Home > Pinkerton Academy Refuses To Settle Civil Claim Over Teacher-Student Sex Abuse
Pinkerton Academy Refuses To Settle Civil Claim Over Teacher-Student Sex Abuse
by WireNews+Co - Open-Publishing - Friday 13 September 2013Pinkerton Academy Refuses To Settle Civil Claim Over Teacher-Student Sex Abuse
School says victim cannot prove Pinkerton knew about sex abuse
Against what many would describe as an untenable position, Pinkerton Academy has decided not to settle a civil claim made against the institution, short of a court hearing.
Fallout from the publicity the school received after details of the grooming and sexual abuse of at least one of the school’s students by a former teacher was reported in the media had reached fever pitch. So much so that lawyers representing Pinkerton Academy reached out to the victim and suggested a dialogue towards settlement.
As previously reported by WireNews+Co, a criminal complaint was filed by the victim in the United Kingdom (where he now lives) and the matter was referred to the Interpol Liaison working with Lancashire County Constabulary, who has passed the details of the crime to the Derry Police Department, in Derry, NH.
Earlier today hopes for a resolution to the civil claim were shattered, however, when Pinkerton Academy failed to accept the offer extended by the victim. Encouraged initially by the lawyer for Pinkerton Academy, the victim believed the long saga of living and re-living the abuse he suffered would be put behind him.
But lawyers for Pinkerton Academy say that the victim cannot prove that the school ’knew’ about the sex abuse and grooming when the crime took place, despite the fact that Pinkerton officials met with the minor’s parents immediately before they terminated the employment of their teacher following the abuse.
Also, according to one Derry policeman working on the complaint, Pinkerton Headmaster Mary Anderson told him that the school had reported the ’incident’ to "social services" at the time, but not to police. According to Pinkerton’s lawyer, Anderson now denies having reported this to police.
Diane E. Foster (nee Burrell, now Kanady) was a teacher at Pinkerton Academy, located in Derry New Hampshire throughout the 70’s. Know as "Debbie" or "Deb", Mrs. Foster was married to Jeffery Foster when she took a shine to one of her underage students.
The ’IT’ teacher encouraged the young boy to join her on a skiing trip to Bretton Woods ski resort under the guise that the outing would be a school function with a number of other students coming along. She even told her student’s parents that the short day-trip was a school function, but half-way to the popular winter retreat the married teacher told her pupil that the others "couldn’t make it, but that they would enjoy themselves all the same’.
Once at Bretton Woods, Debbie arranged for a hotel room. She telephoned the boy’s parents and told them that foul weather had crept in and that they would have to stay the night... then she forced the young man to perform numerous sex acts with her.
Matters grew from bad to worse when the child’s parents threw the boy out of the family home upon his return the next day after they expressed their unwillingness to accept that he hadn’t been lying all along about the trip.
After being told to leave with nothing more than the clothes on his back, Mrs. Foster was contacted from a friend’s house and the teacher collected the boy and took him back to her own home where she bedded him again later that night with her husband sleeping in the next room.
Unsurprisingly the next morning both Debbie and her student (now partner) were asked to leave the house by the teacher’s husband.
Some of our New Hampshire readers will remember "Farmhouse Furniture", run by Bill Morse. Debbie took her student there and arranged for him to live and work there for several months, visiting each night to satisfy her sexual desires, until the teacher, who by then had been fired from her position at Pinkerton Academy and now working for Digital Equipment Corporation in Merrimack, New Hampshire, had bought a home where they both would live.
Pinkerton Academy was contacted in November 2012 concerning these allegations. McLane, Graf, Raulerson & Midddleton was immediately instructed to represent the school against the claim being made. Lawyer Linda Johnson acts the school.
Michael Kelleher for the Department of Education for New Hampshire received and is investigating the complaint made against the school.
Mrs. Foster, who is now known as “Diane E. (Deb) Kanady” and who eventually married to Mr. Kenneth L. Kanady (2 Wagon Wheel, Road, North Attleboro, MA 02760) quite astonishingly continues to have contact with High School students through her Eastern Star Scholarship trust, not to mention her “trusted” position as a “CSA” working at Mass General Hospital; a status granted by the Society of Certified Senior Advisors.