Olathe schools knew elementary teacher accused of stalking student had disturbing past
Eight and a half years before an Olathe elementary school teacher was arrested for stalking a student, a group of middle school cheerleaders expressed concerns about the same man, leading to a district investigation.
But James D. Loganbill did not lose his job then. Instead, the school district reassigned him to another school where last spring he admitted to stalking at least two fourth grade girls he found “sexually attractive,” according to a court record.
One of them was a girl identified in court documents only by her initials. When the girl wore black leggings last school year, it aroused Loganbill, he told police and the school principal.
Detectives found 210 pictures and 31 videos of the 10-year-old on Loganbill’s phone and iPad when they searched them with his consent. Many of the images were of her fully clothed backside, focused on her buttocks, that he captured furtively when she wore tights or dancing pants to Meadow Lane Elementary School in Olathe.
He never touched her in a sexual way. But according to court documents, Loganbill, 58, told police that he found the girl “sexually attractive and would not have taken the pictures otherwise.” He’d look at them at home, the police affidavit said, on the same devices that he would watch her competitive dance performances he’d searched for on YouTube.
The girl had not noticed that he was taking photos of her at school, but her friends did. They told their parents, who alerted the girl’s parents, who then reported it to the school principal on March 9.
Two days later, Loganbill resigned when confronted with the allegations. That Wednesday he also confessed to police, telling them “he knew what he did was ‘dumb, just dumb.’ ”
Now, parents are asking not only how Loganbill was able to keep his position in the district for so long, but if there are other teachers with similar behaviors who have been quietly shuffled among schools.
In June, Loganbill was charged with reckless stalking, a misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of a year in jail. But that charge may not stick, the county’s top prosecutor acknowledges. Defense attorney Carl Cornwell contends in a motion that the case should be dismissed since the stalking statute requires that the victim fear for their safety while being stalked, and the girl hadn’t been aware of it.
In other words, what Loganbill admitted to might have been creepy but not necessarily illegal.
Regardless, Olathe Public Schools could be in legal jeopardy for lawsuits based on allegations that the district knew Loganbill had a disturbing predilection for young girls, yet continued to keep him in the classroom.
“They’re in trouble,” Cornwell said.
Through a spokeswoman, Olathe superintendent John Allison declined The Star’s request for comment.
“Due to the pending claim and continued litigation, the district will not be doing interviews at this time,” executive assistant Joy Bondurant said in an email.
Cornwell said Loganbill also would not comment.
Troubled history
That the district knowingly put the fourth-grade girl and other youngsters in danger of being sexually exploited by one of its teachers is the central contention of that pending claim. The girl’s parents have formally notified the district that they intend to file a lawsuit as soon as a mandatory 120-day waiting period ends in a couple of months.
Bolstering the allegation are the accounts of some of Loganbill’s former students who had him as their teacher in grade or middle school and are now in their 20s and 30s.
After Loganbill’s arrest made the news this summer, the women began posting their stories on Facebook, alleging that he had focused inappropriate and sometimes obsessive attention on them and other young girls during his 31-year career at Olathe Public Schools.
Olathe police interviewed many of them and five agreed to share their stories with The Star, as did four parents whose children had Loganbill as a teacher at Meadow Lane and Pioneer Trail Middle School, along with three current or former Olathe educators who worked with him.
None of the former students (most of whom did not want their names published) said Loganbill’s behavior rose to the level of sexual assault. However, they all had similar remembrances from different periods of his career of how he would dote on one or more special girls, giving them sweets, letting them skip tests and keeping their desks close to his.
One woman now in her 30s said he abused her emotionally after she reported him to the principal for being overly friendly with her female classmates when she was in sixth grade at Countryside Elementary School 21 years ago.
“Even at that age, it kind of struck me like, this is weird,” said the woman, who lives in Independence.
Another woman, who had him for fifth grade in 1991, also at Countryside, said she thought it odd at the time that, every day after lunch, he would pat his leg and summon the same girl to sit on his lap while he read to the class.
“I remember thinking like, well, I guess, you know, she’s the teacher’s pet and she’s the favorite,” said the woman, who went on to become a teacher in the Olathe district for 12 years before leaving in 2017.
“Once I started teaching, that would pop into my head and I’d think, omigosh, that is so inappropriate,” she said.
Earl Martin, the principal at Countryside during the 1990s, said he always considered Loganbill a good teacher and can’t recall receiving complaints about him.
“Now I’m not saying there were not some people having concerns that they expressed among themselves or whatever, but no one formally made a complaint against him during the time when I was there,” said Martin, who retired as the district’s head of elementary education.
“I do think that something happened at the middle school later on that was significant, but frankly I don’t know anything about that.”
Daja Coker does. She and two other young women, who are also now college seniors, told The Star that when they were cheerleaders in seventh grade at Pioneer Trail Middle School in 2011, they and others on the cheer squad became increasingly uncomfortable with the attention their social studies teacher showed toward them.
That was Loganbill. When the district did away with its junior high schools in 2010, ninth-graders moved into the high schools, and sixth-graders moved out of elementary schools and into middle schools.
Like many other sixth grade teachers, Loganbill moved with them.
Coker and the others remember a strange remark he made during his introduction to the fall semester in 2011.
“He said, ‘sometimes you might catch me staring at you, and if you do just give me a nod and I’ll look away,’” she recalled. “As a seventh-grader, I’m not thinking too much about that, but then going back after things happened, well, he only did that with the girls.”
Coker and the other two, who did not want their names used, said he was especially friendly with the cheerleaders and would coax them to pose for a picture with him in their uniforms. He taped their wallet-sized yearbook photos to the frame of his computer monitor and would rearrange them now and then based on some preference they didn’t understand.
“Mine was always in the top left corner,” said the former cheerleader who the others agreed was his favorite. “That was my spot. No one got their picture above mine.”
She said Loganbill would leave what she came to think of as “love notes” in her school folder, and it embarrassed her. Once she erased one of them that he’d written in pencil. The next time she looked, he’d rewritten it in pen.
“After that point, I never touched that folder again,” she said.
Kerri Yanes, the mother of a fourth cheerleader, said she called the favorite girl’s mother to alert her after her daughter told her about it. She remembers that she and other parents went to visit the principal about that and other troubling behavior.
“He had a back room, and he’d, like, go back there and talk to them one on one,” Yanes said.
The back room was a shared space for several teachers. Loganbill would give the girls treats, the former cheerleaders said, that he kept in a filing cabinet, and would invite them to eat lunch with him in his classroom.
“There was even one instance where he sat on a student’s lap,” Coker said. “I can’t remember what the circumstance was, but I, like, vividly remember that.”
The back room visits and all the rest concerned another teacher when the cheerleaders told her about it.
“And I immediately let our administrators know and their parents know,” said the teacher, who still works in the district and fears she would suffer repercussions if her name was published. “And at that point I was completely shut out of it.”
District officials launched an investigation that ended with Loganbill being reassigned, although it is unclear whether the reassignment was forced or voluntary.
It’s also unclear whether any disciplinary action was taken or whether school officials reported the complaints to the Kansas Department for Children and Families, the state agency that conducts independent investigations of alleged child abuse.
Educators are on a long list of professionals required to call a state hotline whenever there is an allegation of physical, sexual or emotional abuse of children no matter how credible it might seem.
“It doesn’t matter as a mandated reporter if you believe the child, you are still mandated by law to make a report,” said Bev Turner, education program director at the child advocacy group Sunflower House.
Police apparently have a copy of the district’s internal investigative report but have not made it public, nor would the detective working on the Loganbill case discuss it.
From what they do know about what happened at Pioneer Trail nine years ago, several parents told The Star that they have lost trust in the district. They wonder whether other teachers with troubled pasts are being bounced from school to school the way Roman Catholic priests were often transferred to other parishes for decades when allegations of sexual misconduct arose.
“I mean, it’s really just like the Catholic Church,” said Kyle Johnson, whose daughter was one of the fourth-grader’s classmates. “The school district is doing the same thing, and nobody seems to care.”
District officials deny that in emails sent to Meadow Lane parents and obtained by The Star.
“We do not shuffle around child predators,” board member LeEtta Felter wrote one mother. “We never have, and we never will. Our number one priority is the safety of our students. Period.”
She said the district is currently reviewing its policies with regard to child safety. And in another email to Meadow Lane parents, chief human resources officer Jill S. Beckman said the Kansas Association of School Boards is doing a complete policy audit this fall.
As to the stories circulating on Facebook and elsewhere about the district’s possible culpability, Beckman wrote that she couldn’t comment specifically about Loganbill’s situation for legal reasons. But she implied those accounts might not be entirely accurate:
“As I hope you can understand and appreciate, there are many times when the information that is circulating publicly is not 100% accurate or does not provide the full picture.”
Teacher defends Loganbill
After the cheerleaders lodged their complaint, they were allowed to finish out the semester in another social studies class.
Coker and the other two former cheerleaders who spoke with The Star said some teachers thought the girls had overreacted and accused them of staining Loganbill’s record with false accusations. They remember one being quite harsh.
“We’re already out of our comfort zones to say something about this situation,” Coker said. “We want to feel safe, and to know that one of our teachers is basically calling us liars, it’s not too refreshing.”
That teacher, now retired and speaking on the condition that her name not be published, does remember telling the girls that Loganbill’s career could have been ruined by false accusations.
But she recalls also saying “if it’s true I am behind you 100%.”
Loganbill’s favorite cheerleader has no recollection of that offer of support.
“I definitely do not remember her saying (that),” she said. “It was all very negative, how this is our fault...we were ruining his career and all this.”
Loganbill was assigned substitute duty outside of Pioneer Trail in the spring semester of the 2011-2012 school year. That next fall term, he arrived at Meadow Lane where he taught fourth grade for the next eight school years.
According to police, Loganbill told them that in each of the past three years “there has always been a girl who wore tights and admitted that last year he took pictures of another student.”
Last year refers to the 2018-2019 school year, as the police interview was conducted in the spring of 2020. In August, the Kansas State Department of Education stripped him of the teaching certificate he had held since 1984 for taking pictures of a young student “in compromising positions without her knowledge for his personal sexual gratification.”
He did not challenge the decision.
#notyourdaughter
The alleged stalking victim’s mom has become an activist, forming a group called #notyourdaughter, for which she is working to get nonprofit status. Last month, supporters wearing pink T-shirts with that slogan rallied outside the Olathe school board meeting to show their support for tougher policies to protect kids.
The Star generally does not name victims of crimes against children, so we’re not naming the parents of the child in order to protect her identity.
But that mother is well known to local state legislators and Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe, who is working with her to change the stalking statute. Howe wants to remove the requirement that the victim be fearful while they are being stalked, as well as make the charge a felony when the offense is sexually motivated.
“It would make it easier for us to ensure that this type of conduct is prohibited under Kansas law,” Howe said, although he is not conceding that the current statute won’t hold Loganbill accountable. If Loganbill is convicted, Howe will seek to have him placed on the sex offender registry.
The girl was scared when she learned she had been the object of his attention and was terrified Loganbill might show up at her house someday. A judge granted a protective order back in April that would penalize him if that were to happen.
“At 10 years old, it has been very confusing for her to understand why someone who she trusted and saw as a ‘safe’ person in a safe place would take advantage of their position of authority and take advantage of her,” the mom said in a text message. “She is now fearful and scared that given some of the things he did and said, that he would still potentially want to harm her.”
She goes to a different school now, but not in the Olathe district.
This story was originally published October 4, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
