leaving aside these dubious hires, the P&I specialist role itself appears to conflict with Washington’s sexual abuse prevention guidance. WSRMP calls “Special Relationships” between staff and students the “essence” of sexual grooming; SB-SBIRT calls them a “protective factor”—indeed, the “intended outcome” of its brief intervention. P&I specialists are expected to discuss “sensitive” and “uncomfortable” subjects with students during a brief intervention, including their Check Yourself responses about sexuality and who they are “most likely to have a crush on.” By contrast, WSRMP considers discussions of “sexual topics that are not related to a specific curriculum” an “inappropriate boundary invasion.” It also warns staff against disclosing personal information to students, while SB-SBIRT teaches specialists that “sharing a piece of themselves” helps “build trust and a sense of care.”

The program institutionalizes many additional behaviors that WSRMP and other Washington agencies recognize as common precursors to sexual abuse: SB-SBIRT staff may email and “text/chat/call” students through services such as Google Voice, pull them from class for private meetings, and “hang out” with them in peer-like settings.

In response to questions about oversight and accountability, Seattle Public Schools told me that SB-SBIRT staff “are supervised centrally through regular site visits and observations, with an assigned building administrator at each school for day-to-day support.” Yet the program appears to set few, if any, standardized safeguards for staff-student interactions, instead leaving participating districts to establish their own. An SB-SBIRT “Implementation Playbook,” for example, provides a sample system for tracking brief interventions but does not require its use, saying interventionists will “usually” report such data and instructing schools to determine how it will be documented.

Charol Shakeshaft, a leading researcher on educator sexual misconduct, told me that she is skeptical of SB-SBIRT’s emphasis on unstructured adult-student relationships, particularly when staff have criminal histories. “If we give a whole class of people ‘trusted adult’ status without guardrails, we’re asking for trouble,” she said.

In other states, that trouble has already come calling. Earlier this month, Virginia police charged an Albemarle County “social-and-emotional learning coach” with 11 felony counts of sexual abuse. The school-based behavioral health initiative that employed him closely resembles SB-SBIRT. Like P&I specialists in Washington, the coach in Virginia had broad access to students and was permitted to pull them from class for private meetings. Officials have identified at least four children as victims.

A spokesman for King County’s Department of Community and Human Services (DCHS), which oversees SB-SBIRT in the county’s public schools, broadly disputed the characterization that the program does not follow abuse-prevention best practices, emphasizing that “SB-SBIRT provides critical and life-saving mental health supports to young people,” and that all school district employees “are required to complete a background check prior to employment.”

There are two ways to reduce educator sexual misconduct litigation: make civil claims harder to bring or prevent abuse before it occurs. Doing the latter means teaching students, not just staff, to recognize grooming behaviors and boundary violations, ensuring member districts follow established safeguarding practices, and refusing to support programs that undermine those safeguards—such as SB-SBIRT.

The solution to Washington’s rising sexual-misconduct liability problems is fewer victims, not fewer lawsuits.