UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, November 21, 1996
7A
Harassed gay student accepts settlement
School officials failed to protect pupil from abuse
The Associated Press
EAU CLAIRE, Wis. — Because he is gay, Jamie Nabozny was regularly spat on and beaten up in school, subjected to a mock rape and kicked in the belly so many times he needed surgery.
Yesterday, Nabozny, now 21,
accepted a $900,000 settlement, ending
the first federal trial of a school
district for not protecting a gay
student from harassment.
The settlement was announced one day after a jury found that three school administrators in the Ashland school district violated Nabozny's rights by failing to protect him from years of gay-bashing. The jury had been scheduled to begin considering how much to award him in damages yesterday.
The verdict marked the first time school officials ever have been held liable for anti-gay violence against a student, said Peg Byron, public education director for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay-rights organization that represented Nabozny.
"I think this will send a very clear message to school districts," Nabozny said. "It is time it's
Nabozny said the gay-bashing started when he entered Ashland Middle School in 1988 and continued until he dropped out of Ashland High School as a junior in 1993.
stopped."
He said it ranged from name-calling to being shoved, beaten, spat on and even having his head pushed in a urinal and being urinated upon.
He recounted how boys in an eighth-grade science class pushed him to the ground and pretended to rape him. He said he was kicked in the stomach so many times during the years that he required surgery.
His parents said the abuse continued even after they had many meetings with school officials.
A former classmate, Roy Grande,
"I think this will send a very clear message to school districts."
Jamie Nabozny Gay bashing victim
testified that he and others beat and taunted Nabozny because he was girlish.
Nabozny's lawyers used Grande's testimony in an effort to show that school officials weren't consistent in punishing students for harassing others. Grande was suspended for violations such as calling his girlfriend names, yet he was never punished for tormenting Nabozny.
The jury ruled against Middle School Principal Mary Podlesny and two high school administrators, Principal William Davis and Assistant Principal Thomas Blauert.
Timothy Yanacheck, an attorney for the district, said the three were hurt by the verdict.
"They continue to believe that they responded appropriately to the plaintiff based on the limited information that they had available at the time," Yanacheck said. "School administrators are sympathetic to kids who are harassed by other kids in school. But for the most part that's misbehavior that school administrators cannot prevent or control."
Nabozny earned a general equivalency degree after leaving the Ashland schools, but said he hoped to still get a diploma so he can hold an unofficial graduation ceremony.
"It's something I was denied, something my parents were denied," he said.
Ashland, a town of 8,000 people, is in far northern Wisconsin on the shore of Lake Superior, about 65 miles east of Duluth, Minn.
Mudslide wreaks havoc on Oregon community
The Associated Press
UMPQUA, Ore. — Rain had been falling hard in the narrow canyon for two days. When the school bus dropped his son and daughter at the bottom of Rock Creek, Rick Moon's hands were so cold he couldn't write the note to show he had collected the children safely.
Moon and his neighbors had been working for hours on Monday to clear a small mudslide that had partially blocked Hubbard Creek Road, a two-lane road that was the main artery through the canyon.
Moments later, just after Moon climbed the hill to his house to change his sodden clothing, another slide roared through the forest, so big it snapped towering Douglas firs and rolled boulders like pebbles, so big it smeared his house and four lives against the side of the canyon.
The wall of mud, rocks and logs killed Moon, 46; his wife, Susan, 44; a visiting neighbor, Sharon Marvin, 40, and a family friend walking up the gravel road, 40-year-old Ann Maxwell.
The Moons' children, Rachelle, 16, and Justin, 13, survived, as did a 70-year-old newspaper carrier who was swept away in the mud and pinned beneath a tree.
"It's hard to comprehend losing four friends," a hollow-eyed Jeff Orr said a day later as rain bounced off his green slicker and broad-brimmed hat and soaked a Rottweiler-mastiff puppy at his side. He stood near the spot where he had found Rick Moon's body, swept half a mile down the canyon.
Back in 1972, when they were all in their 20s, Orr and the Moons got together with Sharon and Gordon Marvin and Todd Corbett to buy 160 acres along Rock Creek. They called it Stump Acres. They built rustic, rough-sawn cabins and tilled fertile gardens.
Susan Moon was a nurse at a Roseburg hospital. Rick Moon was taking courses for a new job with a computer company. Sharon Marvin was a homemaker.
Orr, a former paramedic, is working toward a new career in wildlife management. Corbett is also a nurse; he had become best friends with Ann Maxwell at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Roseburg, where Corbett cared for Maxwell's husband.
The canyon where these friends lived is one of southwestern Oregon's isolated pockets, 12 miles and a one hour bus ride to school in Roseburg. The canyon had a peaceful beauty made of running water, low ferns and towering firs.
Late Monday afternoon, retired baker Arnold Ryder was delivering the Roseburg newspaper, The News-Review, up Hubbard Creek the way he did every day. He was taking it easy because of the heavy rain.
At the end of his route, his small car got stuck on Hubbard Creek Road. Orr, the nearest customer, tried to help, but they couldn't work the car loose. From Orr's house, Ryder called his wife to send a tandu truck.
Meanwhile, Rick Moon had gone up along Rock Creek to his house, and Justin had come down to help Corbett try to clear the mudslide. Orr was working to divert the muddy water that was slicing down his driveway and digging ruts around his house.
As Ryder walked back to his car, he heard Corbett vell.
"I heard him holler to the little boy to run! run! run! I heard four or five of those great big trees crack and a big roar like a freight train, and that was it," Ryder recalled from his hospital bed.
"I grabbed a tree and hung onto it. It was too much. Down over the hill I went, praying all the way."
The mud carried Ryder 50 feet down the hill. He managed to free his upper body, but one leg was pinned.
Officers suffer effects of scandal
Argument sheds light on fighter pilot club
The Associated Press
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — In Air Force parlance, Lt. Col. Shelley Rogers was a "fast burner," an F-15 pilot promoted quickly and given choice assignments. Lt. Julie Clemm had begun a promising career in intelligence.
Both have watched their careers ruined by charges, since dropped, that they had an affair a year ago while the 90th Fighter Squadron, under Rogers' command, was on patrol above Bosnia.
Rogers and Clemm say they are the victims of a jealous second-in-command who sexually harassed Clemm, performed poorly for Rogers and then saw a way out of his trouble by linking them in a career-ending scandal.
Their accuser, Maj. Michael Cloutier, says Clemm came on to him even while having an affair with her commander.
Exactly whose story is closer to the truth may be less important than its effect on the three careers involved and the light it has shed on a fighter-pilot club called the Command Barstoolers Association, an organization reportedly given to fraternity drinking and miscellaneous hell-raising.
Rogers was found guilty of disorderly conduct (he drunkenly walked on top of several cars outside a pub) and having an unprofessional relationship with a subordinate.
charges heard.
At Rogers' court-martial at Elmendorf Air Force Base in September, Rogers' lawyer argued that Cloutier relied in part on his clout as a member of the barstoolers to get his
An adultery charge was dropped for lack of evidence.
He lost his command and four months' pay, about $16,000, and was reprimanded.
The Barstoolers are a semi-secret group of active and retired fighter pilots, all men, who gather annually in Nevada for a weekend of drinking, golf and carousing. Formed in the 1950s as a way for Korean War veterans to keep in touch, the association has about 1,000 members and chapters at Air Force bases around the world.
Members keep in touch with a newsletter, the Drink Booze News, which chronicles their drinking and other antics.
New members must be nominated by current ones, and Cloutier has sponsored several officers at Elmendorf.
The nomination letters can be profane, with an emphasis on drinking, anatomy and sexual prowess.
The Stooler Salute is a raised middle finger.
The Barstoolers in some ways resemble the Tailhook Association, the group of Navy and Marine aviators who held a 1991 convention in Las Vegas where several women were groped and otherwise harassed.
That scandal led to dozens of reprimands and destroyed several careers.
Air Force officials say they are powerless to control the Barstoolers since it is a private club.
And although the Elmendorf chapter meets in the base officer's club, no laws have been broken so nothing can be done to prohibit the gatherings.
Buttestimony of sometimes crude behavior by the 90th Fighter Squadron's pilots in Italy, including a "mooning" along a country road, drew an unusual response from the general who oversees the Pacific Air Force.
Gen. John G. Lorber has ordered all officers under his command to hold meetings to discuss the Air Force code of conduct.
In an Oct. 2 memorandum, the general, himself a former Barstooler, said some members of the 90th "conducted themselves as though they were in a wild fraternity, totally out of control with no mature supervision."
He went on to suggest that standards of behavior have changed since the 1970s, when "we were not a world-class Air Force." Lorber was criticized for that comment and later apologized to veterans who served in the '70s.
"If lewd behavior and debauchery in an Air Force squadron shocks you, then you are part of the team," the memo said. "If it doesn't, then it's time you look for another profession. Our Air Force today does not tolerate such behavior, nor should it."
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