PORTLAND — The Portland school board is close to adopting a new policy clarifying appropriate relationships between staff and students eight months after it was originally proposed.
The policy may get its first reading in front of the full board as early as July 16, triggering a 21-day public comment period before it can be adopted.
It’s one in a series of reforms officials at the state’s largest school district pledged in the wake of an Oregonian/OregonLive investigation that found former educator Mitch Whitehurst eluded decades of sexual misconduct allegations by exploiting several loopholes in district and union policy.
Investigators hired by the school board backed up the newspaper’s findings and recommended overhauls of district policies and processes to better catch and punish educators who engage in sexual misconduct. The investigators also called for a similar change to state law.
The board’s policy and governance committee first began discussing the professional conduct proposal in October of 2018. Some of its progress was stalled by negotiations with the teachers’ union, which at first demanded to negotiate the contract language.
The union dropped that demand in early June as its bargaining team reached an agreement with officials over reforms to the district’s practices for managing educators’ disciplinary files, then-spokesman Harry Esteve told The Oregonian/OregonLive in early June.
The new policy explicitly bans district staff from, among other things, asking students to keep secrets from other adults, being alone in a car with a student, and inviting students to their homes without “proper chaperones, parental notice and approval” unless noted in an explicit exception.
District staff are also required to maintain both personal and professional social media accounts and can only interact with students in direct messages through their professional accounts with parental permission.
The policy sets guidelines for one-on-one interactions between district staff and students, noting, “When possible, staff should avoid one-on-one meetings with students out of the view of others.”
It also requires teachers to report colleagues they suspect may be engaging in sexual misconduct to the state Department of Human Services, a policy widely known as mandatory reporting.
The school board’s governance and policy committee reviewed the professional conduct policy’s near-final language during a meeting Wednesday morning. Revisions were largely limited to minor editing for redundancy and clarity.
But board members were wary that the policy applies broadly to both district staff and volunteers, who aren’t required to be licensed by the state. School staffers also go through refresher trainings every fall to ensure they’re aware of district policy.
“We can’t reasonably have some expectations of adherence because we don’t have the same kind of training and oversight” for volunteers, Board Chair Amy Kohnstamm said.
Liz Large, the district’s general counsel, reminded board members that the new policy works in tandem with existing district processes and dovetails with other, statewide efforts recommended by investigators in the Whitehurst case.
On the final day of its session in June, the Oregon Legislature passed a law to better identify and punish educators who engage in sexual misconduct. Among the reforms in Senate Bill 155 are provisions that outline the process to report a volunteer for sexual misconduct.
“It’s not just this policy where we’re going to have the matrix of reporting,” Large said.
