Schools Get Federal Guidelines on Sexual Violence

Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, seated, make an appearance earlier this month at the University of New Hampshire in Durham to call attention to sexual violence in schools and colleges.

—Cheryl Senter/AP

By Nirvi Shah

After the gang rape last fall of a 14-year-old girl in the stairwell of a District of Columbia high school during the school day, a teacher wrote to a newspaper, horrified at how the situation was handled.

It wasn’t handled at all, she said. At a staff meeting the Monday after the attack, she said, the school administration didn’t even bring it up.

“After the meeting, I had to go up to my classroom and pretend that nothing happened,” second-year teacher Jessica Lilly wrote in an email to The Washington Post . “For the rest of the day, I attempted to teach how to write an equation of a line in slope-intercept form in between student...