On Tuesday, the Manatee County School Board voted to give $400,000 in taxpayer money to a former district employee in order to settle a lawsuit he had filed against the district after he was ensnared in a notorious sexual abuse case at Manatee High. The stunning giveaway was nearly double what the primary victim of the abuse received in settlement from the district, which seems to say a lot about how the good old boys in Manatee County feel about who the real victims were in this sorry ordeal.
Bob Gagnon was the principal of Manatee High School while former assistant football coach and parent teacher liaison Rod Frazier was abusing his position in order to forge relationships with young female students that ranged from wildly inappropriate to illegal (Frazier ultimately pleaded no contest to four counts of battery). Frazier would routinely call female students out of class, ostensibly to counsel them.
However, teachers reported to assistant principals that they'd witnessed Frazier behaving inappropriately with the students, including one sitting on his lap while he fed her cake. Students at the school during Frazier's tenure have referred to his relationships with female students as the worst kept secret at Manatee High.
Gagnon was ultimately promoted to assistant superintendent of curriculum under former superintendent Tim McGonegal, despite questionable qualifications for the position. After he left Manatee High for the administrative building, widespread concerns over Frazier's continued behavior led to an internal investigation, which lasted only half a day and did not include interviews with the students Frazier was alleged to have had questionable interactions with.
There was no follow-up, and the district's internal investigator at the time, Debbie Horne, took the word of two assistant principals who had claimed to have looked into the allegations, found nothing but hearsay and spoken with Frazier about such matters.
Soon after, a former student at the school who had transferred out in order to avoid Frazier's unwanted advances, heard of the sham investigation and penned a letter describing her experience, which included Frazier regularly touching her inappropriately, making sexually suggestive remarks, telling her he loved her, and asking her to text him naked photographs of herself. She said that he even arranged a meeting with her outside of school, at a park, where he touched her buttocks, and also claimed that there were other students who'd been treated similarly, including one who had shown her one such picture she had sent to Frazier's phone after a similar request.
The district again dismissed the accusations, and it wasn't until the Herald Tribune broke the story and published the girl's letter that the Bradenton Police Department became aware of the allegations and launched a criminal investigation, despite the fact that Florida law requires that any such allegations be reported to law enforcement of the Department of Children and Families within 24 hours. The BPD began an intensive investigation into the student's allegations, seizing computers and interviewing dozens of employees and students.
While all of this was happening, the district was spiraling into financial chaos with tens of millions in debt hidden by cooked books before McGonegal ultimately resigned in September of 2012. The district was run by three different interim superintendents until Rick Mills was finally brought on in March of 2013, following a national search.
Less than three weeks into Mills' tenure, the Bradenton Police Department recommended Frazier be arrested. They also recommended arrests for four administrators, including Horne, Matt Kane and Gregg Faller (the two assistant principals at Manatee High) and Gagnon, all on felony failure to report child abuse charges, with a recommendation that Gagnon get an extra charge for intentionally misleading police during the investigation.
At this point, Mills had hired a replacement for Horne, former D.C. police detective Troy Pumphrey, who he directed to re-open the district's investigation. Pumphrey studied the BPD investigation report and continued to investigate the matter from a district policy perspective, while the State Attorney's office was building on the BPD report with their investigators.
The state attorney's office ultimately charged Gagnon with failing to report suspected child abuse, a felony. He was ultimately acquitted of the charge on a lack of evidence that the information that could be proved to have been given to him would have led a reasonable person to suspect abuse. On the unanimous recommendation of Mills' discipline committee, Gagnon had been suspended without pay after he was charged. He was then non-renewed when his contract came up in late May of 2014, while he was still suspended. When an ALJ recommendation advised that he should not have been fired, the district paid him back pay through June of 2014 and paid his legal fees.
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In the meantime, Mills had created a reorganization of the district's administration which eliminated the assistant superintendent position that Gagnon had occupied and replaced it with the deputy superintendent of curriculum, for which he hired current superintendent Diana Greene. Mills said that he had not found Gagnon qualified for that position, but that he had earmarked him for the Director of High Schools position, though he could not publicly announce it while the specter of felony charges loomed over his head.
The exhaustive focus on Gagnon also revealed many troubling aspects of his employment. First, it was Gagnon who had hired the two assistant principals at Manatee who failed to properly look into the litany of allegations against Frazier, or know that something like that was going on out in the open at their school. Both Kane and Faller were buddies of Gagnon's and had worked with him at previous jobs. Both very clearly lacked the resumes one would expect of assistant principals, especially at schools the size of Manatee. Kane had been a gym teacher at Lakewood Ranch and Faller was in a low level position at the Manatee PAL's charter school when they were tapped for the high-level positions by Gagnon.
It was also revealed that Gagnon's own resume was somewhat dubious, having been the top administrator at Lake County Boys Ranch, a small alternative school in central Florida, when it was exposed in a multi-million dollar scheme to defraud Medicaid.
Gagnon escaped charges in that incident as well, though it spoke little of his talent for educational administration, as it was again a failure to prove he knew what was going on at his school that led to him being spared.
Next stop was the Manatee PAL's charter school, where he left under circumstances that remain unclear, before eventually landing in the Manatee School District as an assistant principal at Lakewood Ranch after a recommendation from former Manatee football coach Joe Kinnan, who had been the PAL school's V.P., and would again be Gagnon's benefactor when he helped him get hired as principal at Manatee a few years later, where Kinnan was Athletic Director.
Every aspect of the Frazier investigation continued to embarrass the district, revealing a good-old-boy network in which high-paying administrative positions were routinely given to loyal but unqualified personnel, who could be counted on to keep the quasi-patronage system in place, show favoritism to preferred employees, and, perhaps most importantly, put the Manatee High football program above all else.
What the Manatee sex scandal revealed, however, was how dangerous such nepotism and the ineptitude that results can be. Any innocence that Gagnon, Kane or Faller could claim would be owed to their failure to know what was happening right under their noses. Former internal investigator Debbie Horne, who was hired into a newly-created position that didn't even have a job description, despite having no experience or training whatsoever as an investigator, is more evidence of what happens when a district, rather than creating detailed job descriptions with criteria for hire and then conducting exhaustive open searches to find the best possible personnel, just give it to the next favored employee in line (rather than face charges, Horne entered a pre-trial diversion program for first-time felony offenders).
While much of this changed under Mills, who favored open advertisement and national searches for administrative positions, there are troubling signs that a return to the good old days is upon us. The district recently had an opening for its top human resources position. Make no mistake, being the top personnel executive for the largest employer in the county, with over 6,100 employees, is an enormous job. Sarasota County requires at least a master's degree in an H.R.-related field and five years of experience to be considered.
I talked to several executives in the private sector who said that a corporation with that many employees and such a broad scope of operations would likely require 10 years of high-level H.R. experience with most of it as a director for a similarly-sized operation, in addition to a masters degree in H.R. and several H.R.-related advanced training certificates. Instead of looking for such an individual, Greene decided not to post the position and simply appointed a former teacher with no H.R. education or experience, who'd spent the last three years as an elementary school principal, where she oversaw about 20 employees.
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None of this is the narrative that some on the board and in the district have tried to present, however. In their story, Gagnon, like all of the other players in this sordid tale, was a victim of a ruthless campaign by Mills and rogue board members to purge the district of certain employees. What happened at Manatee High, they contend, was unfortunate, but not the fault of those who'd overseen the school and should have known what had been occurring on their watch.
They leave out the part that it was a Bradenton Police Department investigation and not something directed by Mills that ultimately led to Gagnon being charged with a felony, and the fact that he'd already been paid through the end of his contract and had his legal fees reimbursed before the settlement was even entertained.
They leave out the fact that Gagnon had no right to expect he'd be renewed beyond his contract or that Mills or any other superintendent would have had good cause to find him less than suitable for a high-level position like the one he briefly occupied before he was charged, or that the investigation did little to inspire such confidence, even if it ultimately did not lead to a conviction.
No, in the minds of the board members who've consistently sided with the administrators and urged listening to ALJ recommendations only when they suited that narrative, he was the biggest victim of all, and they awarded him the largest settlement by far, nearly double the $210,000 given to the victim and many times that given to multiple employees the district settled with on whistle-blower cases after they were targeted for retaliation after coming forward in the Frazier case, for which they said they'd been advised by higher ups to keep their mouths shut about.
They warned that a lawsuit would be far more costly and asked who knew how much a jury might award. The obvious question taxpayers should be asking, is who knows what would have actually come out in such a suit (or if a major player in it walked away unhappy), and who might have had something to lose were such things to come to light. Unfortunately, the public will never know. I have to say that Gagnon's legal team employed a brilliant strategy in naming board members they thought might be less likely to side with their client on a settlement, thereby creating a conflict of interest that forced them to recuse themselves for the vote.
When the original case named Mills and board members Karen Carpenter and Julie Aranibar for defamation, it seemed almost absurd. But it soon became clear that their inclusion was unlikely to have any bearing on the outcome, which was always planned to be settled by friendly faces rather than in court.
By taking the two board members who'd earned a reputation as reformers and were not part of the rubber stamp out of the vote, they would need only two favorable votes to settle the case. They could easily get that through Bob Gause, a close ally of Gagnon's, and Dave Miner, who's consistently sided with the Manatee High crowd. Mills wouldn't be able to make a recommendation. Of course, those same forces were able to push Mills into retirement and get Aranibar narrowly defeated by one of their own, while the board also welcomed Charlie Kennedy in 2014, a former Manatee High teacher, who'd worked under Gagnon and has also consistently sided with the the administrative employees throughout the ordeal.
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While it finally seems like the final chapter in this saga has been written, the impacts will continue to be felt. Ironically, during the same meeting, the board formally voted on putting forward the November referendum to ask taxpayers to extend the $23 million a year half-cent sales tax through 2032, just as it gets set to take on more debt to build much-needed new schools after declining to accept around $60 million in school impact fees from the developers of all of the new housing that has created the need for the facilities over the last six years.
There seems to be little evidence that the district is executing any sort of turnaround that would inspire taxpayers that it is any better positioned to be a good steward of their resources, and much to suggest that it is headed right back toward the sort of shenanigans that have caused so much money to be diverted from classrooms in recent years, so that the Manatee County School District can remain a half-billion dollar a year fiefdom that feeds the well-connected.
A saying comes to mind regarding what happens to those who do not learn from history. Hopefully voters will get smart this November and tell the board what it thinks of the way it's been handling public education.
Dennis
Maley is a featured columnist for The Bradenton Times. His column
appears each Thursday and Sunday. Dennis' debut novel, A Long Road Home,
was released in July, 2015. Click here to order your copy.
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