Nine years ago, she was sent home before Christmas break, suspended by her principal for speaking out about a teacher’s unusual attention toward her classmates.

Ana Goble, a 13-year-old Rundlett Middle School student at the time, was accused of spreading false rumors and handed an out-of-school suspension on Dec. 19, 2014. The teacher, Howie Leung, led the charge to discipline her.

When Goble returned to school on Jan. 5, things got worse.

For the rest of the school year, Leung targeted Goble by calling her out in front of other students and humiliating her to the point where she was in tears “over and over again.”

The district never investigated Leung back then and instead repeatedly nominated him for teacher of the year honors.

Secretly, Leung was sexually assaulting a Concord student. The abuse continued until the victim eventually left the school district.

Leung was arrested in 2019 after Concord High School students said they saw Leung kissing a different student, who never pursued criminal charges. It was eventually state officials, not anyone in the Concord School District, who contacted police. Leung was charged with sexually assaulting the Concord student when she was 13 and 14 years old at a summer program in Massachusetts.

In July, Leung pleaded guilty to multiple felony charges including aggravated rape of a child.

“There were other teachers who were witnessing it every day but, for whatever reason, they didn’t say anything and they just ignored it,” Goble, now a student at the University of Oregon, said recently. “If all of us 13-year-olds could see what was happening, I don’t understand how these grown adults and professionals couldn’t.”

Changes to the district

Leung’s arrest led to upheaval in Concord, including the firing of the school superintendent and the principal, who was Leung’s supervisor.

An internal personnel investigation into the allegations of sexual misconduct was conducted on behalf of the school district and found administrators ignored numerous warning signs, allowed Leung to remain too close to students and didn’t thoroughly investigate complaints made against him.

Some recommendations included staff training around grooming and boundary violations, strict policies to respond to sexual misconduct and allegations, staff and administrative “red flag” training and limitations on student-teacher relationships, including social media interaction, alone time with students, transportation between staff and students, out-of-school relationships and physical contact.

“Recovery from these events will require considerable time, resources and reflection, but this process also presents the Concord School District with the opportunity to heal and move forward as a stronger community by creating robust response mechanisms, and more importantly, a culture that recognizes and understands the realities of sexual misconduct and the harm it causes, encourages reporting and holds offenders accountable,” the report stated.

School officials took steps to meet them and have continued to provide training, education and transparency to both employees and families.

“We’re dealing with the aftermath, and we did have another case come up with a former student,” said Title IX Coordinator Karen Fischer-Anderson, who was hired in 2020. “I look at where we were and what happened subsequent to that in terms of a real live case. It shows we have markers in place and we are trying to be proactive, which means a lot of training.”

In 2021, Concord High teacher Joshua Harwood was accused of engaging in inappropriate sexual behavior during school hours, including allegations of prostitution and child pornography. Some of the images involved a child under 18 who was a former student. Harwood was immediately placed on administrative leave and later pleaded guilty to the allegations. He was sentenced to prison.

The school’s reaction and collaboration with the Concord Police Department was quick and showed the progress that the school district has made since 2019, Fischer-Anderson said. Since she began her employment with the school district, no formal Title IX complaints have been filed and student complaints about cyberbullying and sexual harassment have been promptly investigated.

“The first thing I did when I was hired was devour the Howie Leung investigation to look at what went wrong and what we can do better,” she said. “We trained our administrators on how to investigate, and we’ve established relationships with the Concord Police Department, DCYF and the school resource officer.”

“In addition to training and investigation kinds of things, we’ve done work around policy,” said Superintendent Kathleen Murphy. “That’s really important, and any of our policies go before the school board. We gave the community the chance to see we were looking at policy and make sure it would support transparency and accessibility. Some things were tightened up, too, to make sure that the lines between teacher and student were very clear.”

Additionally, education about grooming, boundaries and sexual misconduct was forged into discussions with high school students through a series of video presentations discussing what healthy boundaries and grooming behaviors look like, Fischer-Anderson said.

“In middle school, it’s hard for them to articulate what they see and what that means,” Murphy said. “We have to work specifically with the middle school kids, which is a constant challenge. How you deal with it at a sixth grade level is very different than how you deal with it at an eighth grade level. We need to continue to work with them.”

Because trust was broken between staff and students, Concord High Principal Tim Herbert has been working to restore it by supporting student voices, encouraging them to speak out about their concerns and inviting them to forge relationships with staff and resources available to them, he said.

“They might not always feel like they need to report something to us, but they might have something they want to share with us and we might have to go a little deeper with them,” Herbert said. “We had these resources before but we didn’t have direct pathways on how to access them. The last few years, we’ve been educating students on that.”

Guilty plea and some relief

Goble was in the courtroom earlier this year when Leung pleaded guilty to six felony counts of felonious sexual assault involving a minor and was led out of a Massachusetts courtroom in handcuffs to begin his seven-year sentence at the Souza Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Mass.

As part of a plea deal, Leung will be required to register as a sex offender, undergo treatment and rehabilitation for sex offending, stay away from the victim and her family, comply with all state requirements and avoid applying for coaching or teaching licenses in addition to having no unsupervised contact with children under the age of 16 with the exception of his children. Upon his release, he will be required to wear a GPS locator for the duration of his probation.

“It was amazing to hear him say he was guilty and even better seeing his face when they put the handcuffs on him and walked him out,” Goble said.

In a separate interview detailing her experience, Fabiana McLeod said she is still trying to overcome the abuse. The Monitor does not name victims of sexual abuse without their consent. McLeod said she decided to tell her story to help protect other students.

Between seventh and eighth grade, Leung invited McLeod to join him at a summer program held at the Fessenden School in Newton, Mass., where he was the assistant director. In the confines of her dorm room on campus, McLeod was repeatedly sexually assaulted more than 20 times throughout the summer.

As the sexual abuse continued, Leung would become aggressive if McLeod resisted. When she tried to distance herself from him upon entering high school, Leung told her to keep their relationship a secret.

Goble’s parents Kate Frey and Quentin Goble eventually sued the school district for the way their daughter was treated. The family settled for $10,000.

“We weren’t in it to break the bank, we wanted to make things right for Ana and clear her name,” Frey said. “We wanted other kids that have been victimized to feel more comfortable to come forward and the arrogance and incompetence of the school district just made it so much worse for these kids.”

Back then, Goble didn’t know what the term “grooming” meant. In the wake of new training and new leaders, the school district should be better equipped to act.

“In a perfect world, I would have known the definition of grooming, but that responsibility shouldn’t have been on me,” Goble said. “I wish part of me could have pointed it out or put a name to it but I was only 13, I should never have had to even think that maybe my seventh grade teacher was grooming a classmate of mine.”

Editor’s note: This article was written by former Monitor reporter Jamie Costa when she was a member of the newspaper’s staff. She now works for the Union Leader.