A Rockville, Md., teenager has filed suit against the Montgomery County Public Schools and the estate of a former school counselor, claiming that the counselor wasn’t a licensed psychologist and that he had caused undue emotional distress, WTOP 103.5 FM reports.
Brandon Hall, now 18, says his case as an 8-year-old boy was assigned by a family judge to the care of a school counselor, Duane Donald Flemmer, who at the time was working under the alias of David Flemmer.
In the custody fight, Mr Flemmer testified in court, and on the basis of his professional opinion, the lawsuit maintains, Brandon was taken away from his mother and given to his father.
The lawsuit claims Mr Flemmer lied not only to school officials to get the job with Montgomery County Schools in 1998 but also to the court in identifying himself as an expert witness in Brandon’s custody case. Court documents say he did this in order to “create havoc in the life of Brandon, and secure another year of therapy for which he could continue to charge fees,” WTOP-FM reported.
State officials eventually caught up with Mr Flemmer, and he was dismissed in 2009, after working as a counselor in Montgomery County Schools since 1998. He committed suicide in July 2013, so the suit is technically filed against his estate.
Brandon’s attorney was quoted as saying his client “has a permanent distrust of adults and authority figures, and problems with confidence and self-esteem.” And, other children may have been affected: “We don’t know how many other children and parents were ‘counseled’ by this man in the decade he worked at the school system or testified as an expert in court.”
Because the lawsuit is still pending, Montgomery County Public Schools won’t be able to comment on the case, but they did confirm Mr Flemmer’s employment in the school system.
Thankfully, a rare occurrence
Because of the careful hiring practices in schools, not too many school psychologists or counselors are able to obtain employment using a fraudulent license. A search of the Psychiatric Crime Database reveals only one or two fake license crimes in the last 10 years.
Most crimes involve counselors engaging in inappropriate behavior, such as sexual misconduct with students, like the Sacramento, Calif., counselor and his alleged accomplices, who were charged in May with trying to arrange a sexual rendezvous with a teenage girl, according to a report on ABC-News-10.
Conduct a randomized survey about the benefits that students at your school see in school counselors and report your findings. See Common Core seventh-grade math standard SP.A.1-2 for more information. Or, in high school, HSS.IC.A-B.