A Merrimack County Superior Court judge will review a 100-plus page report written by an independent investigator about Concord School District officials’ handling of sexual misconduct complaints and determine if any parts of it can be made public.
Judge Brian Tucker denied the Concord School District’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed in November by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Concord Monitor and Concord parent Dellie Champagne in his April 6 order.
Tucker said the district did not prove that the report should be “categorically exempt” from public disclosure because it deals with internal personnel practices, as its lawyers have argued.
The report could shed light on whether school policies were followed by district employees or board members, who are not employees, Tucker said.
“While the district acts through its employees, the complaint does not describe the investigation as one confined to employee conduct…Conceivably, the report discusses whether school board members or others not employed by the district complied with district policies,” Tucker continued.
The school district will have two weeks to provide the report to the judge to review.
Gilles Bissonnette, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties of New Hampshire who argued for the release of the report, said his organization was pleased with the judge’s decision.
“We will continue to push for its release, excluding information that could identify students,” Bissonnette said. “The taxpayers, parents, and residents of Concord have a right to gain access to this report. Despite the Concord School District’s recognition that it made mistakes, it has kept the public in the dark as to what exactly the District knew and did. The public deserves full transparency as to what happened in this case.”
The independent report was completed 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.
Leung, who was employed in the district for 13 years, was arrested in April and charged with sexually assaulting a former student. His inappropriate behavior with the female student allegedly began when she was in middle school.
Since Leung’s arrest, members of the community said they came forward with concerns about Leung’s behavior before his arrest but administrators turned a blind eye. One student was suspended by Principal Tom Sica when she was in middle school in 2014 for saying Leung’s behavior with some female students made her feel uncomfortable. Sica accused her of spreading gossip.
In December 2018, several female students reported seeing Leung kiss a female classmate in a car outside the high school. As school administrators investigated, Concord High School guidance counselor Karen Slick and art teacher Jeff Fullam – in their roles as union representatives – tried to discredit and disprove the student accounts, saying the girls likely didn’t see what they reported and argued eyewitness testimony is unreliable.
It is not known if other complaints were made about Leung or if district officials had investigated his interaction with female students in the past. School officials have repeatedly refused to answer those questions saying it’s a personnel matter. The contents of the report may provide some answers.
Two days after receiving Perkins’s report, the school board voted unanimously to terminate the contracts of Sica and Superintendent Terri Forsten without any public explanation.
School District lawyers have maintained the entire report should be categorically automatically exempt from the public because part of it deals with “internal personnel matters.”
Lawyer for the school district Dean Eggert argued in court in January that it was unnecessary for the judge to read the report to make his ruling.
“I want to concede very clearly that there is a public interest, but even our constitution and our Legislature, when they adopted this exemption, waived that,” he said to Tucker. “You are being invited to second guess that.”
Tucker said that based on the information presented from both sides, the document should be reviewed by the court.
“Review in-camera is appropriate [w]hen there is a question whether [materials] are exempt from public access,” Tucker wrote.
Bissonnette asked in January if lawyers for the ACLU, the school district and a lawyer that has intervened in the case representing the interests of two students who were interviewed for the report, could each review it in order to have an educated conversation about what information could be released for public consumption.
Tucker left that question open-ended in his order.
“The plaintiffs asked that counsel for both sides participate in the review, but in the first instance it will be by the court,” he wrote.