The University of Idaho announced policy changes regarding sexual misconduct reporting to align university policies with state policies and practice, according to an email memo sent to faculty and staff Monday.
The university will implement four changes in alignment with Title IX policies from the State Board of Education (SBOE) which were implemented August 2017.
“While we have been training to the standard, it was not reflected in our written policy,” president Chuck Staben wrote in the email. “It has been updated to comply with the SBOE policy.”
The state board policy requires all university employees who learn of a sexual misconduct allegation to notify the Title IX coordinator within 24 hours, so long as the employee is not required by law to maintain the confidentiality of the disclosure.
“It was an important change, but yet sort of a house keeping change to bring some of the things into line,” UI spokesperson Jodi Walker said. “This really doesn’t change anything of the reporting as university staff have been trained.”
Walker said the changes were already present in the training of university employees, including student employees, whom she said share the same mandatory reporting duty as employees. She said staff and faculty that are not required to report are typically medical or mental health professionals.
“This is an important issue to all of us,” Walker said. “I think each of us has a role to play in reporting and making sure that our students, as well as our faculty and staff, are in the safest environments and feel the most supported.”
Walker also said the memo is in response to an independent report released during the review of former Athletic Director Rob Spear’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations against a student-athlete in 2012.
Spear was terminated in August after reports surfaced he mishandled complaints of sexual misconduct by not contacting an independent investigator with the university.
The report, in addition to saying Spear “responded inadequately” to reports of sexual misconduct by two athletes, said the university bore some responsibility for his underreporting because policy changes about sexual misconduct reporting were “seriously under-promoted.”
In 2012, then-UI president Duane Nellis issued an emergency policy adding off-campus sexual harassment and violence to the university’s jurisdiction. But the change was only communicated via an email sent to university employees at the time, according to the report by independent investigators, published July 2018.
This communication, of only one email with notice of the policy change, did not highlight the rule change, resulting in faculty being “generally unaware of the change through 2013 and beyond,” according to the report.
Walker said the communication over the current sexual misconduct reporting policy changes are improved from the 2012 communications. This year’s policy change was communicated in a memo in addition to the one sent out last week giving a run-down of all policy changes to be implemented.
“We have, under the leadership of the president, created an atmosphere now where we want to better communicate that,” Walker said. “So this memo is the reflection of that.”
Kyle Pfannenstiel can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter: @pfannyyy.