Immediate Changes Needed at Tahoma School District
by the Tahoma Values Team
The Bryan Neyers child sex abuse case has been slowly unfolding for several years now in the Tahoma School District (TSD), with a few large developments in recent months. Alongside these developments, on Wednesday, September 6, the TSD superintendent declared his intention to retire at the end of the 2023-24 school year. Three days later, on Monday, September 11, two of our TSD school board members resigned. One resigning board member was in the middle of her term and the other was in the middle of re-election. We at Tahoma Values have been reflecting on all of this news, and thought we’d share some of what we’ve learned and considered with all of you.
Where Tahoma Values Stands
As advocates for public education, we believe that every single student should be safe and supported in our schools. What we have learned over the past few weeks is that the Neyers situation reflects deep, systemic problems within our district. Systemic failures to escalate complaints and concerns about inappropriate behavior, failures to adhere to mandatory reporting standards, failures to keep children safe from abuse, and ultimately, a failure of accountability.
In our view, every District employee – from the building administration, to district staff, to the superintendent – who, through their inaction are responsible for these failures, must be terminated immediately. There is still time for Superintendent Hanson to hold those responsible to account, and for the Tahoma School Board to insist he fulfills this duty, but they need to act quickly. There is also time for improvement to prevent future abuses from occurring, and we are advocating that our district take the steps necessary to do that.
What Happened?
Briefly, Bryan Neyers was a paraeducator and EEP (daycare) employee of the Tahoma School District, who worked from 2015-2019 at Glacier Park, Rock Creek, Shadow Lake, and Tahoma Elementary Schools. After years of documented concerns (see screenshots later in this article), in April 2020 he was credibly accused of child sexual abuse, with a police investigation following. His criminal trial is ongoing, but the district has settled a civil suit with one of his alleged victims for $3.9 million. For more information, we highly recommend this article by InvestigateWest, which goes into extensive detail.
What concerns us
Multiple District employees ignored multiple red flag warnings – including violations of the District’s Boundary Policy – allowing Neyers to continue working with children up to the time of his arrest. As detailed in the InvestigateWest article, despite at least eight district employees notifying administrators about Neyers’ concerning behavior over a period of several years, he faced no meaningful disciplinary action. Some of the administrators in direct and prolonged communication with teachers and staff who were sending complaints regarding Neyers were Rock Creek (RCES) Principal Chris Thomas and RCES Dean of Students John Schuster. Tracy Krause and Mark Koch in HR have also been named in conjunction with these complaints. Mike Hanson, our current superintendent, was the assistant principal at Glacier Park when some of this was ongoing. Again, we recommend you read the InvestigateWest article for more details.
We have obtained records requested of the district, which show repeated failures to adequately report or handle situations with Neyers.
In the end, we feel that the TSD administration at the school and district level needs to be held responsible for failing to adequately train or support their staff, or for failing to escalate these concerns themselves. Other school districts across the country have learned this the hard way, and implemented policies to help prevent them from happening again.
Excerpt from a report by the United States Government Accountability Office:
At the local level, half of the school districts we visited reported having a zero-tolerance policy for failing to report suspected sexual abuse or misconduct, in part because districts and school personnel could be held liable and face civil suits for not reporting—a lesson one of these school districts had learned firsthand. Officials at this school district said the district paid $3 million as a result of a lawsuit which alleged that a principal in the district had failed to take action in response to reports from teachers of inappropriate contact between an elementary school teacher and students.
Are the recent board resignations related?
Well, we don’t know. All we can do right now is piece together some heavy context clues. In case you missed it, board directors Malia Hollowell and Haley Pendergraft – notably, the only two women on the school board or in any higher level positions of authority within the district – resigned on Monday.
We do believe that the recent resignations were a direct result of the Neyers case, and the fallout from it. Last Wednesday morning, Sep 6th, the school board called for a special executive session to be held on the coming Friday, Sep 8th. That same Wednesday, in the afternoon, Superintendent Hanson announced his retirement, ahead of the Friday executive session. We find the timing of all of this to be very interesting, and the resignation announcement from these two board members references frustration with the conduct of the superintendent.
We have also heard frustration from people who were calling for the superintendent’s firing, only to have him decide to retire before the board could even meet. However, we don’t actually know what the intended purpose of this executive session was. Executive sessions are confidential, as per OPMA law, though they can only be called for certain things. Those can be topics like personnel issues (which can include discussions with the superintendent about personnel, or discussions about the superintendent), land purchases, and others.
The remaining members of the school board can still choose to fire the superintendent at any time, rather than keep him until his retirement goes into effect at the end of this school year. However, this could potentially result in a payout cost to the district, as most modern superintendent firings involve paying out the remainder of the contract in order to avoid costly lawsuits. The board’s hands are essentially tied when it comes to all other personnel. Because of the way school boards and districts are structured in WA state, the superintendent is their only direct report and effectively their only employee. Superintendent Hanson himself can make the decision to fire (or hire) district personnel before his superintendent duties end in June, and obviously a new superintendent could make the same decision. This means that the board’s only choices are to accept Hanson’s decisions or to fire and replace him.
What’s next?
We have more articles to come on this topic and others, so stay tuned! Tomorrow we’ll tackle what the school board will go through to replace the members who resigned, options for you to get involved, and a brief discussion of our own plans.
This article was a collaborative effort of the Tahoma Values team, but we are always looking for people to write articles for us! If there’s something you’d like to publish with us, send your submission to tahomavalues@gmail.com
