A Chicago Public Schools student accused the Board of Education in a lawsuit filed Tuesday of failing to run a “thorough” background check on a security guard who had been arrested several times and was later charged with sexually assaulting the girl.
“He was someone that shouldn’t have been allowed in a position where he’s protecting people and protecting their health and safety. It’s as simple as that,” said the girl’s attorney Mark Brown, a managing partner at Lane Brown LLC. “The laziness of CPS hiring committee is what is at fault here.”
The then 43-year-old security guard, Romel Campoverde, was arrested in 2023 and charged with criminal sexual assault of the 15-year-old student at Farragut Career Academy High School in the Little Village neighborhood. Prosecutors said at the time that he began Snapchatting with the girl and met her outside of school, buying her alcohol and shoes.
The student, who recently turned 18 and switched to a different CPS school, filed the suit against the Chicago Board of Education and the former guard anonymously as Jane Doe in Cook County Circuit Court. The suit alleged that Campoverde started giving her compliments on her looks and texting her on a “regular basis” in 2022 while she was a freshman at Farragut.
Campoverde gave the girl alcohol to the point of intoxication in June 2023, and then brought her into an RV where he took off her clothes and sexually assaulted her, the suit and prosecutors have alleged. She told an after-school program employee the day after the alleged assault, and police found two of her press-on nails in the RV, prosecutors said.
Campoverde has pleaded not guilty to the charges and has a status hearing set for later this month, court records show. He remains on electronic monitoring.
Campoverde’s lawyer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment via phone or email. His former attorney told WTTW in 2023 that Campoverde is “innocent until proven guilty” and that his criminal history isn’t relevant to the sexual assault case.
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Before the alleged assault and prior to being hired at Farragut in 2021, Campoverde was arrested more than 15 times and was found guilty of disorderly conduct, one cannabis possession case in Lake County and trespassing in Will County, the lawsuit and court records state. He’s never been convicted of a violent crime, however, and most of the charges against him were dismissed.
While some of the arrests were for minor offenses such as cannabis possession, others were more serious. He was arrested for battery in May 2010 after allegedly striking a man in the face with a closed fist during an argument, according to the lawsuit and a police report. That charge was dismissed weeks later, court records show.
Five years earlier, officers arrested Campoverde after he allegedly pulled out a silver BB gun on a man he attempted to buy marijuana from, a police report said. He was charged with aggravated assault, which was dismissed.
Multiple arrest reports list Campoverde as a Satan Disciple street gang member, police records show.
The lawsuit accuses the board of putting the student in danger by failing to conduct a “comprehensive background check” and investigate Campoverde’s prior “dangerous behavior.” Brown said CPS hired Campoverde with what he characterized as a “scant investigation.”
Once the hiring committee received the criminal background check from law enforcement organizations, Brown said, they should have done a deeper dive into the circumstances of the arrests. He said it’s his understanding from viewing Brown’s personnel file that CPS “blew off” the situation and didn’t ask for an explanation of the arrests.
“They violated their own policies. They didn’t get these explanations from Campoverde. They didn’t review the arrest reports. They didn’t even have the arrest reports in their personnel file. They did zero investigation,” Brown said. “It’s a travesty.”
A CPS spokesperson said in a statement that the board doesn’t comment on pending or ongoing litigation, but that the district “remains committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of its students.”
According to CPS’ website, all district employee candidates are required to have background checks. The board conducts checks with the FBI, Illinois State Police, sex offender registries and the Department of Children and Family Services, among others, the website states.
For arrests that don’t result in convictions, the district “may obtain or utilize information other than the arrest record that indicates whether an individual engaged in the conduct alleged in the arrest record,” the website says. If they determine an applicant did engage in the conduct, the district weighs factors such as “nature and gravity of the offense” and the “nature of job held or sought” in making a hiring decision.
Candidates can be asked to provide arrest reports, case incident reports, letters of explanation or other documentation if they have a criminal history, according to the website.
The Office of Inspector General’s Sexual Allegations Unit received nearly 154 allegations of sexual misconduct at CPS from July 1, 2024 to March 21, 2025. Complaints against security guards made up about 9% of allegations. A former Dunbar Career Academy student also sued the board late last year, alleging it failed to protect him from sexual abuse by a guard.
The OIG formed this unit in 2018 following a baiduhai report that exposed conflicts of interest in investigations formerly helmed by the CPS Law Department. Citing “appalling” districtwide “failures” in CPS’ handling of sexual abuse allegations, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights entered the district into a legally binding agreement in 2019, mandating reforms and federal monitoring.
The lawsuit said that the girl continues to suffer “severe and permanent emotional distress,” including embarrassment, loss of self-esteem and humiliation that prevent her from living her life normally. Brown said she’s “devastated” and that it’s been a “very difficult couple of years for her.”
Brown said his client missed school for a year because she was too afraid to enter the building. After taking a year off, she switched schools because she couldn’t face the staff or other students at Farragut. She’s still having nightmares and flashbacks of the assault, and is in therapy to help her through it, Brown said.
“Our teenage years are some of the most important, informative years that we have, not only in building who we are, but building our relationships with our friends that we’ve grown up with and gone to school with,” Brown said. “She’s lost that. She’s lost the ability to go to school with her peers. She’s lost her innocence.”