Who Sleeps Where

The Harford Glen Policy That Exposed a Much Bigger Scandal

Bob Cassilly sent a letter to the Board of Education on April 6 that every parent in Harford County ought to read:

It’s about Harford Glen. If you’ve got kids in HCPS, you know the deal — every fifth grader goes out to the outdoor education center off Wheel Road for three days and two nights. It’s been running since 1980. Most parents remember it fondly.

But here’s what’s in the current parent handbook, buried in the “Attendance” section: “Lodging is established for students using their gender or gender identity.”

Read that again. A boy who says he identifies as a girl gets assigned to sleep in the girls’ cabin. These are ten-year-olds.

Cassilly’s letter flags the MSDE guidance behind the policy, which says “nonbinary and other gender expansive youth should be given a choice as to which housing assignment makes them feel most comfortable.” Great — so the gender-confused kid gets a choice. What about the thirty girls in the cabin who didn’t get one? Nobody at MSDE seems to have thought about that.

Cassilly also raises something I haven’t seen anyone else ask: high school kids work as counselors at Harford Glen. Does this policy apply to them too? Could you have an older teenager bunking with fifth graders of the opposite sex?

Moms for Liberty Harford County is all over this. They’re calling on parents to pack the April 20 Board meeting and give public comment. Good. Do it.

But I want to zoom out. Because this policy didn’t just fall out of the sky. It was adopted and enforced by a school system that has been failing our kids in ways most parents don’t even know about. And when you see the full picture, the Harford Glen sleeping arrangements start to look like the least of our problems.

I. The Whole House Fell Down

Before we get into the policy fight, you need to understand what happened to the people who were supposed to be in charge.

In January, HCPS lost its superintendent, its board president, and its deputy superintendent. All within 48 hours.

April 6, 2024 — Superintendent Sean Bulson calls 911 from the New Orleans Marriott at 2 in the morning. He’s there for a school board conference. He tells the operator a woman in a green dress got into his room and stole $8,000 worth of stuff — his wallet, a district laptop, iPad, two phones, an Apple Watch. Marriott security later finds everything in the room safe. No police report ever gets filed.

April 7, 2024 — Board President Aaron Poynton finds out. He tells nobody. For twenty months.

January 6, 2026 — FOX45 gets hold of the 911 audio and puts it on the air. Cassilly calls for Bulson to be fired that same day.

January 7 — Board puts Bulson on paid leave. Deputy Superintendent Eric Davis goes on leave too. Davis also happened to be the district’s Title IX Coordinator — the person responsible for making sure federal student protection laws are followed.

January 8 — Poynton resigns from the Board. Says he got a new job. The Inspector General’s report would later show he’d been sitting on the whole thing since April 2024.

February 2026— The Board finally votes 6-3 to end Bulson’s contract. They’re still paying him through June. Dr. Dyann Mack, a career HCPS administrator, steps in as interim superintendent while the district searches for someone permanent.

So let’s do the math on Harford Glen. The superintendent who adopted the gender identity lodging policy is fired. The Title IX coordinator is on leave. The board president who was supposed to provide oversight was running his own cover-up. And right now, the Board has multiple Cassilly appointees, an interim superintendent, and no permanent leadership in sight.

These are the people we’re trusting to keep our kids safe at overnight camp.

II. Predators in the Building

I wish the leadership implosion was the worst of it. It’s not even close.

John David Hobbs taught English at Bel Air Middle School. He started in 1998. In 1999, he took a 14-year-old student home and molested her. Then he came back to school on Monday and kept teaching. For twenty years. HCPS never caught him. The victim finally came forward in 2019. Police wired her for a phone call. Hobbs picked up and apologized. Said “I hate myself for” what happened. He pleaded guilty and got 18 months. Eighteen months for ruining a kid’s life and then hiding in plain sight for two decades.

Jaron Darden taught music at Edgewood Middle. He photographed a student’s body, put the pictures on a fetish site, and paid the student for sex. The charges: soliciting a minor, three counts of human trafficking.

Dominic LaFrancesca taught music at Lisby Elementary in Aberdeen. Arrested August 2024. Eleven counts. Child pornography depicting kids as young as one. He’d been a substitute at multiple HCPS schools before they made him full-time.

These are not rumors. These are arrests, charges, guilty pleas, and convictions. In our schools. With our kids.

In the 225-case study, every single accused educator admitted to the reported actions. Zero false allegations were documented.

— Dr. Charol Shakeshaft, DOE Report, 2004

And it goes back further than any of us realized. Under Maryland’s Child Victims Act, at least ten people have now filed lawsuits against the Harford County Board of Education for sexual abuse. The oldest allegations go back to 1981. Grooming. Rape. Forced sexual contact. By teachers, aides, bus drivers. One family says the school district made them sign a gag order.

When the Board’s lawyers responded, they didn’t just deny it. They blamed the victim. The actual language in their filing: “nowhere in the Complaint does Plaintiff allege that [the accused] forced Plaintiff to engage in sexual activity.” In other words: the child didn’t fight back hard enough, so it’s partly her fault. The Maryland Supreme Court shot that argument down, 4-3, in 2024. The cases are going forward.

III. They Can’t Even Run a Background Check

You’d think after all of that, HCPS would at least make sure they’re not hiring criminals to be around children. You’d be wrong.

FOX45’s Project Baltimore team dug into HCPS hiring records last year and what they found was beyond belief.

Lawrence Smith got hired to teach 8th-grade English at Edgewood Middle in August 2025. At the time he was hired, he was facing fifteen federal charges for stealing $215,000 from Baltimore City Schools. Wire fraud. Tax evasion. He pleaded guilty in October while still collecting an HCPS paycheck. Poynton’s response? The charges didn’t “legally disqualify” him.

Then there’s Kairen Thomas. Hired as a classroom aide at Edgewood Elementary in 2023. He already had a 2019 arrest for nineteen theft charges and a 2024 handgun conviction. The man was literally serving jail time on weekends and going to work at the elementary school during the week. Then in July 2025, he picks up new charges — shotgun possession, drug dealing, and something called “firearms access by minors.” HCPS didn’t get around to removing him for five more months.

A January 2026 state report found that twelve Maryland school systems lacked basic screening procedures. The legislature is working on a fix. Too late for the kids who sat in those classrooms.

IV. This Is Happening Everywhere

Harford County’s problems aren’t unique. The federal government knew this was happening twenty years ago. They published the report and then basically shelved it.

In 2004, the Department of Education had a researcher named Charol Shakeshaft pull together everything known about sexual abuse in American public schools. Congress required it under No Child Left Behind. Shakeshaft’s numbers were horrifying:

4.5 million kids abused by school employees over the course of K-12. Nearly one in ten students in 8th through 11th grade had experienced sexual misconduct from staff. And only 6% of those kids ever told an adult who could do something about it.

When districts actually caught someone, the typical response was to let them resign quietly. Over half the time, that’s all that happened. No prosecution, no report to the state, nothing. The superintendent signed off on a quiet exit and moved on. Only 1% of abusers lost their teaching license. Only 1% of superintendents even checked whether the guy they just got rid of went and got hired at the next school over.

The Government Accountability Office confirmed it: a single predator teacher typically passes through three different school districts. One offender can rack up 73 victims before somebody finally stops them.

Congress got around to passing a law about this in 2015. The “anti-passing-the-trash” provision says schools can’t help an accused abuser land a new job. But Congress didn’t put any teeth in it. No penalties. As of 2022, three out of four states hadn’t even implemented the thing.

Meanwhile the numbers keep climbing. A 2023 study found 12% of recent high school graduates experienced misconduct from a school employee. A 2024 study put it closer to 17%. That’s roughly one out of every six kids. And 96% of them never tell anyone who can help.

V. Back to Harford Glen

So now you’ve got the full picture. And we come back to Cassilly’s letter.

Can we trust this district — the one where Hobbs taught for twenty years after molesting a student, where a guy facing fifteen felonies got hired to teach English, where a convicted felon did weekend jail and weekday classroom duty, where the superintendent’s scandal got buried for twenty months — to handle the sensitive question of who sleeps where at overnight camp?

I don’t think that’s a hard question.

Cassilly’s legal argument is solid. The MSDE guidance behind the Harford Glen policy is not law. It’s a suggestion. HCPS was never required to adopt it. They chose to, under a superintendent who’s now gone. The Title IX coordinator who would have managed compliance is on leave. Nobody was minding this.

Meanwhile, the federal government has decided to push hard in the other direction. The day after Cassilly’s letter, the Department of Education killed six Title IX agreements that had required gender identity protections at schools around the country. They’ve opened 85 investigations nationwide. And they already opened a case against a Colorado school district over an overnight trip rooming policy that looks exactly like Harford Glen’s — a family in Jefferson County sued after their 11-year-old daughter was assigned to share a room (and a bed) with a biological male student on a school trip.

In January 2025, a federal judge threw out the Biden Title IX rule that tried to make gender identity a protected class under sex discrimination law. The Trump administration went back to the 2020 standard: biological sex, full stop. The legal argument HCPS used to justify this policy in 2022 is gone.

Maryland law still has the Inclusive Schools Act on the books, so there’s a state-level fight coming. And the Supreme Court’s Mahmoud v. Taylor ruling last year — a Montgomery County case — upheld parental opt-out rights when school policies conflict with religious beliefs. That cost MoCo $1.5 million.

HCPS is caught between Annapolis and Washington on this. Over 11% of school funding comes from the feds. That’s real money. But strip away the legal complexity and the question is simple: do the people running this system deserve our trust? Look at the record. You tell me.

VI. The Deeper Question

Show up April 20. Tell the Board what you think about Harford Glen. That matters in the short term.

But we:d be lying if I told you that swapping out a few board members and hiring a better superintendent is going to fix this. We’ve been swapping out board members and hiring new superintendents for decades. Look where it got us.

The Harford Glen lodging policy, the predators, the hiring failures, the cover-ups — these aren’t bugs in the system. They’re what the system produces. A government institution that processes 38,000 kids through a bureaucracy designed in the 1960s is never going to treat your child the way you would. It can’t. It wasn’t built for that. It was built to move kids through a pipeline efficiently. Safety, character, the formation of a whole human person — those were always afterthoughts, and the record proves it.

We keep talking about “reforming” public schools. But you can’t reform an institution into something it was never designed to be. Government schooling was never meant to raise your children. It was meant to indoctrinate, brainwash, and credential them.

The fact that we’ve handed it the job of moral formation, emotional development, and now gender ideology (on top of academics it’s increasingly failing at) tells you how far off course we’ve drifted.

Government schooling should not be the default for American families.

It should be the safety net — there for families who truly have no other option.

The default should be parents educating their own children, whether that’s homeschool, private school, co-ops, or classical Christian education that treats the formation of character and virtue as the foundation, not an elective.

Charter schools are a step in the right direction. They break the monopoly. But they don’t go far enough. A charter school is still a government school with a longer leash. What families need is genuine freedom — the funding following the child, not the institution. Let parents choose. Most of them will choose better than any bureaucracy ever could.

Education has to be holistic.

It has to form the whole person — mind, body, character, soul.

That means the people doing the educating have to be held to the highest standards of personal character, not just checked against a criminal database once at hire and then forgotten about for thirty years. Classical and Christian education understood this. The modern public system abandoned it and replaced it with credentialism, ideology, and institutional self-preservation.

Forty-five years of abuse lawsuits. Predators hiding in classrooms for decades. Convicted felons working with children. A superintendent scandal buried for twenty months. A lodging policy that puts ten-year-old girls in cabins with biological boys and doesn’t even tell the parents.

This isn’t a system that needs a tune-up. It needs competition. It needs to earn the trust of families or lose them. Right now, it’s losing them — and the only thing keeping most families in the system is that they don’t have anywhere else to go.

Change that, and everything changes.

Next Board of Education meeting: Monday, April 20, 2026, 6:00 PM. A.A. Roberty Building, 102 S. Hickory Avenue, Bel Air. To sign up for public comment, email publiccomment@hcps.org or call 410-588-5347 before noon that day.

Sources for this report include public records, court filings, HCPS documents, MSDE guidance, the U.S. Department of Education’s 2004 Shakeshaft report, GAO studies, CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey data, and news coverage from the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Banner, FOX45 Project Baltimore, CBS Baltimore, WMAR-2, and Bel Air Patch. Maryland General Assembly and U.S. Congressional records were also referenced.