Four years after Concord school officials quietly investigated reports of a popular teacher kissing a student in a car – an episode that later led to criminal charges in Massachusetts, public outrage and millions of dollars in legal costs – most of the district’s top leaders have been replaced with new faces.

Policies have been changed, including an anonymous way for students to report misconduct, a streamlined process to involve police and a new administration position that was created to supervise safety and compliance.

Despite all the changes in Concord schools, Howie Leung, the man accused of sexually assaulting a former Concord middle school student while supervisors protected him from complaints, has yet to stand trial due to repeated delays in Massachusetts criminal court.

The demand for accountability in Concord was far more swift.

Once it became clear that former administrators allowed Leung to continue teaching for four months after three female students reported they saw him kissing one of their classmates in a car on Dec. 10, 2018, concerned parents packed Concord School Board meetings, demanding answers to why they were not informed sooner and why he was allowed to remain in contact with students for so long.

By the end of summer 2019, so many parents were showing up to the basement meeting room at the school district offices that meetings were moved across town to Mill Brook School. An online petition asking the board to remove former Superintendent Terri Forsten and former Concord High principal Tom Sica garnered 2,800 signatures. As emerging reports from an investigator revealed a pattern of inaction from administrators, parent questions turned to demands for reform and requests for a solid plan to rebuild the trust with the community that many said had been broken.

In the years since, the Concord School District has undergone significant leadership transformation – seven of the 11 administrators on the district leadership team, including the current superintendent and assistant superintendent, joined the district in 2020 or later, while seven of the nine members on the Concord School Board joined in 2021 or later. The district – and Concord taxpayers – faced significant financial costs: more than $500,000 in legal costs to lawyers and Perkins, and more than $1.5 million in settlements with former students.

Administrators and parents say it’s a long road to rebuilt trust in a community.

“Trust doesn’t come automatically just because we have new people in the district, I believe that it has to be earned,” said Superintendent Kathleen Murphy, who took over leadership of the district in 2020. “How do I evaluate that? I evaluate that by things like: How have other situations been handled? In what ways did we respond to the concern?”

Murphy said that moving the district forward requires a triad of accountability, transparency and effective communication.

Policy changes

In a list of recommendations released publicly in 2019, independent investigator Djuna Perkins suggested changes the district should make to its policies and climate in the aftermath of Leung’s arrest. Among them were recommendations for a host of trainings and policy updates around teacher-student physical contact, one-on-one time, online communications and ride sharing. The district was advised to handle all sexual misconduct allegations at the district level rather than the school level, to document all reports and to place any employee on paid leave as soon as the district is made aware of “a credible allegation of sexual misconduct.”

“A sexual predator will use any tools at his or her disposal, including ambiguity of rules, a lack of enforcement of rules or a charismatic personality to accomplish it,” Perkins wrote at the time.

Safety Compliance Officer Karen Fischer-Anderson was hired in March 2020 to implement many of these recommendations and to oversee compliance with Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education including sexual harassment and assault. Her role is a unique one in New Hampshire’s public education sphere.

“When you look at most K through 12 schools in New Hampshire, I doubt you’ll find anyone like me who was hired full-time to do what I do,” Fischer-Anderson said.

Fischer-Anderson’s job focuses on educating staff and students about state laws and school district rules pertaining to discrimination and sexual harassment and making sure everyone understands the correct avenues for reporting potential misconduct. She conducts trainings, works with the school board on policy-writing and developed a response matrix detailing how the district should respond to complaints. Fischer-Anderson said the goal is to do preventative work now, with the hope that it will negate the need for response work in the future.

“I’m an optimist. I do believe that we’re better than where we used to be, but I still believe I’ve got to keep beating the drums,” Fischer-Anderson said.

Fischer-Anderson, who is based at Concord High School, performs trainings at each of the district’s schools, meets with athletic coaches and gives presentations to students at the start of the year to make sure everyone knows about her role. She does mandatory annual training for employees, in which she covers abuse and neglect and New Hampshire’s mandatory reporting requirement, sexual harassment under federal Title IX education law, bullying and cyberbullying, retaliation and how to report all of the above. During summer trainings, she has also covered grooming and boundary violations. She also does smaller group trainings on the district’s transgender and gender-nonconforming policy.

She has worked with the Concord School Board on 43 different policies, ranging from the Title IX, sexual harassment and reporting grievance process to policies protecting transgender and gender-nonconforming students and pregnant students.

In November 2019, the district launched an anonymous online tip form on the website where parents, staff and students can submit complaints and installed black boxes in the high school for written reports. The district gets an average of about two reports per month through the online tip form, according to technology director Pam McLeod; the most they ever received in one month was seven.

Fischer-Anderson says the vast majority of reports she receives are related to student bullying and cyberbullying and that most of the reports that come through the online system are related to Rundlett Middle School. Many of the bullying incidents fall under Title IX because they are related to sexual orientation or gender identity; she also receives some reports of racism, such as the use of racial slurs. Most reports are addressed at the individual school level, but Fischer-Anderson personally investigates any report involving a staff member and a student.

She encourages students and staff members to submit reports, even if they’re unsure whether it’s warranted.

“I’ll say, ‘Even if you don’t feel comfortable, still report it,’ because oftentimes we may see a pattern,” she said.

The school district put their new response matrix to use in late 2020, when then-Concord High School teacher Joshua Harwood was arrested on charges of human trafficking and manufacturing child sexual abuse images for soliciting explicit videos from a former Concord High student who was a minor.

The former student reported Harwood to a school administrator on Dec. 16, 2020, and unlike in the Leung case, the district immediately alerted the police. The superintendent swiftly placed Harwood on administrative leave and issued a no-trespass order for school grounds, pending the result of the police investigation. The police investigation uncovered evidence that Harwood solicited sex acts and explicit videos from a minor in exchange for money, and he was arrested Feb. 4, 2021, less than two months after the victim’s report.

Harwood pleaded guilty, and in Oct. 2021 he was sentenced to 3½ to seven years in New Hampshire State Prison. The extent of the proceedings, from the report to the sentencing, happened in less than a year.

‘Boundary violations’

Even before 2013, some school employees noticed red flags in Leung’s casual manner of interacting with students, according to the Perkins report, such as allowing students to call him “Howie,” allowing select students to eat lunch in his classroom every day, buying them takeout food, giving them hugs and keeping the blinds closed on his classroom windows. Still, he remained a favored teacher and was given a “distinguished educator” award by the district in 2012.

After three students reported seeing him kissing a classmate in a car in December 2018, the district’s resulting investigation took two months, during which time neither Concord Police nor the district’s previous Title IX coordinator at the time were notified. The district technology director located email correspondence in Leung’s drive that raised concerns about his relationship to the 18-year-old student and a former Rundlett Middle School student.

During the investigation, Leung deleted files from his school drive before he was instructed not to do so by school administrators. He was also never told to cease contact with the 18-year-old and continued to repeatedly call, text and show up at her house, according to New Hampshire court documents. Two teachers union representatives drafted a letter to the principal attempting to discredit the student witnesses.

In late January, former superintendent Terri Forsten forwarded the summary of the district’s investigation to the State Department of Education, who alerted Concord Police in February.

In March, a school administrator recommended Leung’s contract for renewal, with the condition that he participate in a performance improvement plan.

After a Concord Police investigation, Leung was arrested on April 3, 2019, on a fugitive from justice charge out of Massachusetts in connection with child rape charges.

The community push for accountability

In the aftermath of Leung’s arrest, Kate Frey was one of the parents actively calling for change.

Frey’s daughter, Ana Goble, was suspended as a Rundlett Middle School seventh grader in 2014 for “gossiping” after she said that the attention Leung showed certain students made her uncomfortable.

Years later, Frey feels mixed emotions. She still harbors a lot of anger toward the former Concord School District administration but is proud of the changes that have been made as a result of parent advocacy. She applauds the hiring of Fischer-Anderson and the trainings and policy work that’s occurred. While her family received a formal apology from the Concord School Board, she admitted she does still feel some resentment about not having received apologies from many of the Concord administrators who were involved at the time, most notably Tom Sica, who suspended her daughter.

“I do think that the administration at that time was hoping it would blow over or it wasn’t going to amount to much, and I do have to give the community a huge amount of credit for continuing to have their voices heard, raise their concerns over and over again until they couldn’t really brush anything under the rug,” Frey said. “I think that was all because the community was so vocal.”

Dellie Champagne was another community member actively involved in the push for accountability. In 2019 Champagne, along with the ACLU and the Concord Monitor, sued the district to release the Perkins report.

In the fall of 2019, Champagne and three other Concord parents asked the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office to investigate Concord School District officials’ handling of the Leung sexual misconduct allegations. Champagne said that since the Perkins Report wasn’t public – and after it became public, it remained heavily redacted – it was hard to understand which administrators were involved in the district’s response, and they wanted to make sure all issues of non-compliance were addressed.

“We went to the Attorney General to say, ‘Can you please take a look at this and make sure we’re not missing something?’ ” Champagne said. “We said, ‘We just want to make sure that there are no other people that need to be implicated that may have broken the law.’ ”

The state investigation began in October 2019 and took a year and a half. Thousands of documents were reviewed. At the end, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office concluded there was no basis for any criminal charges against Concord School District officials.

“Thank you for cooperating with all aspects of our investigation and meeting with us to discuss the current state of the school district in this regard,” Assistant Attorney General Heather Cherniske wrote in a letter to Superintendent Murphy on May 27, 2021. “While our criminal investigation into this matter is complete, we must continue to ensure student safety is the top priority at the Concord School District.”

Champagne said she was invited to meet with Attorney General’s Office officials again to hear the conclusions and was told that the state feels the investigation was diligent and missed nothing.

“We felt really good about that,” Champagne said. “It was just reassuring to hear from the Attorney General’s office that they felt good about the direction the school district was moving in. And we were also feeling good about that.”

Seeking closure

Fischer-Anderson said that when she trains staff members, she still encounters people who feel guilt for not noticing red flags in Leung’s behavior back in 2018 and before. And though she tells them that those types of signs are often subtle and difficult to spot, she can sense that the feeling is widespread.

“There’s a lot of guilt still in this district, from the people who were involved or knew Howie Leung,” Fischer-Anderson said. “There’s that feeling of, ‘Gosh, are we ever going to get past this?’ There’s been no resolution with regard to the criminal charges, and I think that’s hard.”

Frey believes that when Leung’s trial occurs it will likely bring a certain amount of closure to the community. However, she is not sure if her own family will ever be able to put the events fully behind them.

“Over the last four years, we have struggled as a family from time to time about this,” Frey said. “It’s with mixed emotions, because while we felt so supported by the community, we really felt so let down by our school district when our kids were really at those formative ages. I don’t know if we’ll ever have complete closure because of that.”

Fisher-Anderson said every time an incident comes up, she views it as an opportunity for the district to continue its improvement.

“What we’re trying to do is take the lessons learned, improve, say we’re going to do it and then do it, as far as process goes,” Fisher-Anderson said. “And never let something like that happen again.”

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