The story that dominated headlines in Concord this year began long before 2019.
Although Concord High School special education teacher Howie Leung was arrested in April, accused of raping a former student, Leung’s misconduct and the school district’s response to accusations against him date back at least five years ago, to 2014.
In 2014, a seventh-grader at Rundlett Middle School expressed concerns about how Leung was behaving with some of her female classmates. Rather than take action against the teacher, Rundlett’s principal Tom Sica suspended the student for three days for spreading “malicious and slanderous gossip.”
The district has provided no records that show any investigation was ever conducted into Leung’s behavior after the student’s report.
Other reports by female students in December 2018 about Leung kissing a senior in a car outside the high school, showed how school staff – including a guidance counselor – sought to discount what had been reported and questioned the truthfulness of those who came forward.
The revelations led the community to question if a culture of victim-blaming in the school district had festered, unchecked for years.
The questions led to the hiring of an independent attorney to investigate school officials’ response to reports about Leung, and later, a school board vote to terminate the contracts of Sica and former district superintendent, Terri Forsten. This district also implemented mandatory training for staff about reporting and trauma and will hire a Title IX coordinator and compliance officer in the new year to ensure reports are properly documented and investigated in the future.
Letters from union representatives written in February show that Leung was spoken to on a few occasions about his conduct in his classroom while working at Concord High School as recently as 2017 and 2018, and at least one of those conversations was regarding boundary issues with students.
It was the report by several female students that they saw Leung kiss a Concord High senior in his car that led to an investigation of Leung by assistant principal Steve Rothenberg, who found that Leung had “more probably than not” had inappropriate contact with a student. However, school officials never chose to alert police, including the school resource officer posted at Concord High.
For three and a half months while the investigation was being completed, Leung was allowed to remain at Concord High School, having everyday contact with students. Leung was recommended to be put on a professional improvement plan that would include courses on teacher/ student boundaries.
The school district then handed the investigation over to the state Department of Education to investigate whether Leung had violated the Department of Education’s code of conduct.
Concord High guidance counselor Karen Slick and art teacher Jeff Fullam, co-chairs of the union grievance committee, challenged the move, which could lead to Leung losing his teaching credentials.
The teachers wrote a 5-page letter to Sica trying to disprove and discredit the girls who saw Leung in the car with the students, and the district’s investigation. It questioned whether the girls could have seen what they reported, cited the unreliability of eyewitness accounts and suggested that the girls could have been punished for harassing their classmate by asking her about the interaction with Leung.
They claimed Leung was being painted in an “unfairly negative light.”
However, when officials at the state’s Department of Education received the investigation, they quickly reported Leung to police. He was investigated and then arrested on charges of aggravated rape of a child with a 10-year age difference, aggravated indecent assault and battery on a child under age 14, and aggravated indecent assault and battery on a person age 14 or older in Massachusetts.
Police said Leung was grooming female middle school students. He enlisted the girl to work at a summer school where he was the director in Massachusetts, and repeatedly assaulted her there.
Leung has pleaded not guilty to all counts.
Sica went on voluntary leave in June while Djuna Perkins, the independent attorney from Massachusetts, investigated administrators’ response to reports about Leung. A Monitor request for his emails at the time he was on leave found that he continued to work remotely in his role as principal during that time.
The school board, however, has not released the findings of the report into Forsten, Sica’s and other district staff member’s response to reports about Leung. The Monitor has filed suit with the American Civil Liberties Union to obtain the 100-plus page report, arguing that student safety overrides any privacy rights of the individuals involved.