Kansas City school whistleblower sues district, says he was forced out of his job
The former Kansas City Public Schools worker who blew the whistle on the district for sending faked attendance data to the state is now suing the district in federal court.
In his suit, Sam Johnson claims he was forced out of his job because he refused to falsify the data and then told Superintendent Mark Bedell about the scheme.
Johnson eventually reported the fraud to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. The district then publicly announced the misconduct and paid the state nearly $200,000 in funding it had wrongly collected. State funding to districts is based on per pupil daily attendance.
Johnson, in his suit filed April 8 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, claims he suffered damages such as lost wages, lost benefits, embarrassment, humiliation and “garden variety emotional distress and anxiety.” He had worked for the district in varying capacities for 25 years.
He is seeking a jury trial to determine the monetary value of those damage claims, plus attorney fees.
The district declined to comment on the allegations made in the lawsuit. “We would like to provide more information to clarify our position in this case; however, it is not our practice to comment on pending litigation,” said Kelly Wachel, district spokeswoman. “We look forward to addressing this case through the legal process.”
The suit names several current and former KCPS administrators, including former Superintendent Steve Green, who led the district during the time the data was falsified; Vicky Murillo, the former chief academic officer who left for a superintendent post in Iowa; Luis Cordoba, now retired executive director of the office of student intervention; and Derald Davis, an assistant superintendent for attendance who now is the district’s assistant superintendent of equity, inclusion and innovation.
Also named: Mike Reynolds, former director of accountability, who is no longer with KCPS; and Anthony Madry, principal at Central High School, where Johnson was working when he resigned from the district.
Bedell came to the district in 2016.
When The Star first reported on the faked attendance data in November, district officials said that from 2013 to 2015, employees had inflated attendance numbers so the district would score better on Missouri’s Annual Performance Review and regain state accreditation.
The district said internal and external investigations found that seven employees had changed attendance records. Three no longer worked for the district. The other four were initially put on administrative leave. In the end, two were fired.
In February, The Star reported that a former middle school secretary, LaQuyn Collier, said she and co-workers were ordered by district leaders to falsify the data. She said she was fired to cover up a problem that went system wide. She has retained an attorney to try to regain her job.
Johnson, a product of the KCPS district, started work there as a part-time custodian while attending college, and worked his way up to manager of the Office of Student Intervention, where he supervised 12 workers.
According to the suit, during the 2015-2016 school year, he was asked by supervisors — Murillo, Reynolds and Cordoba — to alter student attendance records.
“The District’s goal was simple — raise attendance numbers sufficiently to obtain maximum DESE accreditation points by any means necessary, including fraudulently altering and inflating those attendance numbers,” the suit says.
The suit says that “Johnson and others were told their jobs were on the line if they did not participate.”
Johnson and his team declined to cheat on attendance, the suit says. But school secretaries and contractors were called on, and paid extra to do “Cordoba, Murillo and Reynolds’ bidding,” the suit says.
In 2016, after Johnson refused to falsify data and reported the fraud, his staff was moved away from him and placed at individual schools, the suit said. That action “threatened his job without explanation.” Later that year, Johnson was moved out of the district’s central office and demoted to dropout specialist at Central High School, the suit says.
The suit says that Johnson, stripped of his managerial duties, continued to be harassed and retaliated against. The suit says Principal Madry required him to “perform secretarial work and other duties at Central including lunch duty, hallway patrol.”
Johnson claims in the suit that throughout the 2016-2017 school year, KCPS leadership continued to assign him “duties that had nothing to do with improving attendance and dropouts; yet at the end of the 2016-2017 school year, when the District finalized attendance numbers, Madry ”blamed him because Central’s attendance did not improve.”
In April 2017, Johnson’s “working conditions had become so intolerable that he felt compelled to resign,” the suit says.
This story was originally published April 13, 2020 at 5:18 PM.
