The Concord School Board has forwarded to the state Department of Education a 100-plus page investigation about district officials’ response to complaints about a former teacher who was later charged with sexually assaulting a student.
Meanwhile, board members continue to discuss why it has been kept out of the public eye.
Two new board members said after reading the report they understand some of the reasons for secrecy, but still want more information to be publicly released.
“There were specific people, along with the superintendent and the principal, that need to take some ownership for what happened,” David Parker, who was elected in November, said at a Monday night board meeting.
Gina Cannon, a recently elected board member who ran on a campaign of transparency, said she was surprised at how difficult it would be to redact the report.
“I did not expect going into reading the report, how absolutely interconnected the identities of the various interviewees would be in the report,” Cannon said. “It is in my opinion, not even remotely possible to take a black magic marker and redact out parts that you would need to in order to protect the privacy interests that people have.”
“But I do want to talk to people, maybe not on the record, about if some type of summary could be written about the systemic failures and where they were so that people can get more information without necessarily saying, ‘this person did this or that person did that or this person said that,’ ” she added.
The school board voted unanimously to terminate the contracts of former Concord High School Principal Tom Sica and Superintendent Terri Forsten after receiving a report on Sept. 23 by Massachusetts attorney Djuna Perkins, who was hired to investigate the district’s response to student reports of inappropriate behavior by former special education teacher Howie Leung in 2014 and 2018.
The board has not disclosed the reasons for Sica and Forsten’s removal or the contents of the report, saying it’s protected from disclosure because it involves “internal personnel practices.”
One student complained about Leung in December 2014 when she was in middle school, before the alleged sexual assaults took place. She said the way Leung treated some of her classmates made her feel uncomfortable. She was suspended by Sica for three days for spreading “malicious and slanderous gossip.”
In December 2018, several female students reported seeing Leung kissing another student in a car. Yet Leung stayed at the school working with students on a daily basis for three and a half months before he was put on leave.
During that time two union representatives tried to discredit the female students who came forward saying they couldn’t have seen what they claimed and questioning the reliability of eyewitness testimony, according to letters obtained by the Monitor through a Right-To-Know request.
Speaking in general terms, Interim Superintendent Frank Bass said the report identified a communication “systems failure.”
On Monday, Parker said those aren’t the words he’d use.
“To sugarcoat it as just a communication problem I think is wrong,” he said. “Because I don’t agree with you. You’re speaking in your interpretation, not my interpretation.”
“I do agree there’s systemic problems with our district, many of which you are addressing. But I don’t want to be surprised by the state Department of Education getting the report and then coming back and coming up with different conclusions than we’ve come up with,” Parker continued.
Parker said he sees part of the problem as a cultural problem, and part of it as a personnel error.
“I’m not saying everyone should resign,” he said on the phone, the day after the meeting. “There are different levels of intervention that can take place – but if it’s not done, we risk it happening again. People don’t change that much, especially if they aren’t held accountable.”
Bass said he wasn’t trying to sugarcoat anything.
“What I’m saying is there are issues that need to be addressed on a systemic level and I will do that. I also said that I will follow through on recommendations that are in the Perkins report. I will do that,” he said. “I’m not going to speak about that here at this meeting, but I will do that. I also said that I am in coordination with the state Department of Education on how all this is going to play itself out. There will be no surprises, I can assure you of that.”
Bass said he is reviewing communication protocols in the district and talking with the DOE about doing more training in the district on reporting. The district has been sending out surveys to staff and students about policies and it created a task force that will focus on school safety plans for the future. The district has created a job description for – and is hoping to hire – a Title IX coordinator/compliance officer to start at the district, Bass said.
“We are trying to create a system by which we can feel comfortable that principals on down the line know what their role and responsibility is, and how those triggers are to be handled and who makes the appropriate decisions and at what time they make them,” Bass said.
Bass said the board forwarded the 102-page report to the Department of Education because it was required to by law.
The department is “an independent body and will reach their own conclusions, however, I am in touch with them and coordinating efforts where possible,” Bass explained in an email Tuesday.
However, back in October, the board did not want to give a copy to the Department of Education or Concord Police Department based on legal advice.
“Just given the legal framework, it’s kind of an all-or-nothing. If it’s turned over, it then becomes public,” School Board President Jennifer Patterson said in response to a parent question. “I think that is a question really that is bound by the legal constraints associated with the report.”
Pressure from the community for the board to release more information about the contents of the report has been mounting in recent months. The Monitor, ACLU of New Hampshire and parent Dellie Champagne have sued the district to obtain a copy of the report while protecting student privacy.
Monday’s meeting however spurred one of the more candid conversations the board has had around the report and how members feel about it.
Patterson said each member has spent hours talking about how they can release more information. She said they all want to release more.
“I certainly feel like board members agree that there’s absolutely is a strong public interest in the information in the report and I think that our attorneys said that in court,” she said. “I think the thing that is most challenging and the thing that none of us realized, certainly I didn’t realize until I actually read the report, is how significant the privacy interests are that in almost every page of that report, there is private information that we have a legal obligation to protect.”
Patterson attended the hearing at Merrimack County Superior Court where the district asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit. The judge has not yet issued a ruling.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing what attitude the court takes to it, just because it is really, really challenging from a legal perspective,” Patterson said. “It’s beyond our capacity to figure out how we balance the really complex legal challenge.”
Multiple parents have asked that the board create a third report, or executive summary that could be released to the public that wouldn’t infringe on privacy issues.
“This information is going to get out there one way or the other and I know you are working with lawyers who you think are giving you good advice,” parent Kate Frey told the board Monday. “I can tell you right now that you don’t work for those lawyers. You’re paying those lawyers on taxpayer money. We have the right to know what’s in that report and I think a solution to all of this is an executive summary.”
Parent Dan Habib, whose son had Howie Leung as a teacher, asked that the board take a public vote on creating a third report within the next month.
Several board members said they have had students or staff contact them asking for the report not to be released. Officials have said the report includes at least 10 student interviews but does not include their names.
“We are right now in the midst of asking staff to see something, say something, report it. If this were to come out as to this is the way we’re going to treat people who report things, I don’t know what that does to our culture,” Board member Tom Croteau said. “That’s what I think about at night.”
Board member Barb Higgins said the board is continuing to try to improve the way it communicates with the public.
“When policy takes over common sense, nobody is happy. If you can’t follow a policy because it doesn’t make sense, it’s a bad policy. If you can’t give a heartfelt answer because you might break a silence rule, it’s a bad silence rule,” she said. “There is so much that we can say as a board that violates nothing and I do feel that in our litigious society where we take our advice from attorneys…I feel sometimes that we get led down a path that makes nobody happy.”