Parents protested against the Prosper Independent School District on Monday over how district leaders dealt with allegations of child sexual abuse by a school bus driver earlier this year.
Kandia Chastain, the mother of three Prosper ISD students, helped organize the protest. She and others felt that school administrators and district officials should have notified parents about the alleged assaults much sooner than they did.
Now, parents are calling on them to step down as an independent investigation commissioned by the school board looks into the matter.
“We have been to the board meetings in the past, we have raised our concerns, we have emailed the board meeting, we have emailed the school principal who was in charge when this happened, and have not gotten anywhere,” said Chastain.
The incident Chastain referred to was the arrest and subsequent suicide of a district bus driver, Frank Paniagua, who was accused of sexually abusing two girls from a district elementary school more than 100 times in 2021.
He was arrested in May and charged with multiple child sex abuse crimes prior to killing himself.
Chastain stated, “The superintendent, the school principal, anyone who knew this, we are asking them to step aside while the investigation is resolved.”
A lot of the anger and frustration felt by parents over the district not being forthcoming stems from a fear that there could have been other victims.
“Why was I never contacted that my child could have potentially come into contact with a child molester?” stated one unidentified mother at a Prosper ISD school board meeting last month, per NBC 5.
She stated further, “Why was I never told any of these things? Don’t you feel like you have a personal responsibility to us as parents to know that our children could have come in contact with someone who could potentially hurt them?”