Tribune looks into sexual misconduct in schools

Part 1 of a 2-day Tribune series

Every year, Arizona teachers lose their jobs because they molest their students, say sexually inappropriate things, even sleep with them in some cases. But schools, protected by state law, routinely keep these incidents secret. And educators move on to other jobs with little consequence.

SPECIAL REPORT: Search our online database by school district of teachers who have lost their license or been convicted, and watch videos of interviews with convicts, experts and law-enforcement officials

Counselors tell of power, trust, double standards

There has been no way for the public to easily check up on teachers who have been fired or disciplined for sexual incidents.

Since May, the Tribune has researched court documents, police reports and other public records to examine the extent of the problem in Arizona and the East Valley. Because of the Tribune’s inquiries, the Arizona Board of Education for the first time created a database of educator sexual misconduct that now can be more easily accessed by the public.

The Tribune found that since 1995, 176 educators have surrendered their teaching licenses or had them revoked by the state board of education for incidents defined as sexual in nature.

The most egregious of those cases grabbed headlines or television coverage. But many went unnoticed by the public.

ULTIMATE BETRAYAL

In ultimate betrayals of trust, schoolchildren statewide have fallen victim to the misdeeds of many types of educators, including librarians, counselors, coaches, administrators, substitutes and longtime teachers.

The Tribune began looking into the issue of educator sexual misconduct in the wake of the spring arrests of Paradise Valley High School English teacher Jennifer Mally and Scottsdale Saguaro High School assistant varsity football coach and substitute teacher Tom Porras.

Mally is accused of having a sexual relationship with a student, while Porras was charged with sexually abusing a student-athlete during a massage. Both have pleaded innocent. Porras has a court date Thursday. Mally’s trial is set for April. Both have denied interview requests.

Their cases are just two of 23 sexual misconduct investigations pending statewide.

“Where is the outrage?” asked Terri Miller, president of Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation, a Nevada-based organization that is pushing for a public federal database of educators disciplined for sexual offenses. “Our most vulnerable population is our children.”

No single national agency tracks sex-related cases against teachers, but there are several hundred such incidents across the nation each year, according to Miller and other experts. National statistics have never been compiled to compare the issue on a state-by-state basis, though an Associated Press report in October showed more than 2,500 educators across the country were sanctioned for sexual misconduct with minors between 2001 and 2005.

In Arizona, dozens of now-closed cases involve child molestation, inappropriate sexual acts or even long-term sexual relationships between teacher and student.

Among those involved with students sexually were former Higley High School choir teacher Benjamin Lemere, 25, who fathered a 16-year-old student’s baby in 2003, and Charles Robson, a former sixth-grade teacher at Scottsdale’s Tonalea Elementary School, who had a five-month sexual relationship with a 14-year-old student in 1998. Lemere was sentenced to three months in jail in 2003. Robson is serving a 17-year prison sentence.

But many of these incidents involving teachers did not result in a high-profile arrest or conviction, which meant they were able to move on with little or no scrutiny from the public or media. These cases involved such transgressions as inappropriate touching, viewing pornography on a classroom computer or having sexually charged conversations with students.

For instance, in 1995, Mesa’s Irving Elementary School teacher Michael C. Spotten tried to retire in the wake of allegations of inappropriate physical contact with several students dating back to 1979. A state review of Spotten’s personnel file revealed a number of such incidents, including rubbing female students’ backs and thigh areas, hugging and having students sit on his lap. His license was revoked in 1998. Spotten died several years ago.

In another East Valley incident, the board accepted the voluntary surrender of Mesa Unified School District substitute teacher Randy Joe Shaklee’s license on April 24, 2006, for failing to disclose that he had ever been arrested or had any disciplinary actions taken against him. Shaklee was arrested on suspicion of impersonating a police officer and charged with pimping a child and soliciting a child for the purpose of prostitution in 1983, according to information from the Colorado Department of Education. While working at Akron (Colo.) High School in 1990, Shaklee was charged with sexual contact with a girl, a student at the school, according to documents. In both cases, Shaklee’s prosecution and sentencing were deferred on conditions that he undergo mental health counseling, and he was forbidden from pursuing a teaching, counseling or coaching position involving anyone under the age of 18. Shaklee could not be located for comment.

Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas echoed Miller’s sentiments about a general lack of outcry over sex-related incidents in schools. Last year, Thomas eliminated a provision in the system that allowed such offenders to plea bargain to one year in prison and register as a sex offender for convictions involving felony sexual conduct with a minor.

Now, the plea bargain is a minimum 10-year prison sentence for a school employee convicted of sexual conduct with a minor. If they don’t take that deal, they will face a longer prison sentence, averaging 10 to 20 years, if found guilty, Thomas said.

“It’s a serious problem,” Thomas said. “There seems to be more flagrant or outrageous cases of school employees or teachers preying on children, and from what I can see, there’s a greater trend toward sexual predator incidents happening at school. Twenty years ago, you rarely heard such a thing, but now, these days, it’s all too common.”

DISTRICTS DON’T DISCLOSE

Under state law, school districts throughout Arizona do not have to disclose why a teacher resigned or was terminated. Because personnel issues are considered private, the public — or even the parents of schoolchildren — might not ever know why any teacher did not return to the classroom if an inquiry was made with a local school district.

A former student at Gilbert’s Highland High School, who requested anonymity, told the Tribune he didn’t know why his former agriculture teacher, Roger Lemons, stopped showing up for class one day in late 2000 until the Tribune informed him of the reason. A state investigation revealed Lemons engaged in immoral conduct involving a female student.

It also found he was fired from a school in Wyoming because of similar allegations involving female students. Lemons failed to list the Wyoming incident on his application.

“When he started teaching at the school, we kind of wanted to know a little bit about him,” said the former student. “My cousin did some research on him, and knew he had been accused of something similar at a school in Wyoming, but we never knew what the outcome of that investigation was.”

Officials in all East Valley school districts did not disclose why any teachers were terminated or resigned, citing private personnel issues. Records released only showed employment dates, schools where teachers worked and which subject they taught. Some East Valley schools refused to release high school yearbooks with pictures of former teachers involved in incidents of sexual misconduct.

Some districts cited Arizona records’ retention laws that only require them to keep files for three years, making it nearly impossible to find a documented paper trail of how such teachers conducted themselves in previous school districts.

Many educator files containing complaints of those who lost their licenses, however, are archived in hard-copy files by the state at an off-site location from its offices, according to Charles Easaw, chief investigator for the Arizona Board of Education.

School districts throughout Arizona are required to have criminal background checks and fingerprint checks conducted on certified personnel. The Arizona Department of Public Safety is responsible for conducting those background checks going back seven years. From there, DPS is supposed to pass the applicants on to the FBI for a national criminal background check.

However, DPS Lt. Jenna Mitchell, who works in management services, told the Tribune in June that the agency does not look at the results.

Applicant fingerprints and the criminal background check results are returned to the school districts for their review, she said. “We don’t tell the schools who they can or cannot hire,” Mitchell said.

Arizona has no state laws prohibiting schools from hiring sex offenders or those who have committed dangerous crimes against children, Easaw said.

Most districts throughout the state, however, have a list of felony offenses that disqualify a person from obtaining a job within the schools.

“We would be surprised if schools knowingly hired a sex offender or someone with a dangerous felony,” said Vince Yanez , executive director of the Arizona Board of Education. “You just have to use common sense.”

There are about 200,000 certified school employees who serve about 1 million students in 238 public school districts statewide.

Given these numbers, educators are doing a great job keeping kids safe, said John Hartsell, spokesman for the Arizona Education Association — the union representing 35,000 teachers in the state.

Local districts are very conscious about investigating allegations of sexual misconduct, and are very thorough in these investigations, he said.

“When these cases get to the point of an arrest, or there’s some kind of action taken against the accused person’s job or career, it’s usually been pretty well investigated,” Hartsell said. “Given the circumstances that there are 1 million students throughout 1,600 school sites and there are tens of thousands of teachers, we are managing pretty well for those cases that do come true.”

RECORDS SCATTERED

Before the Tribune’s records requests in May and June, officials with the state Board of Education said the agency only kept sexual-misconduct records in hard-copy personnel files packed away in drawers and chronicled in meeting minutes from disciplinary actions at the board’s monthly meetings.

Some information was kept on computer software that was nearly obsolete. The extent of the database of Arizona educator sexual misconduct consisted of annual numbers.

When allegations of sexual misconduct surface, those investigations get moved to the front of the line, Yanez said. But the record-keeping wasn’t built for public access.

“Our system can’t be built for every single public records query,” Yanez said at the time of the requests. “It’s built to help our investigators manage their work load, not look at where teachers are from who are accused of misconduct.

“We look at which cases are open, what are the allegations and what needs to be done,” he said. “It’s not built to say which East Valley schools have the most teachers accused of sexual misconduct. Our main concern is to protect children from unprofessional misconduct.”

Shortly after the inquiries, Yanez and Easaw directed an administrative assistant to build the database.

“It took some time,” said Kristen Bergeson, an administrative assistant for the board’s investigative unit. “We just had to look for the information and put it together in one place.”

The newly compiled database has connected educators who have had state action taken against them to their former districts. The database also includes a brief summary of the reason why the educators surrendered their licenses or why they were revoked.

“If someone were to request the information now, it would be easier for us to provide it to them,” Easaw said.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said he was disappointed to hear the investigative unit didn’t have better record-keeping. But he was happy to learn the board built a database on sexual misconduct.

“It’s obviously a very important step forward,” Horne said.

'MAKE THIS GO AWAY'

One of Horne’s first initiatives upon taking office in 2003 was to travel to districts across the state and encourage vigilant reporting of educator sexual misconduct, he said.

“Sexual misconduct in our schools is a tragedy,” Horne said. “It’s a bigger tragedy when someone knows it’s going on and doesn’t report it.”

Often those incidents don’t come to light until either the teacher or the victim tells somebody, experts say.

Such was the case with Mally, the Paradise Valley English teacher and cheerleading adviser accused of sleeping with her 16-year-old student.

The police report revealed the boy told school officials of their relationship, despite Mally’s pleas in a police-recorded telephone call urging him to deny the relationship.

“You’re 16 years old. I could go to (expletive) jail,” Mally said during the telephone call. “As long as you say, 'no,’ to all of this, it can’t go any further.

“What you should do, is you should talk to your parents. You should talk to your parents and be like, 'cause this is crazy. I’ve never seen her outside of school,’ and totally play this up to your parents. You’re the only one who can make this go away.”

A 2-day Tribune series

Today: Sexual misconduct cases affect Arizona schools each year; many go unnoticed by the public.

Monday: Future teachers get schooled in dealing with tricky situations.