Olathe administrator still on job despite harassment complaints. Women want to know why
Three women are accusing the Olathe Public Schools of protecting a top administrator who they say sexually harassed them and who the district agreed had engaged with them inappropriately.
The administrator was reprimanded for all three complaints, though the district determined that just one met the district’s legal definition of sexual harassment.
He touched one woman on the upper thigh, “eyeballed” others and asked another whether she wore a bikini, all allegations that district officials acknowledged were true following three separate investigations.
Yet the administrator, Rich Wilson, still holds his job as the district’s director of curriculum and assessment, his only punishment those letters of reprimand in his personnel file and a recommendation that he undergo sensitivity training.
Two of the women, meantime, have seen their careers diminished and one has been forced to continue working with Wilson since filing their complaints last year with the district office. One left her job partly out of disgust with how the complaints were handled to take a lower paying job.
And one, who accused Wilson of touching her on the upper thigh and referred to her as his “work wife,” is being retaliated against by the district administration, according to her lawyer. Since the fall, she has been barred from district property while working from home with few duties assigned to her as she contemplates her next career move.
Her job — equal to Wilson’s on the organizational chart — is being eliminated at the end of the academic year.
“She’s a highly rated employee, and they offered her a demotion after she complained about sexual harassment,” attorney Mark Dugan said. “Later, they offered her a severance and essentially offered to try to buy her silence. They had a severance proposal that included a gag order, kind of like Donald Trump did with the women he slept with. And ultimately, they eliminated her position.”
The women and those who support them say the situation is emblematic of a much larger problem within a school district stained by scandal. The Star reported in November that the district attempted to keep secret a legal settlement concerning a teacher who was convicted of stalking a fourth grade girl with whom he had a sexual attraction.
The threatened lawsuit that led to the settlement accused the district of moving the teacher from one school to another, as The Star found in a 2020 investigation, despite earlier complaints about his inappropriate behavior toward students. The settlement only became known after The Star filed an open records request.
Two parents at last week’s board of education meeting linked both issues during the public comment period.
“Unfortunately, it seems that old patterns of protecting district employees guilty of harmful behavior are still happening,” said Angela Schweller, whose daughter had been a student of the Olathe teacher who was recently sentenced to a year in jail on the stalking charge.
Sarah Coddington, a district parent and AP science teacher at Olathe East High School, told the board that what she knew of the allegations against Wilson and how his behavior affected people throughout the district “turns my stomach.”
“We are tolerating sexual harassment in our district,” she said and asked for a district-wide investigation and audit into the occurrences of discrimination and harassment.
“As the board, you need to examine this data carefully so you can truly understand the scope of these problems.”
Board members do not typically respond to public comments at their meetings and this was no exception.
When contacted this week, Wilson declined comment. The district issued a statement saying that the allegations of sexual harassment had been thoroughly investigated, but did not elaborate.
This article is the first to report the specific allegations against Wilson. But over the past six weeks, one of Wilson’s three accusers has been waging an online campaign to put pressure on district officials to reassign him, without ever naming him in those social media posts or providing any details of the complaints against him beyond saying sexual harassment was involved.
Hundreds have signed a petition Tina Ellsworth posted demanding that the district remove “the person who has been found in violation of sexual harassment from his current position where he currently serves with and over the women who came forward.”
The Star has obtained documents concerning all three formal complaints filed against Wilson. Last April 30, then-Superintendent John Allison found the allegations against him credible and recommended that letters of reprimand be put in Wilson’s file and that he undergo “sensitivity training designed to make him more aware of how to be more professional.”
Outraged at what she viewed as the district’s failure to make Wilson more accountable for how he treated her and other women, Ellsworth, who until last summer was the district-wide social studies coordinator, launched the social media campaign and petition drive.
She said this week that 100 of the more than 600 signatures on the petition belong to current members of the district faculty. She quit her job of four years with the district, she said, partly because of the district’s handling of the harassment claims filed by her and two other women. She is now on the faculty of Northwest Missouri State University.
She decided to raise the issue now because she was the only one of the three in a position to do so. The other women still work at the district and are reluctant to speak publicly about their experiences for fear of retribution or violating district policies.
Ellsworth felt compelled to speak out when she learned about the retaliation one of the other women has been experiencing.
“I just want a safe working environment for all the women who work there,” Ellsworth said in an interview this week.
The district says it takes all accusations of misconduct seriously and this case was no exception. The complaints against Wilson were, according to a written statement provided in response to The Star’s inquiries, “thoroughly investigated both internally and externally, above and beyond what is required by law and our board policies.”
Prior to becoming an administrator several years ago, Wilson taught math and coached the boys and girls cross country teams at Blue Valley Southwest High School. Before that, he taught at St . Theresa’s Academy in Kansas City. Current Olathe Superintendent Brent Yeager, who previously was an assistant superintendent, was his immediate supervisor prior to Yeager’s appointment to replace Allison last summer.
While Wilson declined requests to comment on the harassment complaints, he wrote in an email that he concurred with the following statement that communications and media manager Becky Grubaugh emailed in response to The Star’s inquiry into the matter. The statement read, in part:
“We acknowledge and respect that situations involving misconduct carry with them individual experiences, perspectives and concerns. We never want to belittle or diminish anyone’s individual experiences or concerns. However, we feel we owe it to our community to share what we are able regarding the referenced situation and to assure them of our core values as a school district and education system.
“Although we will not provide specific information out of respect for the privacy of those involved, we can share the following:
“Olathe Public Schools takes any and all allegations of staff misconduct very seriously and we have processes and procedures in place to investigate and address them in accordance with our board policies, state and federal laws.
“Our focus is and always will be to ensure our staff feel safe and supported at work.
“We are committed to providing every staff member due process.”
Facebook posts draw attention
Ellsworth brought public attention to what had been a private matter on Dec. 28 by writing the first in a series of Facebook posts that have been widely commented upon by Olathe district patrons, teachers and staff.
“At my previous job just last year,” Ellsworth wrote, “3 of us brave women came forward with sexual harassment/gender discrimination allegations against the same person (who was above me on the org chart). More women came alongside us + said ‘me too,’ and each were interviewed as part of the investigation.
“Our stories were corroborated + found to be true. The accused was found in violation of the sexual harassment policy. Guess who is still working the same capacity that they were prior to the investigation? Guess who is being protected by the district? *Hint: it’s not the women.”
All three women complained about what they found to be a pattern of inappropriate behavior and remarks that made them uncomfortable.
One said Wilson had gone so far as to touch her on upper thigh, then told her to “stay out of my lane” when she complained about that and inappropriate comments.
District investigators and Allison agreed that Wilson had touched the woman’s thigh while sitting very close to her. But while inappropriate, Allison determined that the incident did not meet the district’s definition of harassment because it had occurred more than 180 days before the complaint was filed and “has not proven to be pervasive.”
She also complained that Wilson stared at her, said she reminded him of his wife and made other remarks that made having an office next to him uncomfortable.
The document in which Allison addressed her complaint was provided to The Star on the condition that her name not be published at this time. Her lawyer acknowledged, however, that her identity will become public when he files a lawsuit on her behalf against the district once the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission frees them to do so.
“That’s coming in the near future,” Dugan said.
In her complaint, Ellsworth said Wilson “eye balled” women’s bodies on “countless occasions,” according to the district’s report on the outcome of the investigation. She also alleged that he referred to various women as “attractive” or “bitchy” and singled one out as the “pretty one.” And on “countless occasions,” she alleged Wilson spoke to her in a condescending manner.
But as with the woman whose thigh was touched, Allison did not find that the behavior rose to the level of sexual harassment, despite acknowledging that it occurred.
“While I consider these behaviors to be unprofessional, none would rise to the level of comments that a reasonable person would find so severe, pervasive and objectively offensive to ... deny the Complaintant (Ellsworth) equal access to District programs or activities, and therefore, do not constitute sexual harassment,” Allison wrote in a five-page, single-spaced letter dated April 30.
“Furthermore,” he wrote, “the alleged eyeballing does not constitute discrimination on the basis of sex as the behaviors are exhibited toward both females and males; however, it is still unprofessional and should not be done.”
As with the other case, Allison recommended that a letter of reprimand be placed in Wilson’s file and that he undergo sensitivity training.
Sexual harassment finding
The district did, however, find in a formal sense that Wilson sexually harassed Angela Epps, coordinator of the district’s 21st Centuries Academies program. Both Epps and Ellsworth agreed to be identified by name in this article, though Epps declined to comment.
She filed a formal complaint and, following an investigation, Wilson was found responsible for conduct toward her on various occasions between 2018 and 2020 that violated the district’s sexual harassment policy as well as the “Staff Guiding Respect for All.”
Epps, who has been with the district for 31 years, is quoted in the district’s investigative report saying that she felt “very weird” when Wilson more than once commented on her looks and fitness. Once as she was about to embark on a 2019 trip to Hawaii, he asked her how she felt, as a middle-aged woman, about wearing a bikini. She found the question inappropriate from a co-worker.
“He said he was just wondering because I was beautiful and fit but he knows I am over 50 and wondered how I felt about it,” Epps said, according to the report.
“Whenever I am talking in person to Rich Wilson, he looks me up and down my body with his eyes,” Epps told the two assistant superintendents who investigated her complaint last year. “It is very noticeable. When around him in person, I never turn my back on him.”
According to the investigative summary report, Epps was not the only woman employee who noticed that Wilson looked them up and down. At least one man also said he felt as if Wilson scanned him from head to toe, as well.
Wilson said he did not stare at people’s bodies, according to the report.
“I do not look women up and down or men,” he told investigators. “I do look and since this (investigation), I have paid attention to it, I do get locked on things. I can certainly pay attention to it.”
He also acknowledge that his question about Epps wearing a bikini “was a strange question.”
But he said “there was no intent to ask questions in any kind of sexual nature” and said that as a former coach he was interested in fitness and would typically ask people about what they did to stay fit.
“From my own history that doesn’t seem or feel to me like that is sexual in any nature,” he said, according to the report
Citing a preponderance of evidence substantiating the complaints against him, Allison issued his decision and recommendations for discipline last April 30. Allison retired at the end of the last school year.
Wilson’s punishment was the same as in the two cases where no sexual harassment was found to have occurred to meet the district’s technical definition: a letter of reprimand and sensitivity training. Epps, meanwhile, must icontinue to take direction from him as part of her job.
In a Jan. 11 Facebook post, Ellsworth asked the question that she and the other women still raise nearly a year after their cases were decided:
“If someone has at least THREE letters of reprimand in their file, why do they still have a job? How many letters does one need?”
This story was originally published February 9, 2022 at 2:31 PM.
