A Washington Local staff member accused Superintendent Patrick Hickey of repeated unwanted communication after an alleged relationship between the two ended, according to a copy of the woman’s informal complaint.
Mr. Hickey received a letter of reprimand last week from the school district after being kept from school property during a two-week investigation into the allegation. The reprimand said Mr. Hickey has shown a "repeated display of lack of judgment and inappropriate interpersonal interactions over a significant period of time."
The woman made her allegation to the district’s human resources department May 1, although she did not want to file a formal complaint, instead asking that the information be documented in case there were further occurrences. She provided a series of communicationsto the district between her, her husband, and Mr. Hickey, in which the pair ask Mr. Hickey to stop contacting them.
Related Attachments:
Formal complaint and e-mail exchanges
Mr. Hickey's written reprimand
She does not detail the nature of their relationship, but correspondence makes it clear that it caused stress between the woman, her husband, and Mr. Hickey. The woman also claims Mr. Hickey sent sexual messages to a coworker.
She details efforts she took to end communication. She says she blocked his personal cell phone, his Twitter account, she blocked his work phone, and got a new phone number. She sent him an email telling him to only contact her for work-related reasons. She claims he tried to get her new number from a coworker, a claim Mr. Hickey denied in an email to her husband.
Mr. Hickey released a statement Tuesday after The Blade asked him to respond to the allegations. He says he will not respond to or debate any issues related to the investigation.
In his statement, he notes that the staff member didn’t want to file a formal complaint, and said that Board of Education President Thomas Ilstrup’s statement that, “We believe that the concerns which were brought to the attention of the Board were thoroughly investigated by legal counsel” addressed the matter.
“I believe that the issues have been fully resolved to the satisfaction of everyone involved,” Mr. Hickey wrote. “As a result of the letter of reprimand I received, I will now be more conscious of the comments I make to male and female staff members to avoid the appearance of being confrontational.”
Records request
The complaint filed by the district employee, as well as copies of emails Mr. Hickey sent to her and her husband, were provided to The Blade following a public records request to Washington Local Schools for a copy of the investigation report and all supporting documents. Cheryl Wolff of the law firm Spengler Nathanson responded to the request, denying the request for the investigation report because it was prepared by attorneys and was covered by attorney-client privilege.
Supporting documents were provided to The Blade, but most names and identifying information were redacted. In a letter accompanying the documents, the district or its attorneys say the investigation concluded that the staff member was not subjected to harassment, but that Mr. Hickey’s “subsequent communications and actions were inconsistent with good professional judgment and his office.”
“Please be alerted that some of the information in the enclosed records is based on the writers' perceptions and was not validated,” the letter states.
Even though school officials would not release the name of the complainant, or her position with the district, the records released Tuesday make it clear she holds a teaching position at Washington Local.
In her complaint to the district’s human relations department she wrote that on April 23, “He came into my classroom and asked me what was going on and why I was doing this (I had a class at the time). I told him I was doing what I needed to do.”
Contact continued
Contact continued after the woman asked otherwise, she claims, so she and her husband tried to get Mr. Hickey’s pastor to intervene. The woman claimed that on the next day, on May 10, Mr. Hickey contacted a coworker and “asked what I wanted from him, if it was money.” She writes that Mr. Hickey told the coworker he would recover messages from his phone “in order to make me look bad,” and that he already had spoken to a lawyer.
“He was referring to messages, pictures and videos that were sent to him over the course of the relationship,” she wrote.
She claimed that the coworker had told Mr. Hickey to leave the woman alone in a conversation that “stemmed from a conversation that took place after [the coworker’s] family discovered a series of inappropriate sexual messages that he sent to her.”
Several weeks later, the woman claims, Mr. Hickey sent her husband a box containing a letter, books she had given him, a movie, a coin, and “a vial with his DNA in it,” which she said was taken during an eighth-grade class experiment.
Her husband intervened. In a June 9 email, he asked Mr. Hickey to not contact him, the woman, or her friends.
“l hope you can find a way to live the faith and core values that you speak of, to love your family, and stop your destructive behaviors,” the husband wrote.
He told Mr. Hickey in the email not to respond, but the superintendent did, explaining that he tried to contact the woman after she blocked his number and Twitter account out of concern.
“She texted me and emailed me on a very consistent basis for a long time so abruptly stopping was very out of the ordinary,” he wrote.
Mr. Hickey then offered to speak with him about the relationship.
“I know you are justifiably upset and would gladly discuss this situation with you. We all make mistakes and I will own mine. If any information I can give you can help you to mend your relationship with [redacted] then I am available to talk to you. Your [redacted] deserve your best effort and I applaud you for putting them first.”
The man responded, telling Mr. Hickey he has “seen the emails and text” and didn’t need Mr. Hickey’s explanations. He said he set up a meeting between Mr. Hickey and Mr. Hickey’s pastor, “in hopes that appealing to your beliefs would get you to face your actions and address your immoral and unprofessional actions.”
“Do not threaten my family,” the husband wrote. “I am not threatening you with any public embarrassment, I am simply trying to protect my family and my professional career. I have not looked to punish you; living with yourself is probably punishment enough.”
The husband says that soon after his wife asked Mr. Hickey to stop contact, Mr. Hickey then “started sending explicit messages to another [redacted] colleague, how did that work out for you? Have you explained that to [redacted] yet?”
The husband wrote that he objected to Mr. Hickey carbon copying their emails to his wife, and said that “I am sure you would think I was trying to intimidate you if I copied your wife. Again, Please just leave my family alone and find a way to focus on your own.”
Plea to get help
He closed his email asking for no response from Mr. Hickey, and then encouraged him to get professional help.
Mr. Hickey responded against the man’s wishes, and said that he sent the gifts to the man to let him know his wife had sent them, “so you would know that she was just as responsible as I was for the friendship we had.”
“There is blame to go with [redacted] and there is blame to go with me,” Mr. Hickey wrote. “You seem to think [redacted] is an innocent in this situation and was somehow manipulated.”
He told the husband that he is “very much at peace with who I am and how I conduct myself. I fall far short of perfect as does [redacted] as does [redacted] as does all humans.”
In a follow-up email, Mr. Hickey acknowledged he contacted attorneys about the matter, but that “they only seek the truth and are confident in my testimony and the embarrassing videos sent to me unsolicited. Truth is truth.”
The next morning, he sent another email, apologizing for sending the follow-up email. In August, there was an apparent confrontation outside the complainants’ home, after Mr. Hickey ran by their house.
On Aug. 27, the woman sent a letter to the Washington Local Schools Human Resources Director Rachael Novak and told her that she and her husband did not want her to speak to Mr. Hickey at that time about her complaint.
The woman claimed that Ms. Novak told her she would keep her complaint at her house “if I wanted her to so that it wasn’t at central office.” Sue Yount, an attorney from Bricker and Eckler in Columbus, said that Ms. Novak was asked by the staff member to make sure her concerns were kept confidential, and that she did not want to file a formal complaint. Ms. Yount did not respond to questions about whether Ms. Novak complied with the staff member’s request.
Supporters of Mr. Hickey packed board meetings during the investigation, passionately telling the board that “We support Hickey.” Much of the debate was held via social media, which rallied supporters but also helped fan speculation on the cause of the investigation.
Contact Nolan Rosenkrans at:
nrosenkrans@theblade.com
or 419-724-6086, or on
Twitter @NolanRosenkrans.
First Published September 23, 2015, 4:00 a.m.