Jennifer's Story

Read about the case: Duncan v. Eugene School District 4j

Our son was a junior in high school when I finally realized what was happening. He was in a French Immersion program and there was a French teacher that the students had to have all 4 years of high school to graduate from the program. Partway through that year, our son was having more and more problems in his French class. He asked the teacher for help, and when that didn’t help, he went to his Special Education teacher who hosted a conversation with our son and the teacher.  When that didn’t help, we got involved.

Not only had the teacher put in writing that he would not follow the IEP, but he also openly discriminated against and bullied our son in one dark, ugly meeting with our son, his Special Ed teacher, an assistant principal, and us. He stated that he graded our son differently for his ADHD (later confirmed in a district grading investigation that found clear bias towards multiple students) and that our son did not have a right to be in the French Immersion program, insinuating that our son was not “ambitious” or “motivated” - or smart enough. After the meeting, the assistant principal agreed that it was expected that this teacher would go forward with more retribution toward our son. It took me a few days to think it through and realize that what our son was facing was discrimination. 

In the next 10 days, we were at first discouraged by the head principal (an EdD) to pursue this path, being told that “he didn’t really know what the legal definition of discrimination is.”  I didn’t know either, but I didn’t back down and I didn’t accept the principal’s response that the teacher was now feeling bad about his actions. We had noticed that this teacher seemed to target other kids too -and we knew of families that had gone to administrators with similar issues. So, the principal opened a discrimination investigation. 

Then it got worse. The teacher followed me one night when I was alone through the store in Costco and then into the dark parking lot, coming within arm’s reach of me in both places, clearly purposefully.  At the second pass, I realized it was not a coincidence, and by this time, I had reached out to other moms I trusted in the French Immersion program to see if they had similar issues.  The answer was yes - I learned that there was a girl in our son’s class that had been involved in a discrimination finding investigation during their freshman year. And what’s more, her mom had been followed and intimidated in a public place in an eerily similar fashion to what I had experienced - and both of us had left our homes just prior to our destination on those occasions. Our son was removed from his class and provided with a one-on-one teacher that was not given any prep materials for this upcoming French AP exam and was removed from the immersion experience.

The district brought in Directors from the main office and at first tried to adjust our son's IEP, but there was nothing wrong with the IEP so we didn’t agree. When they realized just how upset I was about the Costco incident, they decided to move the teacher to another school. However, we live in a relatively small community and we knew that this teacher had already been moved to new schools at least twice before this for his behavior. This time, they were moving him to an elementary school, due to the limitations of his teaching license. We spoke up about how vulnerable kids that age are, and that he was dangerous for that environment, or really any teaching environment.  We set up a meeting with the superintendent and took three other moms with us to the meeting, all of whom had kids targeted by this teacher in similar ways and three of us had similar intimidation stories to share.  

The district also concluded the now second discrimination investigation for members of this class. They once again found the teacher guilty of bullying, harassment, and discrimination, but it’s important to note that although the investigations were only 2 years apart, they were done under 2 different principals and 2 different superintendents.  Also, it wasn’t until much later that I learned that the finding was bullying, harassment, and discrimination - in the letter I received from the district, they didn’t use any of those words, and I had to push back on them to at least include a statement that the letter was in response to a discrimination complaint.

Then it got worse. The students in our son’s class were upset that our son and the other student didn’t have to take the French class with this teacher any longer and thought they were getting unfair “easy As.” Some of them were understood to have been selected as class pets by this teacher and were angry that he was being moved. So they organized a walk-out in another class that all of the French Immersion students had together. Of the 42 students in the class, all but 4 got up and walked out on our son and the other student, made their way to the office, and demanded to talk to the principal about how unfair it was that this teacher was moved “because of the 504 kids.”  That’s what the principal told me that day when he called to tell me what happened, and when the teacher whose class the walkout happened in reached out to me, she added that she had known about the walkout plans the day before it happened - -and she had told the principal the night before.  But no one did anything to stop it or protect our already vulnerable kids. On top of that, the kids that walked out were not marked absent – a well-known policy of the district when kids participate in group walkouts. I cannot even imagine how our son and the other student felt in that moment when they all up and left, as they slowly figured out it was about them.

We were hoping that things would calm down after that, but instead, the principal hired the father of one of the kids that walked out. While we knew and trusted this father, we wanted to sit down with him, our son, the SpEd teacher, and the principal to be clear about how vulnerable our son would be when he rejoined that class the next academic year. The principal refused to participate, so we held the meeting without him. Then there were snide remarks that happened in our kids’ presence as the year went on that were hard for them to take, but they did their best to be friendly and continue in the program.  Our kids were shy, quiet kids that were easy to get along with. They just wanted to be part of the group.

Then it got worse. In the months before graduation, some members of the class decided to once again use social media to organize. This time it was a secret class sweatshirt that included their graduation year on the front and the teacher’s name on the back - along with 30 sayings from his class. They invited selected kids to help design and purchase the shirt, keeping it secret until they were shipped. There were 28 kids that ordered the shirt, but the worst part was that the main designer and organizer of the shirts had the school’s office hand out the shirts to the kids - the office that knew the teacher had been removed from the school for discrimination, bullying, and harassment after two separate investigations.

During all of this, we had also filed a complaint with the state licensing board, reached out to the state Department of Education, and reached out for help to the assistant superintendent when related problems arose. At each point, we thought things would get better and we were surprised when yet another thing went wrong. We kept thinking it was behind us. When I learned about the sweatshirt the day of the kids' first graduation ceremony (they had 3 ceremonies – the French program, the International High School, & lastly the entire high school), I emailed the principal, assistant superintendent, and superintendent and asked for help. The principal wrote back and told me he would take care of it, but my trust in him was long gone. So I took our son to the district office and asked politely to see either the assistant superintendent or superintendent given the time crunch until the ceremony that night. Within ten minutes, we were sitting down with the assistant superintendent, the director of special education, and the director of secondary education.  My anger was off the charts, but in trying to keep the drama at a minimum, I let our son do most of the talking. By the time he was done, the assistant superintendent had tears running down her cheeks and they all promised they would take care of him and the other student. But as we were dressing for the ceremony three hours later, we received an email from the director of special education saying there was nothing they could do; the other students had the right to free speech and could wear the shirts to the now-rumored “group wear” to the French program ceremony or ceremony practice in the next 2 days. 

They promised the principal would reach out to the class and request (not require) that they not don the shirts, but I never got an email so I reached out to the principal the next day to ask why.  He told me he had talked to a select group of students and was confident it would be OK.  He and I went round and round on this for 90 minutes. I had had enough, and the kids were incredibly vulnerable. I asked him not to let the girl that designed and ordered the shirt walk at the last graduation ceremony – it was the only thing left he could do to show some accountability to all of the kids. I had sent him a picture of this girl wearing the sweatshirt in class, a copy of the order form that I had got from another mom that showed this girl was doing the ordering, and an email from her mom stating that the girl knew that not everyone was offered an opportunity to wear this class shirt. He had the right data to make that call, but he insisted he would not do that. He told me multiple times that we should get an attorney, that this was a civil rights issue, and that he had put way more work into this than he wanted.

Then the last thing happed that tipped our scales of justice. We got through the first two ceremonies with heavy hearts and kids that clearly felt out of place, but at the final, largest ceremony for the entire school, as we read the programs, we realized that one of the three students selected by the administration through an audition process to speak on behalf of the class was the girl that designed the sweatshirt.  And her topic was civil rights.  In fact, she spoke about how proud she was of her class’s ability to organize a walkout, and although it seemed she was referring to a walkout about the 2016 presidential election, it didn’t really matter to our kids or our families which walkout it was in the aftermath of the walkout on our kids. How could this be the voice of the class – a student held up by the administration to be a standout?

Six months later, our son and the other student happened to be on the same flight coming home from college for winter break. I stood at the airport with her dad and mentioned I had just met an attorney with a Ph.D. in special education and a recent law degree. A few weeks later, the kids - not the parents - filed their lawsuits with the intent of helping kids that came after them to not have to go through what they went through. It took almost 4 years for the suits to make it through the Federal Courts, including an appeals court. In the end, six Federal judges weighed in on it, five of them finding in favor of the kids. The kids settled their suits for $125,000 each, but more importantly, they made changes in caselaw that have continued to help kids all over the country. As I write this, I just found out that one of the issues resolved in the appeals process by the other student’s case was just set in stone by the US Supreme Court, allowing students to not have to exhaust their ADA claims first at the administrative law level under IDEA - if you’ve been through an IDEA lawsuit, you’ll know how important this is.  We have also seen some changes within our district, though it is not our belief that the real, underlying issues are resolved here yet. 

Because then it got worse.  Three years after the teacher left our school for the elementary school, he was once again moved to yet another school. This time, it was because of inappropriate touching of multiple fourth-grade girls who were on 504 plans. There’s a TSPC licensing board probation finding letter available from the TSPC's website. There are several sad and truly disturbing facts about this last finding.  Even after it was repeatedly documented that this teacher targeted special education students, and bullied and harassed students and parents, he was moved to an elementary school where the complaint process had to start over again. But most important to realize is that the administrators all knew what he was capable of doing to students and families before this happened. The probation letter doesn't address that, but when you read the last paragraph of the letter, it reminds you of what he said in that first meeting where he stated our son didn't have a right to be there; he blamed the fourth-grade girls for his inappropriate actions, specifically calling them out as 504 kids that didn't deserve accommodations. 

While we didn’t find out about this last issue until a year after our son’s settlement, we did learn that the parent complaints for the fourth-grade girls started two years after our kids filed their lawsuits (and a year and a half before they settled). Then it took another two and half years for the licensing board to conclude their investigation – just enough time for him to retire with 30 years of service. And they only gave him two years of license suspension – which means he could come back as a substitute in just two years.

Justice was not balanced for the kids of our district.