Concord School Board member Barbara Higgins, a girls’ cross country coach in the neighboring Bow School District, has been suspended from her coaching job due to possible boundary issues with students, according to a letter written to parents by Bow Superintendent Dean Cascadden.
Cascadden wrote in his letter to Bow athletes’ parents on Oct. 16 that the suspension relates to “policy concerns around communication methods, transportation and memorialization.”
Higgins was suspended on Sept. 25, according to Cascadden. Bow High School Principal Brian O’Connell completed his initial investigation on Oct. 7. The district is still investigating one issue “centering around maintaining appropriate adult to student (coach to player) emotional boundaries,” Cascadden wrote in his letter.
Higgins was asked to have no contact with members of the team during the investigation, which was expected to last through the fall season.
Reached Tuesday, Higgins said the accusations are untrue and she did nothing wrong.
“As everyone in the Concord community knows, I’m a very transparent and public person. While I can’t speak about the ongoing investigation, I’m disheartened by my recent suspension from the Bow High School girl’s cross-country coach position,” she said in a statement emailed to the Monitor.
“While I understand the need for the school district to follow through on all concerns raised by parents, students, or the greater school community, I have done nothing wrong,” she added. “I cooperated completely with the Bow School District’s investigation and look forward to resolving these concerns. I’m not going to apologize for offering emotional support to the athletes I coach, as well as others in the greater Concord community. I have always done this throughout my 30-year career in education. This experience has been disappointing but this is what happens when you work as hard as I have, to go above and beyond for students and athletes.”
Higgins has served as the Bow High School girls’ cross country coach since 2014. She was previously a health teacher and cross country coach at Concord High School. In 2010, then-superintendent Chris Rath recommended Higgins be dismissed from the Concord School District after she said Higgins had disparaged colleagues to students and swore in class, according to a letter written by Rath in 2010.
Higgins “repeatedly ignored and/or defied school district regulations … for changing students’ grades, the school’s policy regarding students’ use of cellphones; the school’s policy regarding release of students … prior to the bell and the School District’s Acceptable (Internet) Use policy,” Rath wrote in November 2010.
Higgins resigned from her position two months later despite a movement by her students who felt she had been treated unfairly by Concord administration. Students created Facebook group titled “Bring Barb Higgins back.”
Higgins said at the time the accusations against her were untrue. Further details surrounding Higgins’s departure were never made public.
After she left the district, Higgins ran for a seat on the Concord School Board and won. She served two three-year terms, but lost in 2017, before being re-elected in 2018. Her current term expires in 2021.
Cascadden said he could not elaborate much more on the matter in Bow, citing personnel exemptions.
“It was at times difficult to discuss some of the issues,” Cascadden wrote in his letter to families. “There were many positive aspects of the team and the coach that were shared in this process.”
The district has contacted the New Hampshire Department of Education about the concern, Cascadden said.
Cascadden said Higgins has not been fired, but suspended. He said it’s standard practice to suspend an individual while an investigation is ongoing.
“The investigation is ongoing, and we have not made a decision about next year at all,” he said. “After the season ends, we will weigh everything together and see how that one issue plays out.”
Bow contracted with an interim coach, Sara Krause, to finish out the season.
Speaking generally, Cascadden said that Bow, like all school districts, has struggled with where to set boundaries with teachers and students in the age of technology and social media.
“One of the things we really have struggled with is methods of communication – kids text all the time and when a coach is working with a team and you’re trying to keep the team organized, kids don’t read emails – they text,” he said. “We are trying to work out what is an appropriate mode of communication and whether texting is ever appropriate.”
Following the news of her suspension this fall, some members of the Concord area community have rallied to Higgins’ defense. Annie Gregoire, a cross country and indoor track alumni of Bow High School, wrote in an email to the Monitor that Higgins always made her and her teammates feel welcome and supported.
“Without Barb my high school experience would have been a lot different. Her supportive attitude helped me glide through every season with a smile on my face,” said Gregoire, who graduated from Bow High in 2019. “I faced her for every difficult issue I had going on in high school. She was not just my coach, but my life mentor. Her strength helped me through some of the darkest times of my life.”
Emma Conley, a fellow 2019 Bow graduate and track athlete, said Higgins encouraged her athletes to care for members of their community and built confidence in her runners that extended beyond the track.
“Every year on September 11, Barb sent us off on a scavenger hunt. This wasn’t just any scavenger hunt, though. The things listed mostly consisted of thanking people. We thanked custodians, veterans, police officers, and firefighters for their service. We then would go to the center of town and sing the national anthem to honor those who had fallen,” she wrote in an email.
“Before every single race my team huddled up and Barb sat in the middle. We repeated after her, ‘I am strong, I am kind, I am brave,’ ” Conley said.
Catherine Parker, a parent of two former Bow athletes, said the community rallied around Higgins after Molly Banzhoff, Higgins’s 13-year-old daughter, died of complications from an undetected brain tumor in the spring of 2016.
“Barb’s daughters, Molly and Gracie, were in the dance and theatre community in the Concord area, and many of the girls knew her and were friends with her,” she said of members of the track team. “It was devastating for everyone.”
Darlene Gildersleeve of Hopkinton, whose daughter worked with Higgins when she taught at Parker Academy, said Higgins has been a powerful voice on the Concord School Board in recent months.
Gildersleeve, who led a campaign for the removal of Concord Superintendent Terri Forsten, Concord High Principal Tom Sica and Acting Superintendent Donna Palley, said Higgins is one of the only board members that has been willing to be open with the public as school board members review a report by an independent investigator into district administrators’ handling of sexual misconduct complaints brought forward by students.
“This all feels like an attack on her,” Gildersleeve said of reports about misconduct surrounding Higgins. “I think it’s a method to discredit her because she has been a minority voice on the school board and she is advocating for students and advocating for the release of the report.”