KC area teen was punished for pro-slavery petition. Dad sues school, runs for office
Tom Hutsler strode into Riverside’s Corner Cafe wearing khakis, a heavily starched shirt, and Hoka walking shoes. He was carrying a brown Price Chopper bag. Inside were three plaques he’d brought from home, evidence he wanted to share demonstrating his decades-long dedication to, and accomplishments in, the Northland.
One, a resolution from the Missouri House of Representatives in 2005, recognized his humanitarian efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Hutsler delivered food and supplies to citizens of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Another was an award from Gov. Mike Parson for his role in helping apprehend an active shooter at the Parkville DMV in 2019. The third, from 1996, commended Hutsler for his work in downtown Parkville, where the 67-year-old former model is a prominent landlord and businessman.
“One thing I’ve learned from being down here all these years is that you have to treat everyone with respect,” Hutsler said on this recent Thursday afternoon. “In local politics, it’s better to be friends with everyone.”
Yet it is not hard to find people in Parkville who do not consider Hutsler, a Republican running for state representative in Missouri House District 12, a friend. That list includes property owners who’ve tangled with him in court, previous political foes who consider him a bully and several members of the Park Hill School District administration, which Hutsler is currently suing over a 2021 racial incident that ended with his 14-year-old son and three other boys being suspended for 180 days.
Hutsler and the other parents allege in a federal lawsuit that the school district went overboard in disciplining the students, violating their rights to due process and free speech. They’re seeking unspecified damages.
“It was totally inappropriate what the school district did,” Hutsler said. “They were scared the Black Panthers and the NAACP were going to picket and riot, so they made a quick decision to ruin these boys’ lives.”
Hutsler said that the lawsuit isn’t the focus of his race for state representative and that he had already been recruited to run for the seat prior to the incident. But he talks about it a lot. In two recent interviews with The Star, he returned again and again to the topics of race and education, criticizing the conduct of school board members, claiming white students suffer from disproportionate punishment, and expressing concern about gender pronouns and what kind of books are allowed in school libraries.
“I think this (lawsuit) speaks to the character of the person we’re dealing with,” said Jamie Johnson, Hutsler’s Democratic opponent. “If I’d been involved in that situation, I’d be mortified by the behavior of my child. There would have been some self-accountability. I think it shows where his values lie.”
‘Start slavery again’
The initial story seemed as tidy as it was disturbing. A student at Park Hill South had created and circulated a change.org petition titled “Start slavery again” — yet another instance of racist behavior in a predominantly white suburban school district. The local and national headlines came in quick.
But as the days passed, facts emerged that complicated the narrative. A clearer picture of the situation materialized. It went like this:
Sitting on a school bus en route to an away game in September 2021, several members of Park Hill South’s freshman football team, including Hutsler’s son, who is biracial (white and Asian) began bantering with one another about jobs, race and slaves. As part of the joke, a biracial (Brazilian and Black) student created the change.org petition. Three other students — two white, one Black — wrote racially insensitive jokes underneath the petition. It was then shared on the team’s Snapchat group, about 35 members. Eventually, a screenshot was shared outside the group, where it came to the attention of other students, then parents, then the school district, then the media.
It was amid this glare of national attention and social media outrage from groups like the NAACP and the Black Panthers that Hutsler and the other parents involved in the lawsuit say the Park Hill School District failed their children. The initial communications from Park Hill South Principal Kerrie Herren and then-district Superintendent Jeanette Cowherd to the school community didn’t acknowledge the race of the students involved, “feeding a growing public belief that racist white students had been the source of the petition,” writes attorney Arthur Benson in the complaint.
The school district eventually expelled the biracial student who’d created the petition. Hutsler’s son and two others were given 180-day out-of-school suspensions but were allowed to continue studies remotely. The fifth student, who is Black, was not punished at all, even though Benson’s complaint alleges that he is known to have encouraged and shared the slavery petition.
“They devastated four families over a joke,” Hutsler said. “It was a sick joke, something that shouldn’t be joked about. But it was completely blown out of proportion.”
The boys behind the slavery petition “stirred up deep and disruptive racial tensions in precisely the same way they would be stirred up if a student walked down the halls of Park Hill South waving a Confederate flag,” the school district responded in court documents. Teachers reported children crying and scared for their lives. Cowherd referred to the aftermath of the incident as the “most disruptive incident she has ever dealt with” in nearly 40 years working in public education, court papers say. One of the four students later threatened to shoot up the school, the district said.
Benson, a renowned civil rights attorney known for his efforts to desegregate Kansas City Public Schools, declined to comment to The Star on the substance of the lawsuit, other than to note that discovery and depositions have been completed and the school district’s deadline to file a motion for summary judgment (a move to end the suit) is Nov. 22.
But Benson told the conservative website the Heartlander earlier this year, “Fourteen-year-olds sometimes unwisely shoot their mouths off, instantly regretting it but causing no harm, no disruption. But here it was adults who unwisely over-reacted, causing the disruptions and they are now trying to strip these boys of their entire ninth grades.”
Hutsler’s son now attends St. Pius X High School, a Catholic school. His two other sons remain in the Park Hill School District. He said he and the other plaintiffs have spent nearly $200,000 on the lawsuit so far. “We want these students’ records expunged and we want our legal expenses paid,” he said. “I don’t know how many millions their (the school district’s) insurance policy is, but they have had three and at times four attorneys fighting us at the same time on this.”
Kelly Wachel, the district’s communications director, wouldn’t comment on the financial risk posed by the lawsuit. She told The Star, “While we really want to be able to say more than we can and are doing so through the legal process, we’re not at liberty to comment to the media right now. It is important to tell this story through legal proceedings and we feel confident in those proceedings.” (Cowherd announced her resignation the month after the incident, though Nicole Kirby, a Park Hill spokeswoman who also subsequently resigned, said at the time that Cowherd’s departure was not related to the slavery petition.)
Nicole Price, the CEO of Lively Paradox, a local leadership development firm specializing in diversity and inclusion, has spent time with the four students and believes the school district acted in a rushed and draconian fashion.
“This type of thing happens over and over again,” Price said. “There’s a catalyst: Some kids show up with a slavery petition. Then the schools come up with a technical fix to lower the heat. They issue a statement, say they’re hiring a consultant, and expelling the kids. Whatever they can do to get the national news and social media to stop talking about them. But suspending and expelling kids doesn’t make for a more inclusive Park Hill.”
She continued: “These kids were thinking it was a joke. That’s common when you’re not educated about the history of racial terror in this country. If students feel like they can tell racially insensitive jokes, there’s something about the culture of the school that is telling them it’s OK. Otherwise it would be too uncomfortable, too far outside what’s deemed acceptable. So I advocated from that lens to the school board to reinstate the children and do more education about these issues in the district. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were educating instead of punishing? Isn’t that the goal of school?”
Because Price opposed his son’s suspension, Hutsler considers himself aligned with her and her recommendations. But what about the worldview that undergirds her position? Does he believe, as Price does, that racial education should be a bigger part of Park Hill’s curriculum?
It didn’t sound that way in the press release announcing Hutsler’s candidacy in February. “As representative,” he said, “I will work to ensure no family or student exists at the mercy of critical-race-theory spewing social justice warriors.”
Speaking to The Star, Hutsler said: “DEI, CRT, whatever you want to call it — that’s a discussion I don’t really want to have. They should keep politics out of the classroom. What we’ve seen at Park Hill is that some white students are treated more harshly than Black students as a form of equalization. Including my son. You’re white and you use offensive words, the n-word, you might as well kiss your butt goodbye. If you’re Black, they do nothing to you. And that’s not right.”
Contrary to Hutsler’s view, Wachel with the school district told The Star that Black students in the Park Hill School District are actually disciplined at a rate twice that of white students. “But that’s not a statistic we’re proud of, and it’s something we’re working on through our DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging) Council,” Wachel said.
Parkville politics
Hutsler is himself a product of the Park Hill School District. After moving to Platte County in third grade, he attended Chinn and Renner elementary schools and graduated from Park Hill High School in 1973.
Tall and handsome with a thick head of hair, he worked all around the globe as a model in the 1980s and early 1990s. “Catalog, commercials, advertising,” Hutsler said. “I spent seven or eight years going between Parkville and Paris, Germany, New York, Japan, Italy.” He was also included on People magazine’s “most eligible bachelor” list in 2002, and served as a Miss USA state beauty pageant judge between 1995 and 2004.
After the flood of 1993, many landlords in downtown Parkville, which lies along the Missouri River, couldn’t afford to rebuild. Empty storefronts lined Main Street, and commercial occupancy sunk as low as 30%. Hutsler moved back to Parkville permanently around this time and began renovating properties with two other local businessmen, Dave Williams and Danny Tinsley.
Their first project was 15 Main St., which soon became home to Stone Canyon Pizza. They also renovated 2 Main St., formerly the Park College Power Plant; it became the Power Plant Brewery. By 2003, Hutsler had completed 10 projects in downtown Parkville and developed English Landing Center. The riverside town was humming with new businesses, many of which sent their monthly rent check to Hutsler.
Though it’s a small city — population: 7,000 — and peaceful as a postcard from the outside, Parkville has a reputation for surprisingly vicious local politics. Grudges are nursed for decades, territory is fiercely guarded and petty personal grievances often trump civic progress. The same names seem to pop up year after year at contentious local government meetings, on local election ballots and in the local newspapers. Hutsler’s is one of those names.
Some of the public disputes in which he’s been involved over the years have been simple civil disagreements about policy. He has tangled with Parkville aldermen over the need for more parking spaces downtown, and nearly every member of the Parkville parks board resigned in 1998 in objection to Hutsler’s use of horse carriages that some said damaged the trails in English Landing Park during Parkville Days, the annual festival Hutsler helped organize as a committee member and later chairman of the Main Street Parkville Association.
Other beefs have made it to the courthouse. The owners of the Power Plant Brewery sued him in 2006 for refusing to fix the restaurant’s smokestack. That same year, Hutsler made headlines for painting over the names of several tenants on the entrance sign to English Landing Center, allegedly to pressure their landlord, Eng-Land Inc., with whom Hutsler was involved in a lawsuit over paying for improvements in the development.
“I don’t understand why he does the things he does,” Mark Coulter of Eng-Land told the Parkville Luminary at the time. “I don’t know why he would hurt the merchants and tenants at English Landing Center, but that’s what he does. I’m sure in his own mind it makes sense but to others observing him, it’s just irregular and odd.” (The suit was eventually dropped, and Eng-Land, Inc. has since sold its buildings in the English Landing Center.)
Hutsler had a particularly contentious relationship with Mark Vasto, publisher and editor of the Parkville Luminary, a feisty local tabloid active from 2004 to 2012. Hutsler ran for office unsuccessfully three times in the 2000s — twice for alderman, once for mayor — and Vasto aggressively covered his campaigns. Vasto was critical of Hutsler’s conduct as chairman of Parkville’s Community Improvement District, accusing him of fostering too close of a relationship between the CID, which collects a sales tax fund, and the Main Street Parkville Association, which receives most of those funds and on which Hutsler was a board member.
Vasto reported smaller items about Hutsler, too, such as that he had run a hot dog vendor he didn’t like out of downtown by parking a truck in front of his stand. Vasto also broke the news in 2011 that Platte County Prosecutor Eric Zahnd had warned Hutsler he was the subject of a criminal investigation for removing flood prevention sandbags near his property downtown.
“They had built a 10-foot-high wall in anticipation of the flood,” Hutsler said. “The flood was supposed to happen in July but in late August the wall was still up and merchants were complaining it was keeping people out. So I instructed my workers to take it down. He (Zahnd) sent a letter, my lawyer sent a letter back, and three days later the wall was down.” He added: “Eric Zahnd is a friend of mine. I put some of my signs in his yard just a few days ago.”
Vasto and Hutsler’s animus boiled over into a physical confrontation in 2009. Vasto believed Hutsler was stealing copies of the Luminary out of the newspaper’s downtown boxes. “He broke into the front door of one of my buildings, chest-bumped me and said he was going to kick my ass,” Hutsler said. “I called the police. They arrested him for assault, then he turned around and filed assault charges against me. They released me and kept him overnight.” Hutsler eventually got an order of protection against Vasto, who died in 2021.
Hutsler has also clashed with at least two Parkville mayors. Shortly after he lost the mayoral race in 2008, Hutsler filed an ethics complaint against outgoing mayor Kathy Dusenbery, accusing her of using her mayoral status to improperly forward an email that endorsed his opponent. An ethics commission investigation eventually faulted Dusenbery but didn’t recommend any sanctions.
And in 2019, Hutsler was believed to be associated with an ethics complaint against Nan Johnston that alleged Missouri Sunshine Law violations related to Creekside, a Parkville development that received a tax increment financing subsidy deal from Johnston and the Parkville aldermen. The ethics commission announced in March that Johnston had committed eight violations. Hutsler denies he was affiliated with Jason Maki, who filed the original ethics complaint, though he did call him a “genius.” Hutsler was also quoted in several newspaper stories at the time expressing support for an ethics probe into Johnston.
“I know that we’ve got a couple of past mayors in Parkville who are not happy with me for whatever reason,” Hutsler said. “With Kathy, she eventually became county commissioner, and then the people realized — they voted her out of office. And she’s been upset ever since. No matter what anyone does, she’s critical. And with Nan, she disrespected a lot of people at these aldermen meetings and forums they were having over that development. And she made a deal with the developer behind closed doors. That made them mad. But I had nothing to do with that.”
Johnston, who did not seek reelection for mayor in 2022, declined to comment. Dusenberry, a Republican who later served on the Platte County Commission, is supporting Jamie Johnson in the race for House District 12.
“At first introduction, Tom can be charming, but a disagreement with him can quickly go threatening,” Dusenbery said. “Tom has a history of using his fists instead of diplomacy. His fist fights on Parkville Main Street are well known. Is this the kind of reputation we would want for this district?”
Hutsler said he had no recollection of any physical fights other than his altercations with Vasto.
The race
Platte County is the fastest-growing county in the state of Missouri in terms of percentage growth, and following the 2020 redistricting process, there are now three Missouri House seats representing parts of it. Two of those seats, including House District 12, are expected to be competitive races in November.
“We’re being advised it’s a toss-up,” Johnson said of House District 12, which encompasses much of southern Platte County, including Parkville, Riverside, Platte Woods, Northmoor, and Houston Lake.
“People are pouring in, and southern Platte is getting bluer,” said Ashley Aune, a Democrat representing House District 14, also in Platte County. “It’s very close to downtown Kansas City. People want to live here.”
Johnson arrived in the Northland 17 years ago, not long after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in her native New Orleans. She and her family evacuated to Houston, then moved up to Leavenworth, where some relatives in the military lived, and eventually settled in the Northland.
“The community here really embraced us,” Johnson said. “The schools made sure my kids had what they needed. We found jobs and got other assistance that helped stabilize things for us during that time. We felt like people really rallied behind us.”
Johnson had been an apartment manager in New Orleans, but in Missouri she went back to school and received a bachelor’s in urban planning and design from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She now works in talent management — “it’s just a fancy word for HR,” she said — at Commerce Bank.
She got involved in local politics in 2020, volunteering for the Election Protection coalition, through which she met some members of the Platte County Democratic Central Committee. Johnson is now the vice chair of that committee. She said public education is one of the main reasons she decided to run for office.
“Missouri is ranked 49th in the country for funding public education, and last I saw we are 50th in the country for starting teacher pay,” Johnson said. “That’s not good enough for me. We can’t retain teachers like that. They go to other states, other schools. We need to have a proper funding vehicle and formula for public education in this state. And the Republican legislature has just not been doing that.”
Hutsler said he also believes Missouri schools need more funding, though he comes at it from a different angle.
“We shouldn’t be giving OSS (out-of-school suspensions),” Hutsler said. “If it’s an assault, then sure, that’s a police issue. But if you’ve broken school policy, you should have an in-school suspension where you’re still being taught English, math, history, and maybe how to behave yourself. I don’t care if the school has to bring in a behavioral expert. We need to fund that. And by the way, I believe that should be popular with my Democratic friends. Because guess who’s been hurt by these policies? Minorities. They’ve been giving these Black kids OSS and expulsions for the last 40 years. It needs to change.”
Hutsler, who said he was recruited to run by staff at the Republican consulting firm Axiom Strategies, was less specific when asked how he might convince other Missouri Republicans to reverse the course public education has been on in the state while they’ve controlled the legislature for the past 20 years.
“I don’t know the exact answer for that, but we absolutely need to increase funding to schools,” he said. “I can tell you, I think what qualifies me to be a state rep is my business experience. Being a general contractor and having to build things. My experience owning different types of businesses. I have a payroll, I have to pay sales taxes, I’ve gotten business licenses, I’ve gotten liquor licenses. I can tell you what our government does that works and what doesn’t.”
Tara Bennett, a longtime Parkville resident whose father once represented Platte County in the legislature, said Hutsler’s reputation around Parkville will hurt him in the election.
“The fact that he has run for office three times already and not won is telling,” Bennett said. “People in Parkville know who he is. And his latest shenanigans with the school district illustrate that. People move to Parkville because of the schools. When you have a candidate whose stated goal is to go after the school district in a place like this — I think that’s very much at odds with how people here feel.”
Hutsler disagreed. His reputation in Parkville, he said, was as a job creator and a hard worker. Someone committed to improving his community. Just look at all the plaques in his grocery sack.
“When Hurricane Katrina hit, I made five trips over three months to Mississippi and Louisiana, representing Parkville, delivering relief supplies,” Hutsler said, holding the framed resolution honoring him for that work. “My opponent used to live there, and she fled. Well, while she was fleeing the storm, I was heading into the storm.”
Long pause.
“I don’t mean that in a bad way,” Hutsler said. “I’m just proud of the fact that I could help in that community.”
This story was originally published October 19, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
