The suit comes as the Philadelphia school police force finds itself under fire for too little training and lax hiring and screening practices for officers, some of whom also have arrest records and discipline problems on the job, an Inquirer investigation found.
Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison said last week that he plans to recommend to the district that training and hiring and screening practices for the more than 400 school police officers be upgraded.
Like city police officers, he said, they should get 32 hours of training compared with the current four, be screened for drugs, and undergo psychological testing.
District officials said they had not seen the suit and declined comment, as is customary in the cases of lawsuits. The district's acting superintendent, Leroy Nunery II, and chief inspector Myron Patterson, who leads the school police, were named in the suit, as was school principal Michael Calderone.
The Inquirer is withholding the name of the girl and her father. By policy, the paper does not identify victims in cases where improper touching is alleged.
A report last year by Safe Havens, a safety consulting firm, also has criticized school police for their search and pat-down methods, calling the searches "invasive" and saying they likely would not stand a court challenge. The group evaluated safety operations in the district's most dangerous schools.
It also noted that female officers failed to use the backs of their hands when searching, which is standard procedure.
"The analysts also noted that many of these pat down searches were also poorly executed because officers missed significant portions of the areas to be searched," the report said.
Eight school police officers - six male and two female - were in the room, along with teachers, the suit said. None were named.
