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Old Allegations Rattle Pine Cobble SchoolStaff reports - February 15, 2008
WILLIAMSTOWN - Pine Cobble School is grappling with 20-year-old allegations against a well-loved alumnus and former teacher who volunteers at the private school.
Winsor Copeland was never charged but allegations that he molested one or more boys, dating back to the 1980s, resurfaced Thursday morning in an article in The Boston Globe.
Headmaster Nicholas Edgerton declined to comment on Thursday except to say the school was looking into the matter.
"I just saw the article this morning and we are trying to formulate a response," said Edgerton on Thursday.
James Briggs, president of the board of trustees, also said the matter was under review and declined further comment in an e-mail Friday morning.
According to The Globe, Copeland resigned from Indian Mountain School, a private junior prep school in Lakeville, Conn., in 1993 after the allegations were made. No charges were ever filed; according to police reports, the statute of limitations had run out.
Copeland has denied any wrongdoing and told The Globe that Pine Cobble, where his mother was once director, was aware of his reasons for leaving Indian Mountain. Edgerton, however, told The Globe, it was "news to me."
Copeland has been volunteering at the preschool-through-ninth-grade school since 2003, after years teaching overseas. Both Edgerton and Copeland told The Globe that Copeland has no contact with the students and that he works with alumni raising funds for the school. Copeland is listed as the agent for several classes on the school's Web site.
Last fall's Cobblestone, the school's newsletter, contains a laudatory article about his teaching years therewritten by a former student, saying, "Now a new generation of Pine Cobble students is under his influence."
The newsletter was removed from the school's Web site sometime today. |
I am a Pine Cobble parent with two children at the school. I don't know who at Pine Cobble, if anyone, knew of Winsor Copeland’s past, but I do know a tendentious hatchet job when I see one, and Kevin Cullen's Boston Globe article is one.
It is indeed tendentious to characterize someone as "quick to minimize" something unless you at least have some specific claim that that thing is not minimal. And it was dishonest for Cullen to excerpt three vague quotes from The Cobblestone ("a new generation of Pine Cobble students is under his influence" -- "[He's] back on campus, this time as a volunteer" -- and "Hearing the chatter of the students as they move from class to class") without including the one more specific quote which tends to support the claim, shared by Copeland and Nick Edgerton, that Copeland was there to raise funds and had nothing to do with the students: "I basically do whatever Sue Wells, the school’s Director of Development, asks me to."
Does Kevin Cullen believe Copeland has been doing any teaching or coaching, or otherwise working with students? Mr. Cullen goes out of his way to imply such activities, and to imply that Nick Edgerton is lying about them, but Cullen makes no such specific (and thus falsifiable) claim. Regardless of how this affair plays out, that makes Cullen a dishonest coward in my book.
I doubt very much that Copeland has been working with students. If he has, this fact would be known to the students and will become publicly known very quickly. It also would almost certainly have been mentioned in the 770-word article about him in The Cobblestone.
Finally, consider the quotes from the mother of the child who was reportedly abused by Copeland 25 years ago: "It's outrageous," the woman on the phone was saying. "Does anybody at Pine Cobble know what happened at Indian Mountain?" and "Either they don't know what happened, or they don't want to know what happened," she said.
Well, if they didn't know what happened, then Pine Cobble’s actions are not, in fact, outrageous. One thing these quotes, if accurate, tell us is that the woman never bothered to call Pine Cobble, but only the Boston Globe; if she had called Pine Cobble and they did nothing about it, then she would have solid grounds for considering the school’s actions “outrageous.”
I know that Pine Cobble does background checks on people who teach for them. It would perhaps be outrageous if they failed to do so. But I would not call them outrageous for failing to do this sort of thing for a volunteer alumni fundraiser, or a parent who wants to chaperone a field trip, or some other person whose contact with students is apt to be incidental or monitored – it’s hard enough to get such volunteers as it is without treating everyone like a criminal.
| | from: DWPittelli | on: 02-20-2008 |
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