For more about The Park School and child sexual abuse, visit https://onoldcourt.substack.com/

Park continues to honor former Headmaster F. Parvin Sharpless, who illegally failed to report child sexual abuse to the authorities and harbored teachers he knew to be predators for years. The school itself announced his failures in 2019, in an email to the “Park community” regarding findings by the investigative firm T&M about past child sexual abuse by staff of students (email at bottom).

Under the Maryland Child Victim’s Act, four survivors have filed cases involving middle school teacher Alfred Siemon, and two involving high school teacher Butch Ashman. Multiple complaints highlight Sharpless’ role in blaming and intimidating girls who were being abused and keeping the abusers on staff. Park has refused to release the full results of the T&M report, and has failed to acknowledge the number of survivors who came forward. The school is still covering up the extent of the abuse-enabling environment at Park during the 1970’s and 80’s, and how many students it harmed.

While benefitting from money attached to Sharpless, claiming to be unable to re-name his namesake program due to donor issues, and deceitfully withholding information about the exploitative school environment he fostered, Park raised $40 million and built a new wing.

In 1983, at the age of 12, I was abused by my math teacher, Alfred Siemon II. Park did an investigation in 2019, and released a statement confirming the abuse and the cover-up by school administration. I am sharing below Park’s public statement regarding the findings of their investigation, and my continued requests that they cease to honor or take donations associated with F. Parvin Sharpless, the headmaster who enabled sexual abuse by various teachers at the school, intimidated all those who knew about it into silence, illegally failed to report suspected child abuse to authorities, and kept abusers on staff.

After being informed of Alfred Siemon’s abuse of me by an unrelated adult witness, Sharpless met with my parents at their request. Without having done any investigation or carrying out the legally required reporting to child protective services, he dismissed their concerns with “little girls get crushes on their teachers.” By depicting me as a nymphet and implying that the whole abuse accusation was a figment of a girl’s sexualized fantasies, Sharpless was simply threatening us with the shame of having, or being, or being publicly portrayed as a lustful girl-tween. He was telling my parents that he had the power to make that myth a public reality were they to push the issue. It didn’t make any logical sense, since the person who originally made the allegation was an adult witness and not me, but gaslighting never has to make sense. It only has to instill fear and shame, with the purpose of silencing the victim. Even while he denied to my family that Siemon was a problem, Sharpless removed all of the girls from Siemon’s homeroom class.

Below I will describe some of the abuse – and especially the culture of abuse permissiveness – that has come to light recently through lawsuits filed against the school under Maryland’s new Child Victim’s Act (CVA), which allows adults who suffered institution-based abuse as children to sue in civil court. The defendant institutions sued so far have mainly been the Catholic Church, juvenile detention facilities and private schools.

In 2018 Park hired T&M Protection Resources to do an investigation of its history of sexual abuse. In the post #MeToo era, private schools around Baltimore and the rest of the country released reports about past sexual abuse by staff members, and either negligence or outright collusion on the part of school leadership. Over time these disclosures became a routine and performative way for schools to wash their hands of the history instead of exploring its meaning and consequences. They were a form of damage-control. But Park has gone much farther than other schools in its use of the T&M process to bury information, even from the very alumni who came forward to share very private and painful testimony, refusing to release the vast majority of the report.

It is becoming increasingly clear that in its one email communication to the “Park Community” on May 17 of 2019 about the results of the investigation, and the complete lack of communication since then, Park has misrepresented and minimized its history of child sexual abuse. It has misled – to the point of dishonesty – both the survivors themselves and the broader Park community. The email, which is the only information Park has ever released about the findings of the T&M investigation, present me and one other woman as the only survivors of child sexual abuse at Park during the 1970’s and 80’s. There were more, and more who were actually interviewed by T&M. We know this from the survivors themselves.

Park has used me and a former student who was abused by another teacher in the 1970’s as their “token” survivors, causing us and the world to think we were alone: anomalies in an otherwise healthy, wonderful school. That is what abusers themselves do, and what Sharpless did to us as we and our families came forward decades ago – isolate the victim, make them feel that they are different, that something about them caused the abuse, that what we experienced or saw wasn’t real. In 2018 I went to Park for information and to (re) report my abuse; instead I was treated by the current administration with a third dose of deceit, manipulation and gaslighting, so they could continue to cover up a very widespread and long-lasting culture of child sexual abuse at the school in the 1970’s and 80’s.

The 2019 email to the “school community” from Park included the following statement:

Based on its examination of the evidence and applying a preponderance of the evidence standard, T&M found that former Middle School teacher, Alfred H. Siemon, II, now deceased, engaged in inappropriate physical touching, touching of a sexual nature, and boundary crossing behavior with the former Middle School student who initially raised the concern. His actions included emotionally manipulative, grooming, and predatory behaviors. Based on additional, similar reports and on a close examination of school records, investigators also found that Siemon had engaged in a general pattern of behavior directed at female Middle School students that included inappropriate physical touching and boundary crossing.

Moreover, T&M confirmed that Park administrators were aware of the inappropriate conduct by Siemon beginning in the early 1980s. At the time, senior administrators implemented steps to limit Siemon’s access to the student, and to address the pattern of inappropriate behavior. Our investigators concluded that Head of School Parvin Sharpless and Middle School Principal Ken Seward failed to take sufficient action. That failure contributed to the long-term emotional effects suffered by our former Middle School student, now an adult woman.

After I filed a lawsuit against Park under the Maryland Child Victims Act in September of 2024, (I’m Jane Doe), The Baltimore Sun published an interview with Sharpless, in which he said about Siemon:

“He was not a good teacher…and part of the problem was the way he handled students and we eventually … I had a meeting with him where I told him he had to change his behavior with students. And he was upset and resigned. But there was never any incident of abuse by him at the school by him or with any school student during school time. I was never aware of any abuse or incident that would have required reporting to the authorities, and nor were any of my staff.”

Siemon stayed on staff for a number of years after abusing me, engaging in “inappropriate physical touching and boundary crossing” with female students, but he was abusing other girls before me, too. This conversation with Sharpless about his treatment of girls, during which he was NOT FIRED, happened years after the headmaster was already aware of my abuse.

Parvin Sharpless, Abuse Enabling, and “New” Information

In May and July of 2025 two additional Park School child sexual abuse survivors filed lawsuits against the school under Maryland’s Child Victim’s Act (CVA) regarding purported abuse by another long-time teacher, Butch Ashman. All three cases detail Sharpless’ central role in creating a culture of abuse permissiveness at Park and explicitly failing to protect students from known predators on staff (lawsuits are in the public record). Two of the survivors, listed in their lawsuits pseudonymously as Judith and Jennifer Doe, implicate Stanley Virgil “Butch” Ashman, a history teacher at Park from 1972 to 1997. Ashman was arrested in 2006 for years-long sexual abuse of Jennifer Doe in the early 1970’s. Judith Doe was not mentioned in Park’s 2019 announcement because she was interviewed three weeks after it came out. But Park administration and board members have known.

The lawsuits set out a timeline of incidents when Sharpless was informed of allegations that a member of his staff was sexually abusing students, and failed to act even to the most basic requirement of the law. When Sharpless was told in 1980 that Ashman was sexually exploiting Judith, he used a management style very similar to what he would do to me in 1983: active victim-blaming, protectiveness towards the teacher/abuser, and failure to alert the authorities. Judith Doe’s lawsuit states:

In 1980, when Plaintiff was in her senior year…Butch became very depressed. At this time, he confessed to the headmaster, Parvin Sharpless and Ashman’s department head, Brooks Lakin, that he had sex with Plaintiff and several other students… Parvin Sharpless responded to Ashman’s confession by stopping Plaintiff in the lobby of the school and telling her to leave Ashman alone and not talk to him. Sharpless told Plaintiff that Ashman was having a hard time and could not deal with her. Sharpless told Plaintiff not to bother Ashman. Sharpless’ response made Plaintiff feel that it was her fault that Ashman was having such a hard time. Plaintiff believed that Sharpless’ response was inexcusable and, in some ways, even more damaging to her than Ashman’s behavior because it reinforced her conviction that she was the responsible party, and the burden of guilt was on her shoulders. Both Parvin Sharpless and Butch Ashman abdicated their responsibility as professionals.

The abuse of Jennifer precipitated Ashman’s arrest in 2006. The abuse took place between approximately 1974-76, when the victim-survivor was 14-16 years old. It immediately preceded Ashman’s abuse of Judith, and was very similar in nature. Jennifer’s complaint states:

In 1992, without warning Plaintiff, her mother went to the Park School and told headmaster Parvin Sharpless, who was also headmaster during the time of the sexual abuse. Sharpless chose not to believe her mother and rudely kicked her out of his office. Sharpless took no action with the information provided by Plaintiff’s mother. Headmaster Parvin Sharpless had a history of receiving similar complaints and taking no action. In 1997, again without Plaintiff’s knowledge or consent, her mother returned to the Park School to make another complaint. Fortunately, Parvin Sharpless was no longer headmaster.

Plaintiff’s mother told the new headmaster, David Jackson, about her daughter’s relationship with Butch Ashman. He took the allegations seriously and contacted Plaintiff to hear directly from her. Plaintiff met with Headmaster Jackson and Park Board member Lee Meyerhoff, where she told them in painfully embarrassing detail what had transpired at Park. Ashman’s employment at Park ended in 1997 when headmaster Jackson met with Butch Ashman to discuss allegations of sexual abuse brought by Plaintiff. Ashman resigned from Park as a result of that meeting. By 1999, Butch Ashman secured a teaching job at the Roeper School in the Detroit suburbs where he remained until 2006 when Plaintiff went to the Baltimore County Police who helped facilitate a recorded call where Ashman admitted to Plaintiff of his wrongdoing. Ashman was then arrested and extradited to Maryland.

The difference in how Sharpless and Jackson handled child abuse allegations gives an outline of negligent vs. responsible leadership. It should be noted, however, that although Jackson says that he reported the allegations to authorities, Baltimore County says it has no record of the report.

All school staff are and were then considered “mandated reporters” – professionals legally required to report to child protective services any and all suspected or possible child abuse, no matter where it happened or what their own personal opinion of the situation. The law is designed to take the judgement and consequences out of the hands of the individual who knows of the suspected abuse – because they may be biased or have their own interests. The only way to get around mandated reporting laws is to consider oneself above them and not make the report: to consider oneself to be the sole arbiter of truth itself, as Sharpless clearly did. He created and spread a culture of abuse-tolerance at Park that allowed the ongoing harm of children to whom they owed a duty of care.

Parvin Sharpless and the FACA Program

Founded in 1987, “The F. Parvin Sharpless Faculty and Curricular Advancement Program (FACA), Park’s innovative program for professional development, provides teachers time and funding for intensive study that directly benefits Park students.” A signature program for Park, the school claims that FACA “has garnered national attention as a model for professional development. In 30 years, over 1000 grants have supported hundreds of projects and 82% of Park’s faculty. All areas of school life — academic, athletic, artistic, social, and technological — have been studied.” FACA has funded the work of award-winning authors and Park staff such as Laura Amy Schlitz and Deborah Roffman.**

The publication 100: The Park School of Baltimore 1912-2012 highlights the program named for him as Sharpless’ crowning achievement, quoting at least two trustees as saying:

He’s got a terrific ability to pick out good people, and he stays with them.
He knows that [faculty] have the ability to do well, he tries to find what
they will do well, and he lets them do it. The most important thing that
Parvin accomplished was establishing and visualizing the Faculty
and Curricular Advancement Program [FACA].

and

His crowning achievement was FACA. To see what that program has
become in the life of this school and the way it has transformed it as an
institution is really quite stunning.

Ken Seward, Sharpless’ understudy and Middle and then High School Principal while I was at Park, moved on to work as Head of School at The Roeper School in Michigan in 1998. He was followed there by Butch Ashman, the Park history teacher arrested in 2006 and named in a lawsuit by Judith Doe. What is important to note is that Park already knew of the allegations against Mr. Ashman before he moved to Roeper – they are the reason he left in 1997, but Seward hired him anyway. It’s very reminiscent of Catholic leadership moving dirty priests from one parish to the next. After Siemon left Park, he went to work for a private tutoring company, where he could meet with students individually. Seward included a close-up photo of Siemon in a large-screen slideshow he presented to my class in 1989 soon before we graduated, saying “remember this guy?” Then he laughed. I missed the rest of the joke due to shock and a roaring sound in my ears. There are too many indications that the abuse of girls and boys has meant very little to the private-school intelligentsia of our society, until victim/survivors made it matter.

In 2021 I asked the current Head of School, Dan Paradis, to have Sharpless’ name removed from the FACA program, and followed up with two written requests to the school’s entire “Equity Committee.” I also sent emails to individual staff members. These requests were made not to erase Sharpless from Park’s history, or to imply that everything he did was bad. They were reasonable in light of the public knowledge that he normalized, covered up and prolonged an environment that was sexually exploitative of girls.

One of the fundamentals of an abuse-tolerant culture is tacit acceptance of deep discrepancies between stated values and reality. By honoring F. Parvin Sharpless, Park is still following the directly destructive and morally corrupt path of so many schools and religious institutions: that of protecting men’s reputations over the well-being of their young victims. A school that was concerned with education over status would use the renaming of the program as a teachable moment for students – not only about abuse, but also about living out one’s values, even when it is inconvenient.

The only response I received was an email from current Head of School Dan Paradis implying that Park could not afford to re-fund and re-name the FACA program, or do without the money donated in Sharpless’ name. In reality, the school is an engine of conspicuous consumption casting about for something on which to leverage its enormous fundraising potential, as it sits on the edge of a city mired in need. Park’s tax-exempt 990 form for 2021 reports its revenue after expenses in 2020 at 18.5 million, slightly less than it received in donations that year alone. They were in the middle of a fundraising blitz called “The Promise of Park.” By 2024 they had raised $40 million in donations and built a new science and engineering wing, which is what it takes to “continue preparing our students to be the confident questioners, responsible citizens, and thoughtful leaders the world needs.” Except, of course, when it involves confident questioning of Park itself.

Who Cares?

In her book Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, the great trauma pioneer Judith Herman explains that “memorials do matter. They are enduring public proclamations that tell us whom our society honors and respects. Sometimes directly, more often by omission, they also tell us who is to be dishonored and disrespected, who is to be invisible.” The continued memorializing of Sharpless by Park, and its lack of transparency about the history of child sexual abuse, provides an important data point about the current moral and ideological nature of the school – about whom or what it “honors and respects.”

Herman states that “In the triangle of victim, perpetrator and bystanders, impunity means in effect that the bystanders take the side of the perpetrator, and the weight of law and society condemns the victim to isolation.” That is what Sharpless did throughout his tenure, and what Park is doing now, by continuing to honor him. Only a change in social power dynamics alters that behavior – which is why Park did the investigation and report in 2018/19, when so many private schools were being outed for sexual abuse, on the heels of #MeToo and the Kavanaugh hearings. Now that moment has past, as has their zeal for any conversations about righting their institutional harm to children.

There is plenty of precedence for action in response to the release of information about abuse at schools, and the corrupt actions of administrators. The Catholic School of Baltimore announced it was going to remove the name of a nun accused in the Maryland Attorney General’s report about Catholic Church abuse from its auditorium, just one week after the report was released. In Notes On a Silencing, Lacy Crawford, survivor of a vicious sexual assault at St. Paul’s boarding school in New Hampshire, described how after their sexual abuse reckoning school administrators made a controversial decision to remove the name of an abuse-enabler from the school hockey center. “The symbolic removal of Matthews’ legacy bespeaks good intentions…current leadership is willing to tolerate antagonism to force conversation about change.”

Ninety-nine Park teachers took money from the F. Parvin Sharpless FACA fund during summer of 2024, which would be a sizeable percentage of their staff (whom they call faculty – as if it was a university). Do staff and donors genuinely want to continue to honor an acknowledged enabler of child abuse, even as they likely condemn the actions of the Catholic Church? There is no valid reason the FACA program can’t continue, shed of its association with child sexploitation, if people care.

Private schools are hiding behind the scope of the horrors of Catholic Church abuse, hoping no one will notice them. But that is not how survivor memory works. The majority of CSA survivors do not disclose until they are in their 50’s. Maybe Maryland’s Child Victims Act and similar legislation in other states will cause a discussion beyond institution-controlled reports, farther into the side effects that being a cloistered, closed and self-serving entity can foster in regards to all kinds of unhealthy beliefs and behavior. Those are qualities common to the religious institutions, private schools and youth detention centers now being sued under the Child Victims Act, which may be attractive to predators and to the secretiveness that enables abuse.

Of the 1,250 lawsuits filed under the Maryland CVA in Baltimore City, few have been against the public school system. This is not only because of the social status or resources of Catholic or private school victims; a large chunk of the cases were filed against the juvenile justice system. There was something about private schools that made them a haven for child sexual abuse, which was allowed or overlooked by school leadership. While private schools have done individual reports and moved on, the Catholic Church has been forced to engage in introspection regarding what their abuse crisis demonstrates about them as an institution, and discuss this publicly over decades. The even more cloistered private schools, including Park, have sidestepped that process. I feel that I have been cynically used as part of Park’s performative but false purging of its sins.

Grave things are happening in our world and our country right now, things of much more pressing concern, of course. But none of them are happening at Park, and that sentiment has always been used to silence abuse victims: people who carry societal refuse we don’t want to smell, and would prefer to believe was produced solely by individual abusers and victims themselves, not by our beloved institutions. If survivors’ legal claims are settled or won in court Park’s insurance will cover them, however the school is still responsible for the refuse it has dumped into the world. Part of being a worthy educational institution is honestly confronting the child sexual abuse culture once in place at the school, and repudiating the money and perks associated with a Headmaster who was a steward of student sexploitation.

Thank you

Connie Phelps ’89

_____________

* The following is the statement that Park released on 05/17/19 about its investigation into past sexual abuse at the school, Baltimore Sun article here.

An Important Message from the Head of School and President of the Board of Trustees   Dear Park School Community, In October, we wrote to you to share some deeply distressing news we had learned regarding the conduct of a Park School teacher from the past. In the 1980s, a Middle School teacher (who has been deceased for a number of years) had inappropriate physical contact with a Middle School student and engaged in the purposeful, targeted, persistent emotional manipulation of the student. This conduct was wrong, and the resulting harm was and is very real. Our preliminary review of school records indicated that a concern had been brought to the school administration at the time, and we committed ourselves to investigating the matter fully, to taking steps to address past failings, and to continuing our essential work to ensure the safety and well-being of every member of our community. In our October message, we shared that we had enlisted T&M Protection Resources, a highly-regarded professional firm with significant experience investigating misconduct, to investigate the reported incident and any other concerns that might be shared. We sought to provide a safe, discreet, and independent resource for any member of the community who may have been subjected to, or may have knowledge of, misconduct by a Park School employee. We disseminated our message to nearly 7,000 members of the community for whom we had contact information, encouraging them to speak to our investigators directly. We made a commitment that, once T&M conducted further investigation and brought their findings to the school, we would communicate back to the community. For that purpose, we write to you today. To honor our commitment to protect the identities of those who participated in the process, we are sharing only limited descriptions of credible accounts of misconduct reported. The Park School takes seriously its obligation to act on the information that we acquired over the course of the investigation, and on any information we may receive in the future, including contacting the appropriate authorities. The Investigation and Findings During its investigation, T&M interviewed 17 members of the community, some on more than one occasion, either in person or by telephone. The individuals included Park alumni, current and former Park faculty, staff, and administrators, parents of a former student, and former members of the Park Board of Trustees. In addition, T&M reviewed numerous documents including school personnel files, student files, emails, and yearbooks. Based on its examination of the evidence and applying a preponderance of the evidence standard, T&M found that former Middle School teacher, Alfred H. Siemon, II, now deceased, engaged in inappropriate physical touching, touching of a sexual nature, and boundary crossing behavior with the former Middle School student who initially raised the concern. His actions included emotionally manipulative, grooming, and predatory behaviors. Based on additional, similar reports and on a close examination of school records, investigators also found that Siemon had engaged in a general pattern of behavior directed at female Middle School students that included inappropriate physical touching and boundary crossing. Moreover, T&M confirmed that Park administrators were aware of the inappropriate conduct by Siemon beginning in the early 1980s. At the time, senior administrators implemented steps to limit Siemon’s access to the student, and to address the pattern of inappropriate behavior. Our investigators concluded that Head of School Parvin Sharpless and Middle School Principal Ken Seward failed to take sufficient action. That failure contributed to the long-term emotional effects suffered by our former Middle School student, now an adult woman. We are profoundly sorry for the suffering that she and other former students have endured. Over the course of the investigation, T&M also received two firsthand accounts by former Park students of sexual misconduct by two other former Park employees. One instance occurred in the early 1980s; and the second account spanned several months in the late 1950s. The school has reported the accounts to the State of Maryland Child Protective Services office. No current employees were the subject of any reports over the course of the investigation. Reviewing Historical Records Concurrent with T&M’s investigation, the school conducted a review of its internal records. In these records, there are two documented episodes of employee sexual misconduct; both were reported to the Park School administration long after the two involved students had left Park. The first of the two reports of misconduct is a matter of public record and has been the subject of accounts in the media; therefore, we are identifying former Upper School teacher Stanley Virgil “Butch” Ashman here by name. He was dismissed from Park School employment in 1997 when allegations were made of sexual misconduct that occurred in the mid-1970s. In 2006, he was arrested and charged with child abuse. The second report involved a former Park student who had endured sexual abuse by a Park employee in 1974. Head of School David Jackson, who received the report in 2006, referred the former student to legal counsel at that time, and reported the account to the Maryland Department of Social Services. Reflecting On Our History and Moving Forward We offer our sincere apology to any individual who has been affected by the misconduct of a Park employee. Further, we understand that there may be circumstances that prevented individuals from reaching out to either T&M or the school over the course of the investigation and/or this account of the investigation may serve as an impetus for additional reporting. We are maintaining open communication channels with T&M in order to provide the best opportunity for ongoing disclosure: (646) 445-7695 or ParkSchoolofBaltimore@tmprotection.com. As we shared with you in October, The Park School has actively developed and regularly reviews policies and practices to ensure the safety and well-being of all members of our community. This work, that has spanned decades, is never finished and is a responsibility that we take seriously. Our school’s top priorities are keeping our children safe and ensuring their well-being. As mandated reporters, we report any suspicion of child abuse or neglect to the relevant authorities. Our administrative team, faculty, and staff work diligently and with a great sense of purpose in the development and implementation of our policies, practices, and programming. All students and employees are entitled to a safe, supportive learning and working environment. Park School maintains a Harassment and Abuse Policy that we regularly review, refine, and communicate. Our faculty participates in scheduled training and education on the topics of harassment, misconduct, and mandatory reporting. The school health team comprises three school counselors, our human sexuality educator, and school nurse — each of whom has training and experience in prevention, support, and intervention practices related to sexual misconduct. We provide both formal and informal programming for all of our students — across all divisions of the school — on affirmative consent, human sexuality, healthy relationships, and communication. We value our parent involvement and provide topical parent education and facilitate workshops on developmental risk taking, limit setting, and family communication through our Park Connects and Parents’ Association programming. In the cases of misconduct that have been illuminated in this report, we sought to investigate the issues thoroughly; to share the findings with our community; to take all necessary actions to address past failings; and to let those incidents inform our current and future work to ensure the safety and well-being of every member of our community. We are grateful for the honesty and forthrightness of our community members through this period of investigation and reflection, and we will continue to honor the trust and confidence that is placed in us by our students, parents, and graduates. Please share with us any questions, concerns, or comments you may have. Sincerely,   Dan Paradis Head of School   Betsy Berner President of the Board of Trustees     Contact Information:     Head of School Dan Paradis 410.339.4151 dparadis@parkschool.net The Park School of Baltimore 2425 Old Court Road Baltimore, MD 21208   T&M Protection Resources 646.445.7695 ParkSchoolofBaltimore@tmprotection.com

A Park Facebook post about the F. Parvin Sharpless FACA Program, after their report implicating Sharpless came out