Charlo board rehires principal despite complaint
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CHARLO — Charlo school board voted to re-hire principal Steve Love on Feb. 17, despite a parent’s request to delay the re-hire until an outside agency can review whether Love acted appropriately in administrating records for a student.
Parents Andrew and Cari Rosenbaum asked the school board in a closed meeting to have an outside agency look into why it took the school district 132 days to give the home-schooling couple their son’s education files.
According to the Rosenbaums, problems with the district began in 2014, when their sixth grade son endured intense incidents of bullying at school. The boy was regularly harassed, urinated upon in the boys’ locker room, and had his pants and undergarments completely removed by classmates during an unsupervised recess session.
The Rosenbaums made complaints against the 10 children involved in the incidents, and asked the board for additional supervision in the locker rooms.
The board sent the Rosenbaums a letter of finding dated Aug. 4, 2014, that summed up the pants removal incident, stating that the teacher that was supposed to be on-duty was late and that the child had had his pants removed. The board’s letter said that documentation about the incident was placed in the teacher’s personnel file and that perpetrators were punished. Additional staff and student bullying awareness efforts were launched, the letter said.
“In part to try to prevent such incidents from happening in the future, the Charlo School is adding staff, adjusting schedules to make sure a teacher is outside at recess and having a staff member pass through the locker rooms periodically,” the board wrote in the letter.
The Rosenbaums were unsatisfied with the result and decided to home school their son in the 2014-2015 school year.
“It was not a safe environment at that time,” Cari said of the decision, adding that it was a tough one to make. She and her own husband are alumni of the school, as are their two grown children.
“I’m not an overreactive mom,” Cari said. “I know middle school is tough.”
Although the boy was home-schooled, he still qualified for special education testing through the district that was deemed necessary the previous year. The district sent the Rosenbaums a form asking that they authorize testing, but the form was not filled out. It did not indicate what testing was to be administered and it lacked critical information about the child. The signature of the special education teacher on the form was also misspelled, leaving the Rosenbaums to believe it was filled out by Love, instead of the appropriate special education teacher. The Rosenbaums sent the form back twice before it was returned to them correctly. The child underwent testing, and a learning impairment was diagnosed. The Rosenbaums hired a qualified tutor to deal with the issue.
But Cari says it was difficult to know where to start her son in home schooling because she made a records request for her son’s records on Sept. 11, 2014 and she did not receive them until Jan. 21, 2015. State law requires the records to be delivered to another school in five days and to parents within 45 days.
In the interim, Rosenbaum was allowed to review her son’s cumulative file, but she said she found paperwork included that should have been under lock and key in a separate special education file.
She also had difficulty reviewing the child’s special education files, because the school could not find them.
“Those files had a direct correlation to how I was going to educate him,” Cari said. “I just feel like Carlo Schools has not provided him with a safe environment, nor have they provided him a free and public education if they can’t even keep up with his records.”
Cari said the board was not responsive to her Feb. 17 complaint. The board dismissed the family’s inquiry as to whether Love’s re-hiring could be delayed until an outside agency could look into the complaint further. Cari said she is determined to get the incident reviewed, even if the school board does not initiate it themselves.
Principal Love could not say much about the incident because of student privacy laws.
“All concerns and complaints are investigated thoroughly for the best interest of all students,” Love said. “Our uniform complaint procedure is public information and the process is followed appropriately for the best interest of all students as well as staff. It has been my experience that there is almost always two sides to every issue and rarely is it all black and white.”
Love also said that the school regularly has anti-bullying activities in place.
Prior to Love’s rehiring, another family spoke in appreciation of how he handled complicated education issues with their son.
“We have a little boy who is going to school and he is finally on track now,” said Terrance Rosenbaum, brother of Cari’s husband Andrew. “He started school at the beginning of the year. I know you guys being on the board, get little to no thank yous, because you guys have a thankless job and God bless you for doing it. But for whatever you guys did to get our boy back into school, we say thank you. A lot of that thanks does go to Steve Love. Since we’ve been working with Steve he has been understanding and more willing to deal with us, willing to listen, and most importantly, he has been honest with us.”
