The Duval County School Board on Tuesday night approved a change to the school district’s policy to improve protections against sexual misconduct and child abuse by district employees.
But school administrators have been talking about addressing misconduct for more than a year, and last week another teacher at the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts was transferred as the district investigates claims of “inappropriate communications” with a student from two school years ago.
The fragmented, piecemeal way in which information about claims of misconduct comes out can make it more difficult to put each new piece of information into perspective.
For those who want to keep up, here are some key points about the school district’s concerns about misconduct.
Many questions: Police want to question 140 students at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts about misconduct on campus
Why is teacher misconduct such a big problem in Duval schools?
The March 2023 arrest of Jeffrey Clayton, a professor at the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, prompted a flood of complaints from parents, students and alumni after earlier reports about teachers were ignored.
Clayton was sentenced to 10 years in prison in June for violating a state law that prohibits teachers from engaging in sexual acts with students or having romantic relationships. Several other Douglas Anderson teachers have been removed from classroom duties amid allegations of misconduct, and other complaints have surfaced, some of them years old.
In June, then-school principal Dana Kriznar wrote to the families of Douglas Anderson that “I deeply regret that we did not better protect our students from the actions of these predators.”
How often does this happen?
It’s certainly not just a problem at Douglas Anderson, but it’s hard to say how often this happens at other schools.
When Clayton was sentenced, his attorney filed a memo with the judge listing 22 similar cases around the state, including four since 2018 involving former teachers at First Coast and Ribault High School, Landon Middle School and Duval Charter School in Mandarin, and a fifth involving a former teacher at a Jacksonville private school, New Beginnings Christian Academy. The list also included three former public school teachers in St. Johns County.
Who keeps track of these issues?
Under a state rule called the School Environmental Safety Incident Reporting System (SESIR), school districts must notify the Florida Department of Education of dozens of types of teacher behavior problems, including sex crimes.
But the state agency said it did not receive any information about Clayton until after his arrest, despite the fact that the school district had investigated other complaints about his behavior years earlier.
Separately, the state sent an inspector general’s report to the school district in January, saying the district had filed reports in 2023 on 73 other conduct matters — involving employees in addition to Clayton — that should have been reported two years earlier.
Who is responsible for misconduct?
In addition to teachers being incarcerated for committing crimes, teachers can also lose their state teaching license in some cases. However, this can only happen after the complaints are confirmed and reported to the state.
A school district superintendent who handled teacher conduct cases was removed from his position in 2023 when news emerged of unreported cases. However, he retired before the district completed an investigation into his actions.
In a state grand jury report made public in 2022, a former Duval County schools police chief was accused of underreporting campus crimes that also fall under SESIR. However, no criminal charges were filed in connection with those allegations, which mostly involved crimes by students or other non-teachers.
Both the SESIR reporting issues and the grand jury report were raised at School Board meetings in the spring of 2023, when then-Superintendent Diana Greene announced she had negotiated her retirement. She was replaced by Kriznar, who held the position until Superintendent Christopher Bernier took over two months ago.
What has been done to make students safer?
Before Greene retired, attorneys for the school district hired an outside law firm to review the district’s handling of complaints about the conduct of school employees. That review dragged on for more than a year with little transparency, with School Board Chairman Darryl Willie saying at an April meeting that attorneys had advised board members not to publicly discuss the review’s findings because of the ongoing litigation. In July, the School Board approved $1.45 million in payments to settle three legal complaints about teacher misconduct at Douglas Anderson.
Days before Bernier was sworn in, Kriznar rolled out a 20-point plan to strengthen safeguards, including mandating that school employees be removed from contact with children after any arrest or allegation of child abuse or “bodily injury” to another person of any age or drug use or sexual misconduct. Other parts of the plan would require school employees who were aware of evidence of misconduct or student complaints about it to report it to the district’s Office of Professional Standards or the Florida Department of Children and Families or face consequences as severe as termination.
What did the school board vote on Tuesday?
Kriznar’s plan gave the principal’s office, now run by Bernier, a deadline in October and November to submit the complete text of several policy changes to improve protections for students.
The board on Tuesday approved changes to the policy manual for professional ethics and the dismissal of employees for misconduct.
Although Bernier presented the revision on Tuesday, “the revision was already underway when I arrived,” the principal said. He is currently conducting an awareness campaign called “Know the Limits” to reinforce the boundaries the school district sets for teacher-student interactions.
Examples of such restrictions include rules that prohibit teachers or other school employees from contacting students by phone, text, or social media; discouraging physical contact beyond a handshake, high-five, or fist bump; and encouraging school employees not to meet students alone except in situations such as counseling where privacy may be needed.
The school district sets its boundaries and provides a link for reporting concerns about teacher misconduct on a new webpage, duvalschools.org/knowtheline.
This article originally appeared in Florida Times-Union: What has the Duval School Board done to prevent teacher misconduct?
