Vague guidelines, secretive deals shield misconduct and place students at risk (FL)

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Vague guidelines, secretive deals shield misconduct and place students at risk
Last modified: March 19. 2007 4:34AM

By CHRIS DAVIS, MATTHEW DOIG and TIFFANY LANKES
STAFF WRITERS

Rumors dogged Aubine Lee Batts for more than 20 years before the truth finally did
him in.

At least four of his bosses in two Florida school districts warned Batts that he was
too friendly with his female students.

Two principals banned him from coaching but left him in the classroom. Another
principal asked a teacher at Godby High School in Tallahassee to keep an eye on him.

It wasn't until 2001, when a teenage girl came forward with the love notes and pink
lingerie Batts gave her, that school officials fired him and turned him over to the
state regulators.

Before the state took his teaching certificate in 2002, Batts had slept with or
harassed at least three of his teenage students, state records show.

The Herald-Tribune's review of more than 14,000 investigations into teachers across
Florida found that by the time a case reaches the Department of Education, violent
and predatory teachers often have been allowed to stay in classrooms for years while
allegations rack up.

But the scope of the problem is impossible to determine because many instances of
teacher misconduct go undocumented.

In addition, there is no consistent standard guiding when school districts must
report suspicions about teacher behavior to the state.

Sometimes school administrators want to fire a teacher but feel they cannot overcome
union protections, so they agree to drop an investigation if the teacher quits,
enabling the teacher to get a job in another district.

Some educators acknowledge that the practice, known as "pass the trash," is a common
tactic. Questionable teachers are forced out of one school only to turn up in another
classroom.

"That happens a lot," said Mary Helen Fryman, human resources director for the
Escambia County school district. "A deal is made for a person to resign with the
agreement no one says anything. We come across stuff like that all the time when
we're hiring, and we're held hostage by it.

"There's this attitude, 'So long as it's not our problem.'"

The inability or unwillingness of principals and superintendents to fire questionable
teachers stems from a haphazard system of regulations that favors teachers and
handicaps efforts to hold abusive teachers accountable.

The problems can start from the moment a student reports physical abuse or sexual
misconduct.

School administrators' first response sometimes is to question the child's motive and
look for ways to discredit him or her.

Through interviews and in reviewing case files, the Herald-Tribune found dozens of
educators who doubted students' stories and tried to weigh their honesty by their
grades, their attitudes or how they dressed.

This bias permeates every level of Florida's education system, from front-line
teachers to the Department of Education. In an interview last month, former Education
Commissioner John Winn told the Herald-Tribune that children regularly fabricate
stories about their teachers and "there are far, far more allegations than there are
guilty parties involved," he said.

Even when students make the most serious accusations against teachers, the person
most likely to do an initial investigation is a school principal, not a trained
investigator.

And if principals do a cursory review and dismiss the charges as unfounded, they
often leave no trail if similar accusations come up later.

Some teachers are allowed to keep their jobs under the condition that they never
touch a student or spend time alone with children of the opposite sex.

The rules governing teachers are vague and hard to decipher, requiring teachers,
among other things, not to commit acts of "moral turpitude," and leaving the severity
of questionable behavior -- such as writing love notes to students -- open to
interpretation.

The vagueness is in stark contrast to rules of student conduct.

All these factors conspire to keep teachers such as Batts from losing their jobs
before they have the chance to hurt other students.

For years, Batts' bosses noticed questionable behavior but did not launch an
intensive investigation. Instead, they told themselves there was little they could do
because there were only suspicions.

At least four administrators confronted Batts and ordered him to behave but failed to
report him to education or law enforcement authorities.

When the allegations caught up with him at the state level, there were no records of
the earlier reprimands in his school files.

Even when one principal acquired evidence -- about two dozen love letters Batts wrote
to a female student in the early 1990s -- his bosses did not feel the letters were
enough to fire him or report him to authorities, state records show.

Then in 1999, Batts forced his advances on a 16-year-old girl at his school, state
investigative documents say.

"I'm scared to be at school, because I could feel him watching me all of the time,
and it's sickening," the girl told state investigators after she reported him in
2001.

Investigators ultimately found about a dozen school employees or parents in Leon and
Wakulla counties who had heard rumors that Batts was involved with students.

A guidance counselor warned a mother about Batts when her daughter joined school
government, which Batts oversaw.

In an interview with the Herald-Tribune, the victim's father said the evidence was
readily available to stop Batts from abusing girls.

"Yet it takes two years to go through this whole process and the attorneys kept
making (his daughter) feel like she was the guilty one," he said. "It had a
tremendous effect on this family."

In 2002, the state revoked Batts' teaching certificate.

Failure to report

Florida laws are supposed to prevent adults from turning a blind eye to the abuse of
children.

Anyone, including a teacher, who suspects a child is being abused is required to call
a hot line run by the state Department of Children & Families.

School districts also are required to forward all "legally sufficient" allegations to
the education department, which regulates certified teachers and does its own
investigations.

But the laws requiring educators to report their suspicions are at odds with reality.

When a bad teacher is allowed to stay in the classroom, it is almost always because
suspicions are not reported.

Sometimes, principals or district administrators investigate allegations and do not
tell police or the Department of Education.

Other times, it is teachers who look the other way when they see something unusual.

Almost every day during the 2002-03 school year, a group of Boca Raton High School
teachers stepped outside to take smoke breaks.

Day after day, as they looked out over the school parking lot, they watched teacher
Michael Holland appear with a female student.

State investigators later learned the teachers had heard rumors about Holland's
sexual involvement with students.

But none of them reported Holland's odd ritual, even when they watched him drive the
girl off-campus or climb aboard an empty school bus with her.

Nothing happened to Holland until the girl went to a school administrator, and the
police and the Department of Education got involved. Ultimately, the state took
Holland's teaching certificate for molesting several female students.

The Herald-Tribune found dozens of cases investigated by districts that were not
initially turned over to police or to the education department.

Among them, records show:

Walton County Principal Hazel Collinsworth was told that one of her teachers had
slapped a boy so hard his mouth bled, and had ordered her classroom aides to punish
another student by leaving his diapers wet. She never investigated or reported the
abuse.

For three years, Harvey Bullock's staff warned him that one of his teachers might be
molesting children at Croissant Park Elementary. The Broward County principal
dismissed the warnings and tried to intimidate his staff into supporting the teacher.
The state reprimanded Bullock.

Alachua County Principal Robert Schenck would not return calls from a mother who
wanted to complain about a male teacher making inappropriate advances toward her high
school daughter. When the district got involved and pushed the accused teacher out,
Schenck wrote a recommendation letter that helped him get a job teaching in Duval
County.

Local school officials set their own rules for when to report a teacher to the state.

A Herald-Tribune analysis of cases reported to the Department of Education from 2000
to 2006 hints at the discrepancies.

The newspaper reviewed the number of complaints forwarded by each of the state's 67
school districts and factored in the size of the district.

The reporting rate varied widely. Manatee County's reporting rate was half the state
average and far below neighboring Sarasota County.

Manatee County school district officials said they could not explain why their
numbers were so low, but conceded their investigative practices were inadequate until
wholesale changes were made more than a year ago.

Bias favors teachers

Keeping quiet is a natural reaction.

Society says to distrust rumors, disregard unproven theories and, unless you know for
sure, mind your own business.

But those rules don't apply to teachers, says Charol Shakeshaft, a Hofstra University
professor and leading researcher in how schools handle abuse allegations.

"Most people don't know how to respond and believe they have to really know for sure
before they tell someone," she said. "We need to tell them it's not your job to know
whether there is or isn't something going on. It is your job to report it."

While most Florida school districts preach that message, they maintain policies that
undermine it.

For starters, laws and policies at the state level and in individual school districts
are vague and do not make it clear when a teacher will lose his or her certificate.

Some policies actually encourage teachers to keep quiet. In Hillsborough County,
every school administrator gets a checklist that says child abuse by someone outside
the school should be reported to police. But child abuse by a teacher is to be
reported to district administrators, the list says.

The state and many districts do not specifically ban teachers from asking children on
dates or giving them romantic gifts. And the Herald-Tribune found examples where such
behavior went unpunished.

Former Alachua County English teacher Fleeta Harris wrote a series of love letters to
one of her male teen students, state and district records show. When he rebuffed her
advances and asked to be treated like the other students, she wrote him another
letter that reads like a threat.

"If you fail this class will it 'prove' that you are just like everybody else -- no
special treatment??" she wrote. Harris signed the note, "I still love you."

The student's mother later complained, but she found district officials dismissive.

According to a 1998 letter she wrote to the district, a top administrator told her:
"What is it you are trying to prove? It isn't like she committed lewd and lascivious
acts."

Despite having copies of Harris' letters, the district dismissed the complaint and
left Harris in the classroom.

A powerful lobby

Principals have broad authority to screen allegations against their own teachers.

In many school districts, they conduct interrogations and gather evidence. Then,
people trained as educators, not investigators, are left to decide whether enough
proof exists to pursue allegations against a teacher.

The result is a cycle of allegation and investigation with little or no punishment,
because the principal is unable or unwilling to gather enough evidence to
substantiate the charge.

Investigations often end up stalemated by "he said, she said" accusations, with a tie
going to the teacher.

But even when principals and districts want to pursue cases, they often feel
intimidated by teachers' unions, especially if evidence is shaky or a victim will not
testify.

Teachers can call on union lawyers to tie up cases in court for years.

Court battles can easily top $100,000, as the Sarasota County School District found
out when it fought appeal after appeal from former Riverview High School Assistant
Principal David DeWitt.

In 1999, DeWitt was accused of having sex with several students, but an
administrative judge found that his accusers were not credible.

The district fired DeWitt and spent three years fighting appeals.

Beyond providing attorneys, union-negotiated contracts with school districts create a
discipline process that some principals say is too arduous.

Teachers accused of relatively minor infractions must be warned twice and then
suspended before they can be fired.

Susan Lyle, principal at Gulfstream Elementary School in Miami-Dade County, said she
just got rid of one of her most problematic teachers.

But Adrienne Cohen -- who now lives in Sarasota and has applied for teaching jobs at
the Sarasota YMCA -- did not get fired. She was allowed to retire in January after
years of allegations that she physically attacked students.

In 2001, state officials put her on one year of probation after a string of incidents
with students that ended in her arrest on battery charges. Prosecutors dropped the
charges after she agreed to attend a pretrial program.

The education department also found there was evidence to believe Cohen had kept a
school nurse from treating a student's diabetes and had tried to bribe student
witnesses by giving them food and gifts.

Lyle said Cohen kept her job because she was protected by her union contract.

"This lady has a file inches thick," Lyle said. "It's unbelievable."

But Cohen said she was allowed to stay because she is innocent, and her principal was
unable to find evidence otherwise.

"Ms. Lyle is a liar," Cohen said.

Union officials deny that their punishment procedures help keep abusive teachers in
classrooms.

Anytime a superintendent believes misconduct is serious enough, districts can forgo
warnings and simply fire the teacher, said Pat Gardner, president of the Sarasota
Classified/Teachers Association.

What is indisputable is that teachers have a built-in support system with lawyers at
the ready.

School districts regularly leave teachers in classrooms and simply order them not to
repeat their behavior. Sometimes principals feel compelled to ban teachers from even
touching students, but they don't fire them.

At least three students accused Suwannee High School band teacher Jason Hilliard of
sexual misconduct, from asking for kisses to giving a girl a picture of his crotch.
Each time, the principal investigated but either did not believe the accusers or
could not find proof.

Hilliard kept teaching for years but had to remove paper from the windows that
blocked the view into his office. He was later criminally charged with having sex
with a student.

Karen Halpern, a teacher at Fulford Elementary in Miami-Dade County, has been accused
of abuse so often she is not supposed to touch her students.

Jean-Baptiste Guerrier had already been accused of fondling a teenage girl when three
girls accused him of making lewd comments in 1993.

Miami-Dade County School District investigators found him guilty of "conduct
unbecoming of a school board employee." His punishment: write out the district's
sexual harassment policies.

The district tried to fire him in 1996 when another girl accused him of fondling her.
Guerrier sued for discrimination and the county settled.

Today, he is teaching at Miami's D.A. Dorsey vocational school, an adult school to
which he says he was unwillingly moved.

"I was told I did a bunch of things. I didn't even know the students," Guerrier said.
"I try to leave the past in the past. It's sad when you're condemned for something
that you didn't know happened."


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