The Concord School District spent $140,000 on an investigation into a teacher charged with sexual assault, according to district financial records.
However, the total costs associated with the school district’s response to the arrest of Howie Leung, including training and hiring of staff to support students, is much higher – closer to half a million dollars.
Add in the legal costs associated with trying to keep from the public the investigative report into how the district responded to complaints about Leung, and the bills are still mounting. Last week, the school district agreed to release a redacted version of the report after the state Supreme Court ruled that records related to internal personnel practices aren’t always exempt under the Right-to-Know law. A lawyer for the school district said the process of redacting the 100-page report will take “many hours.”
Already, the district is paying a combined $146,283 for the temporary salaries of interim superintendent Frank Bass and Concord High Principal Mike Reardon, who has recently been given the permanent job at the school.
The sick and vacation payout to former superintendent Terri Forsten and former Concord High principal Tom Sica, whose contracts were terminated by the school board after they read an independent attorney’s investigation into how staff handled reports about the arrested teacher, totaled $109,529.27.
And the district paid $18,172.70 combined to host Know & Tell training on mandatory reporting, rent out space to host the training this fall and hire a consultant to help draft a strategic plan on how to move forward in the district after the teacher’s arrest, according to financial records.
Concord School District Business Administrator Jack Dunn said the district’s financial office had to find creative ways to fund these expenses without compromising student programming.
The district dedicated $252,365 of year-end unassigned funds to help cover the report and other legal expenses associated with it. There was also around $61,000 in savings in a copier contract.
Many costs related to the investigation into Howie Leung are not quantifiable, such as staff time that has been spent organizing district-wide training, pulling together committees for student safety initiatives and regular meetings with community partners like the Crisis Center of Central New Hampshire, the Concord Police Department and the Division of Children, Youth and Families. There is also the emotional cost of the ordeal, which has weighed heavily on students, teachers and parents, which cannot be tallied in dollars and cents.
However, numbers that are clearly tied to the investigation start to paint a picture of the impact of the teacher’s arrest on the district in the last year.
Leung was arrested on April 3, 2019, and faces two counts of aggravated rape of a child, one count of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14, and one count of indecent assault and battery on a child over 14 in Massachusetts.
The former Concord student told police she was sexually assaulted by Leung multiple times in 2015 and 2016 when she was under the age of 16 at the Fessenden School in West Newton, Mass., which provides an overnight English Language Learning summer program. The victim had been recruited by Leung to help out with the summer program, according to court documents.
She reported being inappropriately touched by Leung on several occasions at Rundlett Middle School, both on school property and in his vehicle when he gave her rides home, according to court documents.
One of the victim’s classmates was suspended by Sica, who was principal of Rundlett at the time, after she said the way Leung treated some female students made her uncomfortable. She came forward after Leung’s arrest, five years after her suspension, raising questions about how Leung managed to stay employed in the district for so long – 13 years – when there were warning signs about his inappropriate behavior.
Concord school officials were alerted Dec. 10, 2018, that Leung had “engaged in inappropriate conduct” with an 18-year-old female student, who is a different student than the one Leung is accused of sexually assaulting.
District officials said they did not report the incident with the 18-year-old to Concord police because the student was above the legal age of consent. However, they did forward the results of their investigation to the Department of Education, which ultimately notified authorities.
After Leung’s arrest, the Monitor obtained letters from two union representatives to Sica through a Right-To-Know request that showed they tried to discredit students who reported seeing Leung with the 18-year-old student, and discourage administrators from sending their findings to the Department of Education.
The board commissioned Djuna Perkins, a former domestic violence prosecutor from Boston, to complete an investigation into staffs’ response to reports about Leung.
The report, which took more than three months to prepare and included the accounts of dozens of students and teachers, cost the district $69,597.42. The district also hired a liaison to work between Perkins and the board, so the investigation would remain independent. Stephen Bennett of Wadleigh, Starr and Peters was paid $72,982.50 in his role as a liaison between the board and Perkins. Bennett was responsible for presenting the report to the board and relaying questions to Perkins from the board about the report.
After the board received the report, it took quick action and voted to terminate the contracts of Forsten and Sica. The body did not, however, disclose any information publicly about why it had terminated the contracts of the administrators and what information was included in the report.
In January, the American Civil Liberties Union, Concord parent Dellie Champagne and the Monitor sued the district for access to the report. The district paid Wadleigh, Starr and Peters lawyer Dean Eggert $15,631.50 to argue before a judge why the report should not be released. The district now expects to release portions of the report in the next three weeks, after a thorough legal review.
There are more expenses to come. As the strategic plan committee continues to meet monthly to draft a path forward, each meeting costs around $910, as it is facilitated by Gerri King, a consultant from Human Dynamics.
A major expense was the hiring of a School Safety Compliance Officer, Karen Fischer-Anderson, whose salary was budgeted at $137,462.54.
Fischer-Anderson, a former prosecutor for the Navy, will oversee the district’s response to reports of discrimination, harassment, bullying, retaliation and sexual violence. She is expected to identify and address any patterns and systematic problems revealed by those complaints, and provide training to staff and students.
The money being spent on the investigation is about 60 percent of the $861,739 the district received in state stabilization and adequacy aid, part of a $138 million increase in education funding for this and next fiscal year that was approved by the Legislature this fall. Districts have been warned that the funding is not permanent, Dunn said.