An Open Letter to [Redacted] Township School District

Companion articles: This open letter accompanies The Shift They Taught Him and The Body Keeps the Receipts, which document the narrative and neurobiological mechanisms behind the school safety failures and institutional betrayal described here.

Editorial & Transmittal Note: The following formal instrument of inquiry and records audit was transmitted directly to the designated statutory officers of the school district on September 27, 2026. Non-author personal identifiers, administrative email addresses, and specific municipal designations have been redacted for public publication.

September 27, 2026

To:

[Redacted]
District Anti-Bullying Specialist
[redacted]

Dr. [Redacted]
District Anti-Bullying Coordinator and Director of Special Services
[redacted]

[Redacted] Township School District

Subject: Institutional accountability for peer violence and the school’s treatment of the targeted child

Mr. [Redacted] and Dr. [Redacted],

I am Ekewaka Lono, a former student of Central School and [Redacted] Middle School. I am requesting a substantive institutional review of the district’s handling of sustained bullying, retaliatory group violence, removal from ordinary classroom participation, public psychological intervention, and a subsequent coordinated physical assault involving repeated head trauma during approximately 1988–1992.

I am addressing you jointly in your published roles as District Anti-Bullying Specialist and District Anti-Bullying Coordinator and Director of Special Services.¹ This inquiry requires the district to examine its disciplinary decisions, classroom placements, psychological referrals, response to injury, and educational decisions together. Dr. [Redacted], your combined responsibilities make your direct involvement essential to that review.

The central question is what the school’s own actions taught the students involved about who could be targeted, who would be protected, and who would bear the consequences. After peers attacked me, the school removed me from ordinary classroom participation and placed me in the library. The school psychologist subsequently retrieved me publicly from the cafeteria. When I later returned to school visibly injured after repeated blows to the head, administration chastised me for having “attended the fight.” The district must examine what those decisions communicated to aggressors and bystanders, what they did to my standing among peers, and what they taught me about myself.

The district has formally supported an approach to bullying that takes those social signals seriously. On April 16, 2012, the Board of Education unanimously approved [Redacted] Middle School’s participation in Princeton University’s Roots Program for the 2012–2013 school year. The district’s description of that program emphasizes changing students’ perceptions of “acceptable and desirable behavior” and understanding their “social worlds.” Research from the Roots project demonstrated that visible action by influential students can change perceived norms and school conflict.²

I am asking the district to apply that understanding to its own conduct. Did the school’s interventions ratify and strengthen the peer hierarchy it was responsible for disrupting? The records requested below are evidence for that inquiry.

The following is my account of what I experienced and remember.

Beginning in fourth grade at Central School, another student subjected me to sustained verbal abuse. He attacked my parents, my family, my character, and my future. He told me I would grow up to become a mass murderer. The pattern continued through fifth grade: provoke me, observe my distress, dismiss the conduct as “just kidding” or “can’t you take a joke?”, and escalate. My distress became material for further abuse.

The classroom teacher was aware of at least some of this conduct. It continued. By fifth grade, I was already selling myself short and beginning to understand repeated mistreatment as evidence that something was wrong with me. The pattern had become part of my school life.

In sixth grade, I was again placed in a class with the same student, and the attacks on my family resumed. After renewed provocation, I told him to “get a new father.” I knew his father was dead; the statement was cruel.

The vice principal’s questioning centered on establishing my knowledge and intent. I denied knowing. He invoked our shared fourth-grade classroom history to challenge that denial. The institution brought the earlier classroom into the discussion to establish what I knew, but the sustained abuse in that classroom did not receive comparable attention.

That selective use of history requires an answer. What had the teacher observed? What information reached the middle school? What investigation examined the relationship that preceded the remark? The responsibility for assembling that history belonged to the adults who taught, supervised, and disciplined the children involved.

Shortly after the vice-principal encounter, a group of students attacked me in the middle-school hallway in retaliation for the dead-father remark. They were physically punishing me for what I had said. The school now faced group violence against a child whose prolonged victimization it had already failed to stop.

After that attack, the school removed me from ordinary classroom participation and placed me in the library with another student whom I understood to have behavioral problems. The aggressor group remained part of the ordinary peer environment. I became the child taken out of class and managed elsewhere. The school had separated someone; the separation fell on me.

The school psychologist subsequently came into the cafeteria during lunch and retrieved me in front of my peers. The cumulative sequence was visible: disciplinary attention directed at me, retaliation against me, removal of me from class, and public psychological intervention directed at me. The child who had been attacked was now the child visibly singled out for correction, relocation, and psychological attention.

Adults’ treatment of a child supplies information that peers use to judge that child. A longitudinal study of 1,420 fifth-graders found that negative teacher behavior toward a student predicted later perceptions that the teacher disliked that student, which in turn predicted greater peer disliking.³ That finding puts the school’s visible treatment of a targeted child squarely within an anti-bullying review.

Apply that concern to this chronology. What did the school do to restore my standing, establish that I was entitled to protection, and confront the students who had attacked me? What did its actions teach bystanders about defending me? What consequences did the aggressors see imposed on their own conduct? Removing the target from ordinary participation has a social meaning that the district must address alongside the placement’s administrative purpose.

The justification for the hallway attack also matters. Research with children aged ten to fourteen found that moral justification and blaming the victim were associated with bullying, and that blaming the victim was associated with less defending.⁴ Here, the remark had become the basis for collective physical retaliation. The school’s subsequent treatment placed the visible burden of adjustment on the child who had been attacked. Explain how that response challenged the group’s claim that I deserved punishment.

The manner of the psychological referral belongs in the same inquiry. A systematic review of school mental-health interventions identified students’ selection for services and the visibility of their contact with those services as sources of stigma.⁵ In my case, public retrieval followed group retaliation and removal from ordinary class. The district needs to explain what the psychologist was told about the bullying and assault, why the retrieval occurred that way, and how the school addressed the peer environment producing the distress. Effective support requires discretion and action against the conduct injuring the child.

The psychological damage was profound. The message I received from the school was that the problem requiring correction was me. Suicidal ideation began during this sixth-grade period. The institution’s repeated focus on my words, my distress, and my management taught me to turn the explanation for mistreatment inward. I carried that judgment for decades.

Research on students entering middle school identifies a reciprocal relationship between victimization and the belief that something fundamentally wrong with oneself explains being targeted.⁶ That is the psychological process I am asking the district to examine in its handling of me: how an adult response becomes a child’s explanation of why he is being harmed. The institutional contribution to that belief belongs in the district’s account of what its interventions accomplished.

In seventh grade, I was subjected to a coordinated physical assault. The beating was coordinated on a school bus loudly enough to be within the driver’s hearing. Under peer coercion, I went to the designated location, walking there with another student. The location was the playground at [Redacted] Elementary School, another school in the district.

Once there, I was attacked. From the outset, I took full-force blows to my body and head without fighting back. I remained noncombatant throughout the beating.

Partway through, an older, higher-status peer arrived and gave me an ultimatum: “Fight him or fight me.” I refused. I specifically remember him then looking over and nodding to the assailant. The beating continued. I kept taking repeated blows to the head without fighting back, seeing stars from the impacts.

The next morning, I arrived at school with visible facial bruising. A teacher saw my injuries and sent me to administration. I received no nursing assessment or medical evaluation of the head trauma and no protective intervention. Administration chastised me for having “attended the fight” and sent me back to class.

I had gone to the location under coercion. I had taken the blows without fighting and had refused the older peer’s explicit demand to fight. The administration’s characterization collapsed those facts into a judgment about my presence. It treated a coordinated, one-sided beating as a mutual event and made being there the conduct requiring correction. The coercion, the older peer’s ultimatum, the continued blows, and my head injuries demanded attention in their own right.

The physical facts were repeated blunt-force impacts to my head, seeing stars as I was struck, and facial bruising visible the next morning. The school had an injured child before it. Its response left the head trauma medically unexamined and returned me to ordinary school life with the blame placed on me.

The district must account for what the teacher reported, what administrators asked and recorded, whether any nursing assessment or medical referral was arranged, whether my parents were contacted, and what action addressed the assailant, the older peer’s involvement, the coordination on school transportation, and the assault on a district playground. Identify the injury and referral procedures in force at the time and explain the response against those procedures.

The educational consequences also require an account. The district had identified me for gifted programming in fourth grade. After the beating, my grades declined, and within a year I was moved from the honors English track into general education. What assessment examined the sustained victimization and head injuries as explanations for that change in performance? What support addressed those conditions before the district changed my academic placement?

The repeated institutional pattern is clear. In sixth grade, attention centered on what I had said. In seventh grade, after repeated head trauma, it centered on why I had been there. The question the adults repeatedly failed to resolve was: why were these children doing this to me, and what were the adults doing to change that environment?

That pattern also demands an examination of the additional harm inflicted by the institution’s response. Research on institutional betrayal addresses how institutions compound harm through their treatment of people dependent on them for safety.⁷ The school controlled classrooms, placement, supervision, discipline, psychological referrals, communication with parents, and access to medical assessment. Its decisions carried authority. They shaped both the environment in which I was being harmed and my understanding of whether I deserved protection.

Please conduct a coordinated review through the district’s anti-bullying and student-services functions and answer the following questions in writing:

1. What happened to the history of sustained bullying? Identify what staff knew, what they documented or communicated, and what the vice principal considered when invoking the fourth-grade relationship. Explain how the earlier abuse was investigated and addressed, and why the institutional attention described here centered on my reaction.

2. What response followed the retaliatory hallway attack? Identify the investigation, action concerning the attackers, parent contact, supervision, and measures against further retaliation. Explain how the response established my right to safety and challenged the attackers’ justification for violence.

3. Why was I removed from ordinary classroom participation? Identify who authorized the library placement, its educational, protective, or psychological rationale, its duration, the instruction provided, and the criteria for returning me to class. Explain why the separation fell on me and address its effect on belonging and peer status, including the significance of placing me with a student understood to have behavioral problems.

4. What was the basis and manner of the psychological intervention? Identify the referral’s initiator, the history supplied to the psychologist, parental involvement, and the reason for retrieving me publicly from the cafeteria. Explain what action accompanied the referral to address the aggression causing the distress.

5. What did the school’s differential treatment communicate? In light of the Board’s April 16, 2012 approval of participation in Roots and the district’s stated focus on students’ perceptions of acceptable behavior, assess the social signals in this chronology.² Address aggressor legitimacy, victim blaming, bystander defense, my standing among peers, and the perceived consequences of attacking me. Did the school’s treatment of me strengthen the hierarchy it was responsible for confronting or reduce the perceived cost of further aggression? Identify the actions and evidence supporting the district’s assessment.

6. What happened after the seventh-grade assault and head injuries? Account for the coordination on the bus, my coerced attendance and walk with a peer to the [Redacted] Elementary School playground, my refusal to fight, the older peer’s “fight him or fight me” ultimatum, and the continued beating after my refusal. Address the repeated head impacts, seeing stars, visible facial bruising, and return to class without medical evaluation. Explain how the characterization “attended the fight” accounted for those facts, and identify the medical, protective, disciplinary, and reporting actions taken under the procedures then in force.

7. What safeguards would govern this sequence today? Explain how the district preserves a targeted child’s protection and the history of victimization when addressing a retaliatory remark; investigates subsequent group retaliation; distinguishes protective separation from punishment and stigmatizing exclusion; delivers psychological support discreetly; and responds to visible injuries after an assault. Identify how it assesses the effects of its own interventions on peer behavior and the targeted child’s standing.

8. What does the district conclude about its institutional contribution to the harm described here? Address the repeated displacement of attention from aggression to the targeted child, the psychological consequences of that treatment, the continuing vulnerability reflected in the seventh-grade assault, and the response to my subsequent academic decline and change in placement. State what the district acknowledges about its handling of me and what changes in staff training, referral practice, or oversight follow from the review.

To support that work, please search for and provide surviving records concerning me at Central School and [Redacted] Middle School during approximately 1988–1992, together with records concerning the assault at the [Redacted] Elementary School playground. Include cumulative pupil records; teacher observations and anecdotal records; disciplinary and administrative files; guidance, psychological, and referral materials; nursing and health records; transportation and school-grounds incident reports; parent communications; academic assessments and placement decisions; and records maintained separately from the central pupil file. The search should cover the preceding bullying, the vice-principal encounter, the hallway attack, the library placement, the cafeteria retrieval, the seventh-grade assault and injuries, and the subsequent change in my academic placement.

Please also locate the historical policies, Board resolutions, and procedures governing permitted pupil records, transfer of relevant information between schools, recurring peer aggression, classroom removal, psychological referral, transportation reporting, injury assessment, parent notification, and record retention or deletion. The pupil-record framework in force during this period distinguished mandated from permitted records and provided for annual review and deletion of permitted information that no longer described the pupil or educational situation.⁸

For records that cannot be located, identify the repositories and categories searched and the applicable retention or disposition authority. Distinguish records never created, records deleted during annual review, records subsequently destroyed under retention procedures, and records whose history the district cannot determine. Explain the basis for each conclusion. The absence of an individual file today does not answer the professional questions about the school’s response.

Please preserve this correspondence and responsive materials. Dr. [Redacted], please coordinate the substantive review with Mr. [Redacted] and the Superintendent, including the district’s psychological and school-health functions, and arrange the records search with the Custodian of Public Records. Confirm who will prepare the response and provide a timetable for a substantive written answer addressing the eight questions, the search results, and the district’s conclusions about its own conduct.

The adults had authority over the environment in which I was being harmed. Their decisions carried consequences for the peer group and for my life. I am asking the district to account for those decisions and those consequences directly.

Sincerely,

Ekewaka Lono

Endnotes