Portland Public Schools may soon tighten record-keeping for investigations of employee misconduct, more than one year after the release of a damning report detailing how one former educator sidestepped decades of sexual harassment allegations by exploiting longtime district personnel practices.
But it is unclear whether the new rules will suffice to keep principals aware of a pattern of complaints that may have arisen regarding particular teachers they supervise. District leaders expressed confidence they will.
Many of the techniques that longtime educator Mitch Whitehurst exploited to dodge detection and consequences of his sexual misconduct were baked into the district’s contracts with its teachers’ union.
Earlier this month, however, district officials reached a tentative agreement with the union that will change the way personnel records are maintained. The school board is expected to approve the agreement Tuesday.
For years, principals would place files from investigations of teachers that ended without a definitive finding of wrongdoing, including the complaints that led to the investigation, in a “building file” kept at the school where the teacher works. Those folders would be purged of unresolved or unfounded complaints every time the educator moved to a different building or a new principal took over.
The authors of a 2018 report commissioned by the school board found that such protocols, along with district practices that hampered efforts to draw clear pictures of problem educators, allowed Whitehurst, who was eventually fired for offensively touching a co-worker, to engage in sexual misconduct for decades and fly under the radar.
But under the new agreement, expected to be approved by the school board on June 25, that documentation will now be maintained not in the building files at schools but in personnel files kept in the district’s central offices. Chief Human Resource Officer Sharon Reese said principals and assistant principals can come to the central office and peruse those files when they take over a school or when an educator transfers onto their faculty line-up.
It’s not compulsory for principals to review those files. But Reese, who has been the district’s top HR official since August 2018, says most principals do it regardless.
“They’re in the district offices all the time,” she said.
A principal will also typically consult his or her predecessor before starting work, Reese said.
“Principals are pretty motivated to have those conversations. They want to know who they have on their team. They want to know how that person is going to perform,” she said.
In situations where an incoming principal doesn’t have access to the building’s former administrator, the regional superintendent would serve as a point of contact, she said.
Files showing that a Marshall High junior accused Whitehurst of making lurid comments and inviting her to a motel were available in the district’s central office in 2010 when someone posted fliers at Jefferson High and mailed them to school board members calling him a “molester.”
Other files showing that an adult woman said Whitehurst solicited oral sex from her and friend when they were his students at Franklin High in the 1990s were also available at the time.
Jefferson High’s principal and vice principal did not know of the previous allegations, even though they were contained in personnel files at the school district headquarters.
Whitehurst’s supervisors at Faubion K-8, who fielded complaints from girls that Whitehurst was ogling them and making inappropriate and grooming comments did not know about the Jefferson fliers or the Marshall student’s complaint because the building file they were given regarding him contained no references to any problem behavior or previous student accusations, of which there were many.
The new policy would also retain Letters of Expectation, documents that detail minor or unproven wrongdoing and agreed-upon standards for future conduct, in an educator’s building file for six years instead of three as outlined in the current contract.
District officials said those letters would also go into an investigative file to be kept indefinitely but that language was not included in the draft contract agreement.
The new agreement would also expedite some inquiries by requiring investigations into educators on paid administrative leave, who face the most serious allegations, to take top priority.
The amended provisions now also require administrators to be trained in fielding complaints of sexual conduct or abuse and only allow people with such training to investigate complaints of sexual harassment or sexual misconduct.
Reese said the heaviest lift will come in reinforcing what appropriate teacher-student relationships look like. That will require setting expectations for those relationship and clearly relaying them to faculty, staff, students and parents, she said.
“We want everybody’s head to turn and notice when somebody is outside of that culture that we want to create,” Reese said.
The contract guidelines dictating the handling and maintenance of investigative files and complaints were among the last remaining points of dispute between the teachers’ union and school district.
Earlier this year, the two parties reached a one-year agreement that granted educators a 3% cost-of-living raise, which amounted to about $7 million across the district, and healthcare cost increases of about $9 million.
Julia Brim-Edwards was the lone “no” vote when the board approved the contract extension without the file-keeping changes in March. Moore and Reese said they wanted to separate salary negotiations from those focusing on changes in the handling of personnel files to ensure neither process would be leveraged to influence the other.
But Brim-Edwards disagreed, saying the board and union knew there were loopholes in that system before the previous contract was negotiated.
The district has made progress in the year since investigators concluded Portland schools lacked a comprehensive reporting and file-keeping system to catch bad actors, Brim-Edwards said, but she’s sometimes frustrated by how slowly reforms have moved.
She pointed to a proposed professional conduct policy that was introduced in September of 2018 and received public input for about a month but hasn’t yet been voted into effect and implemented. The policy makes clear how teachers are supposed to interact with students, Brim-Edwards said, and that such preventative measures are just as important as streamlining file-keeping or reporting processes.
“Ideally, we want to prevent the creation of investigation files because we don’t want to put our students in a situation where their safety is not ensured in the first place,” Brim-Edwards said.
The file-keeping amendments to the district’s contract with the teacher’s union is just one of several reforms at the local and state level to address the damning report investigators presented to the school board last May.
Reese said the district has begun to provide training for faculty and staff to set boundaries and expectations on appropriate interactions with students. Board Chair Rita Moore said the trainings, which stress expectations for the way teachers interact with their students, may be the best preventative measure the district has adopted.
“I think the training lives alone because it goes well beyond HR,” she said. “We’re trying to change everyone’s understanding and reframe an approach toward healthy relationships.”
The district has also hired a Title IX coordinator: Liane Kehaulani O’Banion, formerly the director of the Learning Center at Portland State University. Her hiring was announced Thursday.
There’s also a bill making its way through the Oregon Legislature that would give the state’s teachers licensing agency greater authority to compel districts and educators to cooperate with investigations and codify its collaboration with the Department of Human Services and local law enforcement.
Senate Bill 155 would also bolster the number of investigators employed by the state licensing board. It was scheduled to get its second and third hearings in the Senate this week. But that bill’s future is in limbo as the Senate’s 11 Republicans deny the chamber a quorum to move legislation through the Capitol.
--Eder Campuzano | 503-221-4344
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