Everitt Middle School in Jeffco has been under a lot of backlash due to a recent lawsuit against the district, claiming that school officials ignored serious reports of sexual assault/ harassment.

Although there is little information about this lawsuit, Milo Schwab, the attorney of the complainant, brings to light “ Slap ass Friday” and “Titty touch Tuesday”. Days in which students would approach their peers and touch them inappropriately without consent. Schwab claims that these actions were made aware to the school and they continued to be inattentive and failed to stop this conduct. While this lawsuit focuses on the  2016-2017 school year, it seems that this “trend” has been going on for a long time and even allegedly happened as recently as last year. 

Former students of the school also point to “causal rape culture” as a contributor to sexual assault and claim that the school’s staff was aware of inappropriate behavior and failed to enforce any type of effective punishment. 

Lili Gladitsch, current Wheatridge freshmen and former Everitt student said “ I don’t think the staff did a good job at making sure the ’titty touch Tuesday’ or ’slap ass Friday’ thing stopped. I remember they had some of the counselors come into our class and say to stop doing those things but it would still happen all the time and the teachers would see it happen and still wouldn’t do anything about it.” Gladitsch went on to add that she felt uncomfortable while these events were taking place and nobody took the situation seriously. 

` Gladitch’s fellow Everitt alumni, Josh Fernandez, shared this opinion about the non-consensual touching; saying “ People would do this with their friends and they were joking at first but then after a while, people would go up to random people and start touching them, and I think at that point it made some people uncomfortable. When it developed into a lot of different people feeling very uncomfortable the school finally said something but I really don’t think the teachers tried to make sure it wasn’t happening.” Fernandez said that he believed if the school had tried to hold students accountable then this behavior would’ve stopped. 

Both students say that the entire situation was normalized in their school setting and after interviewing eight additional former students it was made clear that the student population at Everett felt that the school wasn’t very diligent with holding people accountable for inappropriate behavior and making the school feel unsafe.

Despite the consensus of former students and Schwab, the district’s chief legal counsel Craig Hess, says “most if not all of the allegations have no merit.”. 

Wheatridge principal Josh Cooley says that although he doesn’t know much about the actual case, he hopes that if anybody at Wheatridge is currently dealing with any type of issues regarding sexual harassment they can talk with counselors and staff.