Key Differentiators Between the D. Stafford & Associates Title IX Team and Other Consultants and Consulting Firms
- All of the team leaders and the majority of the Title IX Team members were practitioners in higher education prior to becoming consultants, representing a range of institution types and from the departments most commonly intersecting with Title IX including human resources, student conduct, threat assessment, residence life, and campus police.
- All of our highly-skilled Title IX Team leaders have served as a Title IX Coordinator or Deputy Coordinator in a full time, part-time or interim basis.
- The Title IX Team partners with additional associates to conduct investigations, audits, and trainings. Associates include multiple current and former campus police chiefs and Title IX coordinators, diversity officers, private investigators, counselors, and retired law enforcement from the NYPD Special Victims Division.
- The Title IX Team has drafted or edited more than 85 Title IX policies for every type of institution including public and private, 2 and 4 years, religiously affiliated and secular, as well as professional institutions such as law schools and medical schools.
- The Title IX Team develops and facilitates national classes for Title IX Coordinators (a series of 3 classes) and/or Investigators (a series of 7 classes), along with national and institution-specific courses for investigators, decision-makers, and advisors, all of which are revised regularly in response to new legislation or federal guidance. The DSA Title IX Team has trained more than 10,800 students in national classes and on-campus programs.
- The Title IX Team conducts investigations for schools across the country, and has experience covering a broad range of Title IX behaviors including hostile environment and quid pro quo sexual harassment, cyber harassment, rape, fondling, statutory rape, dating violence, domestic violence, exploitation, and stalking. The cases they have investigated have included multiple complainants and respondents, repeat offenders, incapacitation, and counterclaims. The cases have involved students and employees including senior leaders, faculty, coaches, police officers, athletes, Greeks, alums, and graduate students and managed on and off campus cases.
- The Title IX team also conducts investigations of other civil rights violations including Title VI, Title VII, and instances of intersecting behaviors. Other investigative work has included general student and employee misconduct and employee performance issues.
- The Title IX Team teaches classes for individual client institutions on developing, implementing, and managing threat assessment teams.
- The Title IX Team conducts audits of functions and departments utilizing their years of professional experience in conjunction with tools and certifications held by the different members. Past audits have included a 360 assessment of the leadership team, audits of student conduct and threat assessment teams, assessments of departmental culture, reviews of police standard operating procedures, facilitated focus groups, response to biased events, expert witness work, statistical examinations of data, and detailed case reviews.
- After the release of the new regulations, the Title IX Team created numerous training programs to unpack the changes for Title IX practitioners across the country, offering over 200 hours of programming in May and June of 2020 alone. They created new courses for decision-makers and advisors and launched new national and on-campus programs in September of 2020.