‘The school did nothing’: Kansas student sexually abused for years says teachers knew
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‘Intentionally ignored’
A high school teacher sexually abused her for years. Why didn’t anyone stop it?
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For most of her young life, Haylee Weissenbach adored going to school in McLouth, a small Kansas town where she was raised from infancy and always felt safe and protected — until she no longer was.
“I always loved school, learning, sports. It was one of my favorite places,” she said, calling it a world “I thrived in.”
Except now, when the 20-year-old returns home from Emporia State University and drives past McLouth High School — where she was a valedictorian, a 4.0+ GPA scholar/athlete, a Queen of Courts — her body shudders.
Just the sight of the brick McLouth Unified School District 342 building fills her father, a member of the city council, with disgust. The family is planning to sell their home of 20 years and move because of all that’s happened.
“I can’t stand to even see the place,” her father said of the school.
Waves of anxiety and depression wash over Weissenbach to think how, for two years, starting when she was a 16-year-old junior and into her senior year, she was groomed and repeatedly sexually abused at the school by a married chemistry and physics teacher twice her age.
Had Weissenbach been 15, the charge would have been criminal sodomy. But Weissenbach was a year older.
As a teacher with authority over students, Anthony Kuckelman, now 36, pleaded guilty in July to unlawful sexual relations. He is serving 32 months in a Kansas state prison and is on the National Sex Offender Registry.
But compounding her trauma, Weissenbach alleges in a federal lawsuit, is that in this town of 1,200 residents an hour from Kansas City, many in the school — including its superintendent, principals , a football coach and teachers — ignored rumors, signs and concerns from students and its own staff that a criminal sexual relationship might be going on between a teacher and a student. A trial is set for September in Kansas City, Kansas.
Instead of alerting the Kansas Department for Children and Families, as they are mandated to do by law, they acted with “deliberate indifference” and did next to nothing — making the district negligent, violating her constitutional rights, as well as her Title IX right against sexual harassment, Weissenbach alleges.
“The hell that H.W. was forced to live was not hidden from McLouth,” her attorney, Daniel Zmijewski of Leawood, argues in filings. “It was out in the the open yet intentionally ignored by the entire administration. “
The attorney for the district, Terelle Mock of Topeka’s Fisher Patterson Sayler & Smith, opted not to speak to The Star, but in court filings the district denies the allegations.
As defendants, they argue that for the district to meet the “deliberate indifference” threshold required for a Title IX violation, it would first had to have had “actual knowledge” of suspected abuse. All they had were rumors. Weissenbach never revealed the abuse; she actively hid it and, when the district superintendent and high school principal finally did question her about any possible sexual relationship, “she lied when asked.”
“Title IX requires much more than rumors in a small town to trigger liability,” Mock argues in court documents. “The administration did not know or even suspect Kuckelman and H.W. were having sex. H.W. made sure of that by explicitly denying any sexual relationship. She was very believable. ... When put under oath, not one teacher, student or administrator suspected H.W. and Kuckelman were having a sexual relationship.”
In January, each side presented motions to the federal court for a summary judgment in their favor.
Protected and identified in court papers as “H.W.,” Weissenbach chose recently to come forward to The Star, sharing both her name and the details of her story: how she has been emotionally and physically affected, how, since first filing suit against the district in July 2020, she has become persona non grata, a town pariah, held partially responsible for all that happened. Whatever shame she felt early on, she no longer does.
“I don’t blame myself for what happened anymore,” Weissenbach said, speaking with conviction. She sat with her parents and attorney at the kitchen table in their McLouth home. “I don’t blame myself for actions that he (Kuckelman) took knowingly and willingly against me. I don’t blame myself for the fact that the school didn’t figure it out. I don’t blame myself for the fact that the school did nothing to help me. ... I blame the people who need to be blamed. ... But I’m still affected by it every day.”
She continued, and so did her intensity.
“I’m tired of living my life, especially in the confines of this specific community, feeling I’m the one who did something wrong,” she said, “because I didn’t. It’s not my fault that this happened. And, if anything, I did every single parent in the school district a favor by getting this man out. ...
“I’m just tired of every single time I drive into this town, and every single time I go to the grocery store, or Casey’s, or even church, feeling like I’m the bad guy, when I’m not.
“I don’t want anyone else to feel like the bad guy. So I think it’s time for victims to start standing up and saying ‘I’m not going to be the bad guy.’ I’m done.”
In her telling, the narrative is of a trusting 16-year-old being groomed into a sexual relationship by a teacher, first contacting her via Instagram, and playing on her sense of friendship and sympathy. Eventually her emotions would turn to fear and denial, depression and, following high school, panic attacks and anxiety so intense that Weissenbach would lose more than 20 pounds in a year, making her parents wonder if she had cancer.
When in April 2020, as a college freshman, Weissenbach finally disclosed to her parents what happened, nearly a year after the abuse ended, it was partly a consequence of COVID-19.
Home from Emporia because of the shutdown, Weissenbach heard Kuckelman’s voice over Zoom teaching her younger sister, Jayden, who was 16 and in Kuckelman’s class, just as she had been.
“I think that was kind of the breaking point for me,” she said. “I was kind of triggered. His voice in my house. ... It reinforced all those fears. Jayden’s in this environment. ... He could be doing this to all these little girls.”
Before and after
Looking back, Weissenbach believes that Kuckelman began grooming her for a sexual relationship in 2016, the year before he propositioned her.
Anthony “Tony” Kuckelman had come to McLouth in 2013 from an even smaller school and town, Wabaunsee Senior High School in Alma, Kansas, population 900.
At 170 students, McLouth High School is tiny. Many of the teachers who taught Weissenbach were also often her neighbors who had watched her grow. They attended the same churches. Their children were her friends. Weissenbach sometimes babysat her teachers’ kids.
Kuckelman was 31 and Weissenbach was 15 in 2016 when he became her sophomore science teacher. She trusted him like she trusted all her teachers, she said. When she spoke to her friends in class, he often joined in.
“He knew everything that was going on in my life,” Weissenbach said. “He knew when I broke up with my boyfriend. He knew, you know, just because he listened to me speaking with other classmates. And so I think I felt safe with him, because he was this constant person. I saw him every day. He was at school. Like school is a safe place. “
That year, nothing untoward happened. But in her junior year it did. Weissenbach, at age 16, was placed in Kuckleman’s Chemistry 2 class with only two others students — three in the entire class. At the end of the first semester, the other two dropped the class. For the rest of the year, Weissenbach would become Kuckelman’s sole student in a one-on-one class..
Weissenbach was at home over winter break when Kuckelman’s name popped up on her Instagram account.
“He followed me, which was weird,” Weissenbach recalled, “because teachers don’t typically follow you on social media. And so I followed him back because that’s what you do.”
Kuckelman, she said, responded that it was an error, that his Instagram account was acting glitchy and it was somehow following people by mistake. Weissenbach unfollowed him and thought nothing else of it, until Kuckelman, she said, eventually contacted her again over social media, but with a more salacious message.
“With something to the effect that he was looking for something easy and something fun,” Weissenbach said. “And I was like, ‘What the heck does that mean?’ I was like, ‘You’re married with two kids.’”
Upset, she messaged him. “I was like, ‘I don’t ever want to hear this again.’ I made it very evident that this is not something that was going to happen.”
She nonetheless felt terrible and confused. The oldest of the three kids, she was always responsible, independent, trusted: good girl, athlete, great grades. If something wrong was happening, she felt, it was her dilemma to fix.
She told no one. Not a parent, not a teacher, not a friend.
“The second that he sent me that message, it was almost like a before and after,” Weissenbach said. “I was just filled with anxiety from that moment. ... I was like, this isn’t good, but I’m already in it. And I don’t know how else to describe it other than I was like, this isn’t going down a great path. I don’t know what I’m gonna do about it. ... In my brain, I said, ‘No one can know, ‘ because I was such a perfectionist. I had to be perfect in every way, all the time. And if someone were to find out like, ’Hey, he reached out to you.’ Well, why me? Like, what did I do that made this person make these advances? ... Nobody tells you what to do when your teacher does that.”
Once in class, the two of them were alone. Kuckelman, she said, played on her sympathies regarding the messages.
“He would hardly teach,” she said. “He was just moping around and, you know, he’d say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, you know, you probably hate me,’ and, ‘Oh, my wife hates me,’ and ‘I’m going to kill myself.’ I mean, immediately just pulling me into his personal life.
“The only way to get him to teach was to tell him, ‘Hey, it’s OK. Like, let’s just get back to the lesson.’ Like, ‘Hey, just don’t do it again.’ That’s what it was for about a month.”
She also didn’t want to get him in trouble, she said. He was a teacher with a job, married with two children.
“By the time it started happening,” she said, “I felt like I was so sucked in and, you know, this whole thing is my fault. I just felt trapped from the second it happened.”
Then he initiated something more intimate.
“He told me to come into the classroom,” Weissenbach said. “I can’t really remember why, but I just went, and he was waiting at the door. Then he hugged me, and then I left. That moment was when, I was like, ‘This isn’t good.’ I left the school and I just cried all the way home ... because I, like, knew where it was going after that...
“I didn’t know how to get out of it. I felt stuck in it. “
Weissenbach still told no one. Nor did she stop it. In a legal deposition, Kuckelman admits to engaging in sexual acts with Weissenbach — ranging from isolated kisses to intercourse — about 75 times through the rest of her junior and senior years, in his classroom, on school grounds and off.
When he was arrested, May 5, 2020, a police report indicates that he told police that he did not feel he was using Weissenbach.
“I did love her,” the report quotes him telling police that day. “I think a part of me will still love her.”
The fact that the relationship stretched across nearly two years, and she told no one, Weissenbach knows, has opened her up to accusations that Kuckelman was not solely at fault. The criticism is that she, at 16 — the legal age of consent in Kansas — was complicit and bears partial responsibility.
Experts on sexual assault, and survivors, insist that the dynamics of child sexual abuse are hardly so straight forward.
“That’s my same story,” said Julie Murray, 34, who was also 16 and a sophomore at Holden High School in rural Missouri when she was sexually abused by a teacher there who, at the time, was 26 or 27.
It took Murray 17 years to come forward. In June, the teacher, Joshua Hood, who was by then age 44 and a Park Hill High School football coach, pleaded guilty to five felony counts that included statutory rape and sodomy. He surrendered his teaching certificate and was sentenced to five years probation.
“I didn’t understand manipulation at that time,” Murray said. She talked of how Hood insisted he loved her, drawing her close, while also holding her hostage to consequences of disclosure — a ruined reputation, a family in trauma, an unsure future.
“The power struggle of things is you want to please them, because they’re someone that you look up to, as weird as that might be,” Murray said. “Even though you know it’s wrong and you don’t want to do it — there were times I was like scared to death — but it was more like this subservient behavior, of making sure I was doing things that I was supposed to, because, in the classroom, you’re supposed to do what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to follow the rules.”
Living in a tiny community only increased the pressure to say nothing, she said.
“Especially in a small town,” Murray said. “This teacher goes to church with your family, that teacher plays golf with your dad. I mean there are a million different spider webs of interconnected relationships. You don’t want your past, really your future, to hurt your loved one that you really do love.”
A therapist for the Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault, Kristin Mills routinely encounters situations like Weissenbach’s.
“I think that the perpetrators can do a really good job of making the victim feel like they are part of the decision for the abuse,” she said. “They do a really excellent job of making the victim feel like this is a choice that they’re making.
“Of course there were parts of her that felt like she couldn’t speak up. The teacher knew that this was an illegal relationship. In his role as a teacher, he had power and control over the student. And that power and control is bigger and often heavier and feels more present than the parts of the student that knows something about this just doesn’t feel quite right.
“That’s why we have these laws in place. That’s why teachers have the responsibility to adhere to these laws, because the power and control they have over students is that present, that big.”
Locked doors and rumors
At the heart of Weissenbach’s case is the allegation that teachers and administrators all but ignored signs and school-wide rumors that a relationship might be going on, did not report any of it to the state, and did virtually nothing in response.
“We’re saying that the school has responsibility for what happened to Haylee as a result of failing to supervise and protect her from, well, being attacked by this man,” said her attorney, Zmijewski. “I mean, Haylee can’t get past it. And she blames herself despite the fact that she was a 16-year-old child, put into a room, and the school did nothing to make sure she’d be safe. And it’s not her fault.”
Zmijewski in 2012 also sued the St. John’s Military School in Salina, Kansas, for multiple acts of student-on-student physical abuse on its campus. The school would ultimately pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars through multiple lawsuits and, in 2019, closed for good.
In court documents, he alleges how teachers and administrators in McLouth ignored a possible sexual relationship between a student and a teacher with “deliberate indifference” — a legal threshold in Title IX cases. He holds that the district neglected to keep Weissenbach safe and was negligent in allowing a teacher to have a one-on-one class with a student in a locked classroom.
Among the incidents he cites:
▪ In a deposition filed with the court, a classmate of Weissenbach’s recalled getting in a quarrel with Weissenbach and, in irritation, said, “You think ‘cuz you’re messing around with a teacher you can do whatever you want.” Their teacher overheard the comment and sent the other student to the school’s vice principal, Mark Lackey, who asked him if he had any knowledge of a relationship. He said he told Lackey he was joking. “I mean, I told him — all I said, was, I was like — I don’t know the situation, but it’s a talked about thing.”
The student said the vice principal advised him not to spread rumors. “He just told me, like, basically, like I said earlier, ‘If you do not know about it, don’t say it, because that’s how rumors get spread and that’s how it turns into a big situation, and we don’t want anybody to get in trouble right now when we don’t know anything.’”
He also said that Lackey told him, “The administration is going to handle this. We’re doing our best to handle this situation.” In his deposition, Lackey, who is now a middle school science teacher in McLouth, said he had no recollection of the interaction.
▪ Another student, in another class, signed a declaration, stating, “During my time at McLouth High School there were rumors about Mr. Kuckelman being in a relationship with H.W. “ When a student was asked to go to Kuckelman’s class to retrieve something, the student soon returned and said that Kuckelman’s door was locked. “It seemed like an awkward moment based upon the rumors that were floating through the school,” she indicated. She said she did not see the teacher do anything in response.
▪ Teacher Alyssa Floro said she was present when Weissenbach began crying while working on the 2019 yearbook. One or more students had nominated Weissenbach and Kuckelman for “cutest couple.” She asked Weissenbach if she wanted to report it to the principal and Weissenbach responded, “No. No. Like I just have like two weeks left and then I don’t have to talk to these people anymore.”
“There were times where I heard students saying, like, ’Oh, they spend a lot of time together,’ or whatever,’” Floro said in her deposition. “But I always took it as kids being mean, kids being mean to a girl who is smart, who is driven, who works hard for her grades and, to them, that’s the only reason that she can be doing so well in those classes.”
▪ Football coach and teacher Gary Freeman said that his wife told him in the fall of 2018, Weissenbach’s senior year, that she had heard that Kuckelman was having an affair with Weissenbach. Freeman said he shared that information with a few people, including his friend, Jeremy Johnson, principal of the grade school. Johnson, in an affidavit, said “this conversation did not occur.” Freeman did not report the rumor in any formal manner as such rumors were not uncommon to schools. Even in his own career, he had been subject of rumors of sleeping with students.
“I mean,” Freeman said in his deposition, “like I said, I hear things all the time, and if I had a nickel for every time somebody knew, I’d be a rich man. But they didn’t. And so when you hear things, you kind of let it roll off your shoulder.”
▪ Also in her senior year, on Friday, Oct. 19, 2018, the district’s business manager and school board clerk, Lorie Patterson, told the district superintendent, Steve Lilly, that her daughter had seen Weissenbach coming out of Kunkelman’s classroom from a door that exits to the parking lot at a time when school was not in session. Patterson, concerned, reported it to the superintendent.
McLouth’s district policy 6.44 states that any district employee who has reason to know “or suspect” that a child has been injured by any kind of abuse, sexual or otherwise, “shall promptly report the matter to the local Kansas Department of Children and Families (DCF) office or to the local law enforcement if the (DCF) office is not open.”
It goes on to say that “the employee making the report will not contact the child’s family or any other person to determine the cause of the suspected abuse or neglect.”
Lilly waited until the following Monday with high school principal Jana Davis to review the video showing Weissenbach leaving Kunkelman’s classroom. In his deposition, he said he had suspicions of “inappropriate activity.” Instead of alerting authorities, he contacted Wiessenbach’s parents, Scott and Jenny Weissenbach. Together, they all agreed to call in Haylee.
“I let them know that my questioning was going to be fairly blunt,” Lilly said in his deposition, “that I wanted to know if there was anything going on of a sexual nature, or otherwise.”
Weissenbach, in front of Lilly, Davis and her parents, denied anything improper was happening. Her parents believed her. Lilly did not contact the DCF.
Why didn’t Weissenbach disclose the truth?
“By that point in time,” Weissenbach told The Star recently, “Tony (Kuckelman) had groomed me to protect him. I felt as if it was my only option, and if I were to come forward that it would be blamed on me — a point that was especially driven home by the way the question was posed by Lilly, very accusatory.”
The Star placed calls and emails to Superintendent Lilly and Coach Freeman and Principal Davis, but received no responses. In February, the Kansas City, Kansas, public school district announced that Lilly has been hired as the district’s new chief operations officer at $145,000. He starts in July.
The question of whether the McLouth district violated Weissenbach’s rights under Title IX will largely hinge on whether her attorney can prove that the district showed “deliberate indifference” and had “actual knowledge.”
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights defines “actual knowledge” as follows: ‘”When a school receives notice of alleged misconduct that meets the definition of ‘sexual harassment’ under the Title IX regulations ... the school has ‘actual knowledge.’”
Mock said in documents that the district does not meet that standard and isn’t liable.
“Because H.W. and her parents dispelled any concerns regarding the October incident,” documents say, “and no appropriate person was informed of any credible cause for suspicion, USD 342 lacked actual knowledge and did not act with deliberate indifference.”
A judge or jury will decide.
Anger and pride
Weissenbach’s parents, meantime, only admire their daughter.
“I’m so proud,” Jenny Weissenbach said, choking back tears. “So proud that she was able to not only call him out, but especially in today’s age with social media — she has undergone a lot of abuse. And I am just so proud and in awe at her strength.
“She’s looking out for all the young girls in this community. And the fact that this community doesn’t seem to recognize that just blows my mind. It hurts. She’s one of my heroes for doing this.”
But the family is also angry and fearful. They worry about their daughter.
“She puts on a good show,” her mother said, of looking strong, keeping up her grades and spirits.
But she has also suffered: Weight loss, anxiety, depression, nightmares and post-traumatic stress. She continues in therapy. They worry about her future relationships.
“Obviously, I’m mad at Tony,” Jenny Weissenbach said. “I am very mad that all the people who said they knew this was going on and didn’t do anything. I am upset that the teachers didn’t report it. I am very upset at the administration. I had had concerns. I mean, this is a 16-year-old girl in a classroom with a teacher by herself.”
When Kuckelman was arrested, Scott Weissenbach said, friends and neighbors rallied to their side with compassion and support. But since they filed suit against the school, it has been the opposite, with only a few sticking by them.
“There are many people that we were acquaintances with that no longer have much to do with us,” he said. “I have people that avoid me when I go to Casey’s. They will wait outside in their cars until I leave. Same thing at the grocery store.”
The lawsuit, he believes, has struck at what the community holds most dear.
“The school is the town,” he said. “It’s a small town and people’s identity is related to the school. ... I think people would rather take the side of the school over a child, because the school means more to them.”
Haylee, soon to graduate Emporia State, has applied to law schools, in part to become a victim’s advocate. Her sister, Jayden, is also at Emporia State. The only reason the family continues to stay in town is to allow the youngest of their three children, Camden, 16, to finish high school in the town he was raised in, and the one his parents no longer want to be a part of.
“I would say I’m still angry,” Scott Weissenbach said. “I’ve been angry since the day she told us. ... angry for trusting other people to make sure my daughter was safe, because you think school is a safe place.”
This story was originally published March 9, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
