Concord’s school board is trying to move on after a tumultuous year while dragging behind it an anchor of community distrust. Committees can be created and new policies established, but the distrust will remain as long as the board refuses to come clean about the systemic problems that allowed a teacher accused of inappropriate conduct with female students to remain in the classroom for years after the first report was filed.
The teacher, Howie Leung, was ultimately arrested on charges of sexual assault and the rape of a former Concord student.
The school board hired Massachusetts lawyer and former prosecutor Djuna Perkins to investigate the district’s handling of complaints about Leung, but it has refused to make even a portion of the 102-page report public. A second 10-page Perkins report on steps the district should take in the future was made public, but it shed no light on what happened.
The community remains in the dark. It has yet to receive an explanation for the board’s firing of the district’s superintendent or the resignation of Concord High School’s principal.
The Monitor, along with the N.H. ACLU and a concerned parent, has sued to make a redacted version of the first report public. Merrimack County Superior Court Judge Brian Tucker heard arguments in the case last week. The school board, through its lawyers, wants the judge to dismiss the case, arguing the report is “categorically exempt” from disclosure because it relates to internal personnel practices. Additionally, the board claims releasing the report could harm students or innocent staff members, even if they aren’t named. Indeed they should be protected, but the law does not, as the board’s lawyers claim, mandate secrecy. The board is free to inform the public about what went wrong and why. It has, we believe, a duty to do so.
All educators, under New Hampshire law, have a mandatory duty to report when they have reason to suspect that a child has been abused. It appears that more than a few Concord School District employees failed to do so in response to complaints about Leung. If, as comments by interim superintendent Frank Bass suggest, district employees were unclear about who to report suspected abuse to and when, why? The duty to report requirement in the state’s child protection act became law in 1979.
As reported by the Monitor’s Leah Willingham, board vice president Tom Croteau believes that the report can’t be redacted to protect identities because “the way the report is written is that if you read paragraph 1, 2, 3 and 4 you would know the entire report, and we cannot give that sort of information.”
Perhaps. But if so, why was the report structured that way? Perkins and her firm are experts in their field. They must know that regaining community trust requires transparency.
If the court declines to make any of the report public, the board should ask Perkins to produce, at a minimum, a synopsis of the investigation’s findings, one that does not violate the privacy of victims. Taxpayers have paid tens of thousands of dollars for an investigation, reports and school district legal bills but have gotten little in the way of information for their money. The public has, as several parents have said, no way to know if the district has fixed its problems if they aren’t told what was broken.