When I married my lovely wife Jane in May of 1991, she had already built a house in Fishers so I took up residence there after the nuptial ceremonies were done. Fishers was a town of about 10,000 people, maybe a little less at that time, known for being an emerging suburban community, but it was very well known for its school system, the Hamilton Southeastern (HSE) Schools.
The Town of Fishers became a city in 2015 and the local schools have grown massively since I moved to Fishers. The Hamilton Southeastern School Corporation is now the 4th-largest in the state of Indiana in terms of number of students enrolled. Amazingly, HSE Schools somehow handled the massive influx of new students, and throughout the growth period maintained its reputation for being a high-performing school district.
When I began my news blog in 2012, I learned something very important. Our elected officials are good people. You can argue whether all the decisions were the correct decisions, but their heart has been in the right place.
I found that the members of the Hamilton Southeastern School Board are very good people (OK, many reading this would argue an exception or 2 but I’m not dealing with that in this piece). Just making the decision to run for a seat on the school board is making a massive commitment to the local community. Once elected, board members find the job entails a lot more time and effort then anyone imagined as a candidate.
I would also say that the school administrators and teachers, in my experience, are good people. Yes, you might argue an exception or two, but our local educators take on the awesome responsibility of educating our children. Just about every one takes that responsibility very seriously.
Now, having written all that, I have a question all citizens residing within the HSE School District need to ask yourselves – why do HSE Schools manage to get themselves mixed-up in so many public relations fiascoes? Why does a school corporation that gets so much right, get so much wrong dealing with so many widely-publicized situations?
My twin daughters attended HSE Schools grades K-12. That education prepared them well for life after HSE. Both are now college graduates, married and productive members of society. I can tell you all about the value HSE Schools bring to families and students.
Since beginning my local Fishers news blog, as a volunteer effort, I have found three situations where HSE could have avoided the negative limelight, but failed to come across as the high-performing school system we all know.
The first is the handling of a discipline issue involving Fishers Varsity Football Coach Rick Wimmer. The school board voted to suspend coach Wimmer over an incident related to his role as a teacher. The board buried that suspension in something called the “Consent Agenda” which is normally several pages. It includes all types of personnel actions, including resignations, temporary hiring and maternity leave situations.
But the school corporation chose not to name Wimmer in a consent agenda listing his suspension. Instead, school officials chose to identify Wimmer by employee number. It would appear there was nothing illegal about that, but it was a change from past policy and the school corporation never announced that change. Had school officials simply announced the change in policy, that might have helped, but that wasn’t done.
WTHR’s investigative news team found out about all that, and has been pressuring the HSE Schools to reveal more details about why the Wimmer suspension decision was made. WTHR received two decisions from the Indiana Public Access Counselor saying facts about this suspension decision must be revealed, but school officials have been steadfast in refusing to reveal any specific facts about the incident leading to the suspension of the football coach.
Now, the situation has come to the the point where the student involved in the alleged incident and his parents have filed a civil suit against the HSE Schools. Also, WTHR has partnered with a nonprofit organization based in Washington DC to assist in their legal case as WTHR also sues the school corporation…this civil suit is an effort to force HSE Schools to disclose more facts about the Wimmer suspension.
This was an avoidable debacle and it continues because this high-performing school system with a generally positive reputation has been so adamant in its position on revealing information, to the point of ignoring the Public Access Counselor.
The second blunder happened when there was a national movement last year to conduct student walk-outs honoring the victims of the Parkland, Florida high school shooting. 17 people, 14 of them high school students, lost their lives in that shooting.
Most school corporations in our area announced ways their students could peacefully protest without facing disciplinary action. They all had different ways of going about it, but nearly all found a way to allow their students to honor the victims of Parkland.
HSE Schools took a very different approach, which I criticized at the time. School officials here made it clear they intended to keep all options open on disciplinary actions, taking an extremely hard line compared to just about any school systems in our area.
In the end, some students did walk out of classes, but did so in an orderly and peaceful manner. To my knowledge, no one was disciplined for participating in the walkout. But not before the school corporation took another black eye to their image with the draconian stance taken before the protests.
That brings us to the most recent controversy and this is about a member of the Fishers High School Swim Team. I received my first clue something was amiss at the most recent HSE School Board meeting. There were public comments being made about the proposed nondiscrimination policy. Two female swimmers for Fishers High School, and one adult, spoke about a Fishers High School swim team member involved in sexual harassment allegations that had been suspended but would now be eligible to compete in the sectional swim meet.
School Board Member Brad Boyer was the only board member to respond at that meeting, by saying he had been under the impression this swimmer would not be competing in the sectional meet.
Then, the Indianapolis Star published a story February 15th laying out the anger of the young women, and their parents, claiming to have been victimized by this high school swimmer’s sexual harassment. When the swimmer did compete at the sectional tournament held at HSE High School, a protest was held outside the entrance to the HSE pool, saying school officials were wrong to allow the swimmer to compete. The swimmer qualified for the state meet held February 22 & 23. The same group announced another protest at the state finals but I cannot confirm as of this writing what happened there.
On February 18th, WTHR broadcast a story with reporter Bob Segall about this controversy. It included interviews with the girls talking about their reactions to lifting the suspension, allowing the swimmer to compete. There is also an interview with the attorney representing the swimmer facing these allegations.
The WTHR story details how Fishers High School administrators asked the IHSAA for a waiver to allow this swimmer to compete in the state tournament, since the suspension did not give the swimmer enough meet appearances to qualify for the tournament under the association’s rules. The waiver was granted.
There were more stories in the Star and WTHR, then it happened. The top sports columnist at the state’s largest newspaper let HSE Schools have it….and in a very big way. Greg Doyel wrote a column calling the handling of the situation by HSE officials “appalling.”
Doyel was, to put it bluntly, savage in his assessment of HSE School leaders.
I also read a Facebook post by recent school board candidate Brad Banks. He is a lawyer and knows about the legal side of this much more than I ever will. He took Doyel to task for not realizing that a Title IX issue and a disciplinary issue are two different things. In other words, the Title IX law specifically states this; “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
This law is there to ensure girls may participate in sports without having to endure sexual harassment.
The appeal to the HSE School Board was about Title IX. The student’s suspension was a separate issue, dealing with the student’s adherence (or lack thereof) to the student code of conduct.
Brad Banks argues that under Indiana law, school boards oversee school corporations and evaluate the job being done by the school superintendent. The superintendent, in turn, manages the administrative staff that makes decisions on discipline (like suspensions) for individual students. In other words, Banks says Doyel was wrong to go after members of the school board because they have no legal authority to intervene.
I would never argue with Counselor Banks in his reading of the law. However, there is the law and there is also reality. Even though a school board member may not have legal authority to intervene in a discipline case, board members almost always get involved in highly publicized cases whether they are legally authorized or not. You don’t need to fire a superintendent to have influence over the administrative process.
Brad Banks argues “the media should have done a better job of reporting the whole picture.” I disagree. You can make an argument Doyel’s commentary was way over the top, but I’m not commenting either way on that.
I believe the media did a pretty good job of reporting this story with the information available to the reporters involved. The “information available” part is the key here.
School administrators have much more information on this situation than has been reported. I believe there are facts and circumstances that school officials are not allowed to share publicly and those facts were weighed in their decision. Don’t get me wrong, the girls saying they were victimized in this case have every right to make their case publicly if they choose to do so and the protests are part of the American tradition of having your arguments heard.
However, for the decisions that have been made, school officials clearly had facts we will likely never know in the public sphere. There are laws that may not allow this information to ever become public.
So, what has happened in this case of the Fishers High School swimmer’s sexual harassment allegations has created another negative story about HSE Schools. When the HSE Schools get bad publicity, it hurts us all.
I am personally saddened that our local schools, with so many talented and hard-working educators, are being tarnished unfairly by all this negative media attention.
I agree with Brad Banks that we all need to step back and look at as much of this as we can learn through the information that is public, and we need to consider the legal ramifications, including the difference between Title IX and student discipline.
This swimmer story makes me ache in lots of different ways. I just hope HSE officials know what they are doing in this case.
