I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Members of the Haslett Board of Education met on Monday evening. (Photo by Ed Brayton/Michigan Messenger)
MERIDIAN TOWNSHIP — The room where the Haslett Board of Education meets has 116 seats, the majority of which sit empty during most of their bimonthly meetings. But Monday night was no ordinary school board meeting — it was the first meeting after revelations of drunk shaming, drug use and alleged sexual assault by a group of teachers divided this upscale mid-Michigan community near East Lansing.
On the right side of the room, next to where board members sit, is a large two-part poster titled “Character counts in Haslett.” The poster says, among other virtues, “We teach responsibility” and “We respect ourselves and others.” Students, the second part of the poster says, must “demonstrate the ability to make wise choices regarding personal health, safety and happiness.”
Monday night it was standing-room only as residents packed the room, many of them hoping to speak their minds to the board about the drunk shaming incident after Superintendent Mike Duda gave a short speech addressing the incident that has caused so much controversy over the last few weeks since Michigan Messenger first reported on the situation.
Duda began by making a statement similar to the one he released publicly on the school’s website on Oct. 13, saying that he is “angry and upset about what happened two years ago” and calling the incident “offensive behavior by people we trust to have better judgment than what they displayed that evening at that party.”
Duda reiterated the school’s position that it was told by legal counsel that it had “no legal standing to take action against the staff members who attended a private party on private property” and signaled that the administration considers any investigation of the teachers involved in the incident to be off the table at this point:
At this point, the district has no legal recourse to take action toward any staff member who allegedly attended that private party held on private property. If criminal wrongdoing by anyone involved is found, we will not hesitate to take disciplinary action.
After Duda spoke, Board President Rob Fowler then began calling up those in the audience who had requested an opportunity to speak.
One of the first to do so was Frank Ravitch, a professor at the Michigan State University School of Law who has children in Haslett schools and who has served as legal counsel to school boards in other states. Ravitch disagreed with Duda and said the school had other options short of firing the teachers involved.
In an interview with Michigan Messenger after the meeting, Ravitch said: “I think given the collective bargaining agreement, termination would be out of the question and inappropriate here, but there are others ways to discipline potentially. There are possibilities for discipline less than termination, including putting a letter in their file. The most important thing is counseling — alcohol counseling, drug counseling and I think also sensitivity counseling. That’s something that, when I represented school boards, we recommended quite a bit.”
The personnel files of the teachers involved, which Michigan Messenger obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show no discipline of any type was handed out, despite the fact that three of the teachers involved — Brian Town and Tim Beebe and the victim, Veronica Piechotte — had all gone to school administrators within days of the incident and told them what had happened at the party. There were no letters in the file referring to the incident and no counseling sessions required of anyone involved.
The opinions expressed by community members at the meeting were mixed. Several former students stood up to speak on behalf of the teachers who participated in the drunk shaming. Andrew Izzo called Town an “amazing person who has made a large impact on my life and the lives of my friends.” Erin Johnson said of Town: “He touches everyone he meets in some way.”
One mother named Carol said that the lack of any consequences for the teachers involved in this incident was troubling, saying the school has “one set of standards for the students and what appears to the students to be another set of standards for the teachers and staff.”
“I’ve lost the trust that I had in this school system with my child,” the mother said, “and I think many other parents have lost that sense of trust. Any professional occupation has a code of ethics or character with consequences when that code is breached. And what I can’t find here is the professionalism, the ethics, the code of character to ask people to be responsible for their actions.”
Scott Ray, another Haslett parent, responded to those who defended the teachers as good people, agreeing with them but arguing that it wasn’t really relevant to the situation at hand. “I know that some of these teachers are good people,” Ray said, “but if consequences only apply to bad people who do bad things then our courts would be a lot more clear and we wouldn’t have half the people in jail. We all make mistakes, but you have to pay for mistakes, especially repeated mistakes. Someone justified their actions by saying heck, we’ve all been drunk to the point of passing out and been written on. I think that speaks to a pattern that is very disturbing.”
Charles Rice, who also has children in Haslett schools, told the board that he was “disappointed, angry and confused about the whole issue.” And while due process was important, he said, “protecting our students should supercede protecting our teachers.”
The audience was respectful and there was applause after many of the statements. The only tense moment was when Steve Lampman, a father with three kids in Haslett schools, said that while he has “an expectation that teachers are role models for my children and that they recognize that responsibility,” the school had been “dragged into this as a result of one person’s attempt at extortion.” That comment got some applause along with a fair amount of muttering and gasping by those in attendance.
After the public comments were over, the board proceeded to other business, hearing from the school’s finance director about impending budget cuts, but they returned to the drunk shaming incident again shortly. Fowler, the board president, told the audience: “We lack actual facts. We have no more facts today than we had two weeks ago or two years ago.”
After the meeting in a brief interview with Michigan Messenger, Fowler said that while it’s true that the school now has the police report, all of the names were blacked out so they don’t know who did what. He retrieved their copy of the police report to confirm that. In the copy of the police report obtained by Michigan Messenger from the victim in this case, none of the names are redacted and the statements of each participant are attributed directly to them.
Because of the lack of specifics in their copy of the police report, Fowler said, school officials were focused on moving forward and preventing similar incidents from happening again rather than on handing out any discipline. “We’re going to ask Kristin Beltzer, who chairs our Policy and Personnel Committee, to do a comprehensive review of our policies,” Fowler said, “to take a look at our code of conduct and some of the other issues mentioned here tonight and ask the question, ‘What can we do when people we expect to be role models, to represent our district, what policies and procedures are in place that allow us to react to public bad behavior while still offering due process to those who are involved?’ The Policy and Personnel committee will take that up.”
He also said that the scheduled Nov. 9 school board meeting would be a “working session,” which he defined as “basically an opportunity for us in a much less formal environment to have a conversation about going forward.” That meeting is also open to the public, he made clear, and invited those with ideas to return and speak their mind again.
Do you know where to vote on Election Day? Do you know what to bring with you? Get comprehensive voter information for your state here.
Sign up for our email newsletter