PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - Portland Public Schools fielded report after report that educator Mitch Whitehurst engaged in sexual misconduct with students, starting the very first year of his 32-year career, an investigation released Thursday says.
District officials’ failure to stop him and the district’s lack of improvement in training and protocols to this day indicates an urgent need for Oregon’s largest school district to overhaul how it handles sexual misconduct, the report says.
In fall 2017, the Portland school board hired a team of investigators, hand-picked for their expertise, to examine how district employees treated Whitehurst. The board did so in response to an August 2017 Oregonian/OregonLive investigation , “Benefit of the Doubt: How Portland Public Schools helped an educator evade allegations of sexual misconduct.”
The investigative team interviewed more than 100 people and had access to thousands more records than The Oregonian did. It found evidence school administrators and school police knew Whitehurst was a problem from almost the very beginning. Yet he went on to work at more than a half dozen schools.
Investigators also found additional student victims not previously known to the public, called out specific officials by name for their inadequate actions, and determined that the district and law enforcement should have stopped Whitehurst’s abuse earlier.
District practices and priorities to this day lead to chronic underreporting of sexual misconduct, investigators found. Children suffer from a school district culture where employees look for reasons not to act and stick to the bare minimum of what they feel is required of them, investigators found.
“The buck stopped with no one,” one of the investigators, lawyer Bob Weaver, told the school board when unveiling the report during a special school board meeting Thursday. Weaver is a former federal prosecutor and well-known defense attorney.
Joy Ellis, another lawyer, and former top Multnomah County prosecutor Norm Frink conducted the investigation.
School board members and new Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero showed palpable outrage and sorrow as they listened and responded to the 320-page report.
The stakes, school board member Rita Moore said, “don’t get any higher than this. We owe these students, and their families, not only an apology for our past failures but also an unshakeable commitment to action.”
The case, she said, “may be the quintessential example of how persistent dysfunction in (Portland Public Schools) has impacted children.”
The report details more than a dozen recommendations to prevent future abuse of students and takes sharp aim at the district’s current training, which it notes may even give the impression that sexual misconduct is not a serious issue.
Those include having an arms-length specialist investigate allegations of sexual misconduct; ensuring that all reports of sexual misconduct be sent to and kept in a single centralized place; and providing better training to employees and to students on what conduct crosses the line and what to do if they see or experience it.
The board and superintendent were united in calls for change.
Last fall, the newly elected school board pledged “to give (investigators) the time and support to get to the bottom of this and they have,” board chair Julia Brim-Edwards told The Oregonian/OregonLive . “They have given us a roadmap of very clear recommendations.”
The report shows a pervasive and preventable pattern by Whitehurst.
In his very first year at Portland Public Schools, 1982-83, Whitehurst breached boundaries with students so noticeably that a vice principal reported his conduct to school police. The next year, a mother at the second Portland high school where he worked complained Whitehurst had engaged in sexual activity with students, and the vice principal there also reported his conduct to school police.
In the late 1990s, school police were again called to investigate a student complaint about him, this time at Marshall High. By the time Marshall student Rose Soto told police and a vice principal in 2001 that Whitehurst said he wanted to unzip her pants and take her to a hotel, it was the fourth time the district heard a credible complaint that he violated student boundaries - and did nothing.
“Whitehurst succeeded in denying his conduct and administrators repeatedly treated his inappropriate conduct as a one-time lapse in judgment,” the report says.
Whitehurst refused to speak to the investigators. He would not agree to be interviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Soto spoke at length to The Oregonian/OregonLive for the August 2017 story. Her complaint was previously thought to be the first time the district was notified about Whitehurst.
“I must not have mattered enough. I sure as hell didn’t feel protected by anybody,” she said. “When you’re brave enough to have a voice and you’re just blown off and told ’That’s just not what it was,’ it leaves you with a big sense of self-doubt.”
The Oregonian/OregonLive story revealed Whitehurst told school district lawyer Maureen Sloane, who investigated Soto’s 2001 report, that he had asked Soto for hotel recommendations. Sloane wrote that she found Whitehurst’s denial of misconduct credible.
Sloane, who served as the district’s top human resources lawyer from 2000 to 2009, was highlighted in Thursday’s report as the only person investigators talked to who took responsibility and expressed remorse.
Investigators paraphrased her as saying, “This was my fault and I take responsibility for it.”
In 2008, Sloane again dropped the ball on a complaint that Whitehurst demanded oral sex from a student and had sex with another. That complaint, when finally taken seriously years later by another agency, led Oregon’s teacher licensing agency to revoke Whitehurst’s license.
Investigators also fault the district’s top lawyer of many years, Jollee Patterson, for key lapses that let Whitehurst slide. Unlike many others, she knew of multiple credible reports of sexual misconduct yet failed to act or ensure others did.
“It is regrettable that the district’s general counsel was satisfied with the follow-up she received,” they wrote.
Patterson left the district in 2016.
Thursday’s report noted that time and again employees focused on reasons they could not act to stop Whitehurst instead of seeking ways to act. Investigators found district employees were quick to point fingers at others and explain that they didn’t feel it was their job to act.
“They did what they were supposed to do but not one thing more,” said Moore through tears.
School board member Julie Esparza Brown, like others, credited the girls and young women who did report misconduct.
“Child and sexual abuse are often silent crimes, we know that, but that was not the case here. Many courageous young woman came forward and reported this abuse but tragically no one took them seriously enough,” Esparza Brown said. “A thorough investigation such as the one received today should not come after decades of reporting and rumors and allegations. I know this is too little too late and we will do better.”
Commissioning the investigation was one of the first acts of a new school board that took office last July and has since hired Guerrero to bring promised change. The previous board directed staff to find lessons learned from the Whitehurst debacle, but never followed through to make sure that happened.
Guerrero said of the report, “I am frankly appalled, I am deeply disturbed and upset by the findings.” He said it demonstrates “without argument” failures at every level of the organization caused children to be harmed.
Several board members echoed that sentiment.
Board member Paul Anthony said that while the report over and over blames “the system” what must be kept in mind is systems are not accidents, but created by superintendents, school boards and senior leadership.
Employees were hampered by a district practice that prevents a clear picture of a problem educator, investigators found. The teachers union contract mandates frequent purging of files and this helped abuse persist, the report says. That problem was compounded by the wholesale loss in 2001 of all school police reports from earlier years, including the 1983 and 1984 police reports about Whitehurst.
Portland Association of Teachers President Suzanne Cohen and other union officials refused to speak to the investigative team. Cohen has also told The Oregonian/OregonLive she will never grant an interview about this topic.
The investigators found principals and other administrators generally avoided disciplining teachers and other union members in the absence of clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing because of concerns the teacher’s union would make it too drawn out and difficult. That reluctance was particularly acute when it came to alleged sexual misconduct, they found. The standard, they wrote, became to avoid documentation and other key practices that experts deem essential best practices to protect children from abuse.
Portland Public Schools never punished Whitehurst for his conduct with students. Whitehurst only resigned under pressure in 2015 after a male district employee complained Whitehurst had offensively touched him. Whitehurst was charged with harassment and pleaded guilty.
His criminal behavior with an adult male was then reported to the teacher licensing agency, which stumbled upon the allegations of sexual misconduct with students in the 1980s and revoked his license on those grounds.
Even the way Whitehurst left the district was problematic and could have led to more children being harmed, investigators found. Whitehurst struck a deal - not uncommon in the district - that restricted what the district could tell other employers.
Before the teacher licensing agency revoked his license, Whitehurst planned to teach elsewhere.
The practice of agreeing to keep quiet about former employees’ questionable conduct, investigators found, enabled at least one other teacher, Norm Scott, to go on to another job and harm students. The former Grant High teacher was convicted in October of sexually touching six Oregon City middle schoolers in a single day while substitute teaching.
Currently, the law requires districts to communicate substantiated sexual misconduct. That’s a high bar and if a teacher is allowed to quit before an investigation is finished, that allows conduct to go “unsubstantiated,” investigators wrote.
In their report, investigators detail silos in record-keeping and decision-making that prevented many employees who knew of one instance of Whitehurst misbehaving from seeing the pattern. Those in a position to see the pattern didn’t act on it.
“The district failed to keep schools safe, while Mr. Whitehurst was repeatedly given the benefit of the doubt,” the report says. “Apparently no upper level leadership has been accountable for system failures or the lack of adequate systems.”
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Information from: The Oregonian/OregonLive, http://www.oregonlive.com
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