"Broken Trust"

Davis was part of a team that won a 2008 Casey Medal for a series about abusive teachers.

A student accuses a teacher of abuse. Investigators discover a long history of allegations. School district officials get hammered by parents and the press because they didn’t take action sooner.

This one-day story grew into a two-year investigative project. We follow a relatively simple formula when deciding if we want to pursue a project, one that frontloads the reporting so we learn two things sooner rather than later: Do the tools exist to see the project through and are there personal stories that will resonate with our readers?

When schools reporter Tiffany Lankes first covered a story about teacher sexual abuse, we wondered how widespread the problem was. It took a couple of years, but we put together the most comprehensive review of educator misconduct ever compiled in the state of Florida.

We found hundreds of cases in which teachers who had engaged in sexual or physical misconduct with students were allowed to keep their teaching licenses. Some teachers stayed in the same school for years, racking up allegations of inappropriate conduct while colleagues and supervisors looked the other way.

Our reporting revealed that these cases were the byproduct of a dysfunctional system weighted to protect teachers’ careers over students' well-being. In some cases, school officials simply didn’t believe a student’s accusations. In others, they forgave flirtation and sexual harassment as minor misbehavior. Most often, school districts and state regulators – faced with what they considered flimsy evidence – signed deals with abusive teachers to avoid expensive court challenges.

That professed lack of evidence became a major theme in the series since it turned out state regulators in charge of investigating the teachers had little experience and no training. We found one investigator had worked behind a cosmetic counter at a local mall and another served ice cream shortly before landing jobs investigating educator misconduct.

We spent several weeks just learning the ins and outs of how Florida investigates and handles teacher abuse cases. We identified every contact point between a problem teacher and the government – from law enforcement, child protective services agencies and teacher certification regulators to school districts and administrative courts.

Then we cataloged every public document generated by those agencies and began testing how difficult it would be to gather the documents en masse. Along the way, we requested samples of the documentary sources we identified – a hundred case files here, a database of court hearings there.

We found cases of teachers suspected of inappropriate behavior getting chance after chance, but to define the scope of the problems, we needed an accounting of every case investigated by state regulators. Although the Florida Department of Education maintained a case database, it was little more than a glorified Rolodex and mostly useless as an analysis tool.

The pitiful condition of the database was probably one reason why the state was so reluctant to hand it over. After more than a year of haggling over the details, we were told we could access it – for $20,000.

We looked for alternatives by filing public records requests with individual school districts and searching court records. Since we still couldn’t quantify the problem, we ultimately built our own database using 30,000 pages of investigative records going back to the late 1990s.

We had the paper documents scanned and digitized so data entry could be done by Web interface. With four reporters and several temporary clerks, we spent about three months entering the data, using double entry to ensure accuracy.

More than a year into the project, we won our fight for access to the state’s database. Combined with our own data, we reviewed summary documents for about 3,000 cases and nearly 100 complete case files. We now had a powerful tool to reveal how state and school district officials were failing to protect children.

The data showed that physical and sexual misconduct cases made up the majority of cases against Florida teachers. They also showed that 9 in 10 teachers accused of abuse got to enter into plea deals that rarely cost them their teaching licenses. We were able to identify repeat offenders and teachers who got light punishments. We also matched our data with a list of current teachers in Florida to find abusive teachers still in the classroom.

The series sparked a series of changes even before it was published in March 2007:

• Responding to our findings, the Florida Department of Education launched a Web site where it publicly posts all teacher misconduct cases. In addition, it has made formal training a requirement for the state investigators hired to regulate teachers.
• Last fall, the Florida Senate reviewed our findings and conducted its own investigation. The resulting legislation was passed in the spring of 2008 and has been heralded by child abuse experts as among the nation’s most significant reforms in regulating teacher misconduct.

Florida’s new law:

• Bans settlements that keep an accusation against a teacher secret if the teacher quietly leaves the school district;
• Withholds the retirement benefits of educators who commit certain felonies against children;
• Requires the state to help public and private schools develop educator ethics policies;
• Puts more parents and law enforcement officials on the state committee that helps determine the punishment for teachers who commit violations.

The bill will also make it easier for school administrators to fire teachers by broadening what constitutes a firing offense to include "immorality" and the "commission of a criminal or delinquent act, regardless of adjudication."

Chris Davis is a former education reporter and editor who helped create the Sarasota Herald-Tribune's investigative reporting team in 2003. He now leads the newspaper's I-team. The series was also a Pulitzer finalist in the Local Reporting category.