|
David F. Spray
Dayton High School
Dayton School District
The football coach admitted he had hugged and kissed
the team's 17-year-old manager and bought her flowers, a championship
ring and a jacket.
Spray's conduct led then-Superintendent Steve Chestnut to conclude that
the coach "has engaged in an inappropriate and exploitive relationship
with a female high-school student," according to Chestnut's 1996
complaint to the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI.) "My
investigation revealed an inappropriate romantic-type of relationship."
Chestnut gave the OSPI the district's file on its investigation, including
interviews with Spray, the girl and witnesses.
For three years, the OSPI did little with the complaint, records show.
In 1999, it dismissed the complaint without explanation.
Before that, the district reached an agreement with Spray: Instead
of firing him, it paid him $15,000 in 1996 to quit "based on what was
best for the school district," Chestnut said.
" I made a mistake," Spray, 47, said. "It's something I'm not
proud of. I wasn't trying to seduce her."
He is a physical-education teacher and assistant football coach at
Pasco High School in southeastern Washington.
Robert D. Shaw
Ellensburg High School
Ellensburg School District
After a 14-year-old girl complained that the
football coach put her head in his lap, caressed her lips and nuzzled
her, Ellensburg passed
the case on to the OSPI in 1996.
Records show the school was in the process of firing Shaw, 33, because
of a history of touching female students inappropriately and making sexual
comments, but he resigned.
Over the next five years, the OSPI conducted no interviews with students,
teachers or Shaw, its files show, using district information instead.
Meanwhile, Shaw moved to Idaho, where he worked in two school districts
from 1998 to 2001.
In July 2001, the OSPI suspended Shaw's teaching license for two years
after he admitted "he engaged in inappropriate conversation and
physical contact with a female student."
Though Shaw was not allowed to teach, Yelm High School hired him as a
football coach and assistant boys basketball coach in 2001. He still
works there.
Joseph C. Morrison
Kalles Junior High
Puyallup School District A love note the football coach wrote to a seventh-grade
girl was so alarming that Principal Pam Galloway immediately removed
him from the
classroom.
"It is so frustrating to see you and not be able to show how
much I love you," Morrison wrote to the 13-year-old in January 2000.
The OSPI investigated him, obtaining statements from school officials
over the next several months.
"I now have no doubt in my mind that Joe Morrison was grooming
youngsters," Galloway
stated.
"He seemed to focus on several girls and to keep them
vying for his attention.
"He lacks the good moral character" to be a teacher.
The file contains few entries after that. In March 2002, the state dismissed
the case when Morrison's teaching license expired. The OSPI never decided
whether he was fit to teach.
He can apply for a new license in Washington or elsewhere.
The girl, now in high school, said he should have been barred from teaching. "If
he goes back to teaching and there's another girl that he starts writing
letters to and then it turns out to be more, then she gets hurt in a
bigger way," she said. |
|