Former CAHS coach Alfredo Bruce Smith.
The audit of standards and practices when it comes to reporting of alleged criminal sexual activity within the territory’s schools, begun in 2021 following the arrest of former Charlotte Amalie High School track & field coach Alfredo Bruce Smith, is complete, according to Governor Albert Bryan Jr.
“I don’t know why we haven’t released the report,” he told reporters on Monday during the weekly Government House press briefing. “I’ll go and see how soon we can get this out,” he promised, barring any unforeseen constraints that would prevent its public circulation.
The audit, Governor Bryan said when he announced its launch, was a systemic “gap investigation in terms of what happened,” primarily identifying the potential lapses across the education system that allowed Mr. Smith to abuse dozens of minor boys for the majority of his 15-year tenure at the Charlotte Amalie High School. “What we’re trying to do is get down to what happened, who was involved, and most importantly how we could make sure that this never, ever happens again,” Mr. Bryan said in October 2021.
On Monday, the governor expressed some measure of disappointment in the contents of the report that has been produced. “I didn’t do what I wanted it to do,” he noted. “We wanted to see…where the policy flaws were in terms of determining or making sure that we protect our children, and I think it does a good job of that,” he explained.
It appears that the report does not make any assessment of whether any of the other teachers or school administrators were “criminally willful in terms of violating the VI code” by ignoring their statutory duty to report suspicions of sex crimes against children. “We’re doing that part of it another way,” Governor Bryan said, without going into detail about what exactly he meant by that.
Even prior to 2023’s guilty plea that resulted in Mr. Smith’s conviction on child sexual exploitation charges and subsequent 35-year prison sentence, serious questions have been raised about the other adults operating in an environment where the coach could habitually, according to reports, remove students from class during school hours to sexually abuse them in empty classrooms and offices on campus. As the criminal case unfolded, the public learned that Mr. Smith’s office, where much of the sexual abuse took place over approximately 13 years, was next door to the principal’s office. The former coach also used the school’s official vehicle and camcorder to transport the minor students and record the sexual abuse at various locations on St. Thomas.
According to Governor Bryan’s comments during Monday’s press briefing, parents of the young male students who Mr. Smith preyed on during his tenure as CAHS coach will have to wait for some unspecified future action to bring accountability to any high school officials who may have known about Coach Smith’s abuse of vulnerable children and took no action to stop him.
