Sexual Harassment Spreads to First Grade; 6-Year-Old Says Stop : Schools: Girl’s tormentors were in the fourth grade. The story sounds all too familiar to many American schoolgirls, including one who sued and won in Petaluma, Calif.

The leers and lurid comments started as soon as Cheltzie Hentz left home in the morning--teasing, foul language, lewd remarks aimed at her and her friends.

It continued throughout the day: jokes about body parts, taunts and demands for sexual acts.

It sounds like a textbook case of sexual harassment. But consider this:

Cheltzie Hentz was 6 years old.

Her oldest tormentors were in fourth grade.

And the harassment took place not on the street or even the playground, but on the school bus Cheltzie rode every day and in the halls outside her first-grade classroom in the Eden Prairie school district in suburban Minneapolis.

“I realized she was going to be exposed to swear words” when she started school, said Cheltzie’s mother, Sue Mutziger. “I did not have any idea she was going to be exposed to such demeaning, humiliating sexual language.”

As bizarre as Cheltzie’s story sounds, it’s too familiar to many American schoolgirls.

“There’s a Tailhook happening in every school,” said Nan Stein, a researcher at the Center for Women’s Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, referring to the recent Navy sex scandal. “Egregious behavior is going on.”

All agree that some amount of sexual behavior is inevitable in school--flirting and sexual teasing have long been part of growing up.

But the behavior has grown in frequency and viciousness past the point where it can be dismissed as a rite of growing up.

“This is not ‘boys will be boys.’ This inflicts pain on people,” said school supervisor Chuck Cadman in Petaluma, Calif. “This has the potential of having profound negative effects on people. It is not to be condoned or winked at or explained away by some cliche.”

Cadman speaks from personal experience. His district received what he describes as “a wake-up call” in the form of a suit filed by Tawnya Brawdy.

Tawnya was in eighth grade when boys at her school began mooing, ridiculing her developing body, as she walked through the halls. She gave it a few weeks to die down, but instead it spread into the classrooms.

“It just made me feel like, why should I even be living?” said Tawnya, now 19. “I thought that the principal would do something, but he didn’t. And neither did the vice principal and the counselor or the teachers. . . . I just basically felt like, gee, what’s my point in going to school?”

Fed up, her mother sued. Last year, the lawsuit was settled for $20,000.

“It leaves you with a very helpless feeling, and for educators of all people to not understand what this would do to an individual is just incomprehensible,” Louise Brawdy said.

For Cheltzie Hentz, these harsh lessons started when she entered elementary school. A few weeks into her first year, Cheltzie told her mother that the boys on the bus were using bad words.

“I really thought one of two things: Maybe she was exaggerating, maybe she’s just adjusting to the school bus,” Mutziger said.

By the middle of the year, as her daughter grew more upset about the daily ride, Mutziger asked exactly what the boys were saying. “She came out with the foulest, most vulgar, obscene language I could ever imagine, that I hadn’t heard till I was 20 years old.”

Mutziger sent letter after letter to school authorities over the next five months. A few boys were briefly suspended this past year, and with a new bus driver, the teasing stopped.

But Mutziger, unsatisfied, already had started driving her daughter to and from school. And she had filed complaints with the state and federal government, saying the school failed to provide her daughter with an atmosphere free from sexual discrimination in which to learn--a violation of Title IX of the Education Act of 1972.

The federal complaint was settled in Cheltzie’s favor in April. Federal officials say they believe Cheltzie, now 7, is the youngest person for whom they have fielded a complaint.

But “if you think it’s just happening to my daughter, you’re badly mistaken,” Mutziger said. “Most parents would be shocked if they found out what was happening with their kids at school as far as sexual harassment.”

Ask Katy Lyle.

Six years ago, an acquaintance told her about the bathroom stall at Duluth Central High School in Minnesota filled with obscene graffiti about her.

She still doesn’t know who did it or why.

“The mild ones were, ‘Katy Lyle is a slut,’ or ‘Katy Lyle is a whore,’ ” she said.

She also doesn’t understand why the graffiti remained for 18 months, despite more than a dozen complaints to school officials. Her brother finally scrubbed everything away except the words chipped into the paint of the stall.

When those words remained as Katy’s senior year began, the Lyles, too, filed a complaint with the state and won.

“I could have just let it rest, but I guess I felt it was an opportunity,” said Katy, now 20. “I know there’s a lot of things in society that should be changed, but I felt this was something I could do something about.”

“I think it’s a much bigger issue than people think it is,” said David Beaulieu, Minnesota’s human rights commissioner. In one recent Minnesota case, a 10-year-old boy even filed a sexual harassment complaint because he repeatedly had been called explicit names by a dozen male classmates.

“It’s been unattended,” he said. “People just don’t think students are capable of discriminating against each other, that students can commit acts that are illegal.”

School and government authorities are at a loss to explain why there seems to have been such an increase in reports of student-to-student sexual harassment.

“No. 1, we’ve had it. No. 2, we’re just more aware of what the rules are,” said Jean B. Barnard, assistant superintendent for human resources in the Detroit school district.

Bernard is working on a student-to-student sexual harassment policy for Detroit schools; the district was moved to action when a frightened 15-year-old girl was caught carrying a gun to ward off schoolmates who were demanding sex.

Other states and school districts also are heeding the complaints.