Last year, Vashon Island School District quietly executed a settlement agreement with James Myers, a Vashon High School special education teacher, following escalating administrative interventions into his job performance.

These interventions included detailed communications about his need to comply with state laws in his work with two students and his management of another student’s individualized education program (IEP).

The Aug. 31, 2022 settlement agreement with the teacher included a one-time severance payment of $33,000 — the approximate value of two months of his pay and one year of health benefits. According to state records, Myers’ compensation in the 2021-2022 school year was approximately $112,000.

The agreement additionally called for the removal of all disciplinary documents from Myers’ personnel file and specified that the district’s human resources department would respond to inquiries from any potential future employers of Myers by providing the dates of his employment and his assignments in the district.

As was the case with two more recent settlements with former VHS teachers John Rees and Kara Sears, the agreement was signed by district Superintendent Slade McSheehy.

Myers’ separation from the district was approved, without discussion, in the consent agenda of a school board meeting on Sept. 22, 2022, along with several other personnel changes in the district.

This action, too, mirrored the board’s acceptance of the resignations of Sears and Rees, which occurred without discussion.

Myers’ signed separation agreement was not included in the board documents, nor did the board specifically vote in an open meeting to approve the legal agreement, which had already been signed by McSheehy.

Documents discussed in this article were first received by an islander through a public records request and subsequently obtained by The Beachcomber. McSheehy verified the authenticity of all the documents.

School board was informed

In an Oct. 13 interview, McSheehy said that he had fully informed school board members, in weekly one-on-one meetings with regular board members and/or two-on-one meetings with the board’s chair and vice-chair, about all the issues surrounding Myers’ employment — including the involvement of the district’s legal counsel in the matter.

McSheehy described the briefings as his regular practice to keep board members informed about a full range of important district issues, including personnel issues.

“My responsibility is to inform the board what’s happening so that there are no surprises … so they understand what’s happening in the district,” he said. “It’s very difficult for five volunteers [who] are not involved in the day-to-day operations to have a more keen understanding of what’s happening in the district, but my responsibility as a superintendent is to make sure they’re informed.”

He said the matter had not been discussed in a full executive session of the board because “it did not rise to that level.”

“It would be inconsistent for me to call an executive session — or be probably inconsistent with most districts — to call an executive session to work through or inform a board on an agreement like this,” he said.

He noted that the board chair is also able to call an executive session, but for the chair to have done so to discuss the Myers matter would be “inconsistent with the current practices I’ve seen” as well as “inconsistent with the advice we’d get from legal counsel.”

Series of interventions

The school district hired Myers in 2019 to work as a special education teacher.

The documents pertaining to his settlement agreement – emails, letters, and other communications related to his job performance – spanned September 2021 to September 2022. These materials included correspondence pertaining to investigations of Myers conducted by Danny Rock, who was the principal of VHS at the time.

Also included were Rock’s June 28, 2022 evaluation of Myers for the 2021/2022 school year, which rated his performance as unsatisfactory, and a 20-page report by an outside investigator the district hired to investigate Myers’ charge that actions by Rock and the district’s director of student services, Kathryn Coleman, had created a hostile workplace.

The investigative report, by Celeste Monroe, who works for the law firm of Karr Tuttle Campbell, in Seattle, was dated Sept. 14, 2022, after Myers’ resignation.

Monroe found in the district’s favor, saying that neither Coleman nor Rock had engaged in conduct with Myers that violated the district’s policies on discrimination, harassment, and uncivil conduct.

Monore’s report included witness testimony from Rock, Coleman, the district’s school psychologist, and the district’s speech-language pathologist, shedding light on Myers’ interactions with three special education students.

The students’ names were redacted in the documents, and The Beachcomber is further protecting the privacy of the students and their families by using non-gendered pronouns (they/them) to describe them and not publishing the documents on its website.

Student A

In November 2021, Rock sent a non-disciplinary letter of direction to Myers, instructing him to not use “aversive actions” to stop [self-harm] behaviors in a VHS student referred to as “Student A” in the documents.

The letter was sent after it was discovered that Student A had arrived at school with their hands bound by what was variously described as a ribbon or a string. The student was subsequently observed with their hands remaining bound in Myers’ classroom — a restraint not allowed in a classroom under state law.

Rock’s letter of direction specified that Myers should “under no circumstance engage in or promote aversive actions toward a student to stop their behavior.” Examples of such actions, Rock said, included but were not limited to “zipping a student’s arms inside their jacket, administering [medications] to a student, or tying their hands together.”

Myers, in emails to Coleman, Rock, and others, as well as in his claim of a hostile workplace, expressed his determination to protect Student A from inflicting self-harm due to irritation from a medical condition and was critical of the district’s directives to him regarding his responses to this and other behavior by the student that he deemed to be dangerous.

Students B and C

Documents recounted the district’s oversight of Myers’ work as an IEP (Individualized Education Program) case manager and teacher of Student B — a process that led to an investigation and written reprimand to Myers for his “failure to follow the [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] requirements” as a special education teacher in his work with the student.

These failures, according to Rock, included submitting incomplete data substantiating progress against goals for the student, as well as submitting data that was not relevant to the stated goals for the student.

Another written reprimand from Rock to Myers, dated June 14, pertained to Student C, saying that Myers had twice left the student under the supervision of a custodian — another violation of state law.

Myers’ claim of a hostile work environment more fully detailed his interactions with those students, including his assertion that Rock had “micromanaged” his classroom behavior, documentation, decision-making and program implementation with his students.

In the case of Student C — an older student in the process of transitioning out of public education — Myers said the district had thwarted his efforts to secure outside employment for the student. In testimony for Monroe’s report, Rock and Coleman said Myers had not followed the district’s formal policies and requirements in arranging for the student’s employment.

Charge of hostile workplace

Myers charged in an April 7, 2022 letter to district HR director Amy Sassara that Rock and Coleman had initiated disciplinary proceedings against him as “a form of vindictive retaliation towards [him].”

The retaliation, he said in his four-page letter, was due to his actions as a whistleblower, adding that he “actually witnessed and repeatedly objected to decisions and policies that have led to direct harm to a [special education student] and instances of a district failure to deliver free appropriate education for two other students.”

Myers charged that Rock’s “punitive disciplinary proceedings” against him had denied him his right to due process under federal employment law.

Three weeks later, Myers requested medical leave from the district and did not return to the classroom for the rest of the school year.

On June 28, 2022, Rock sent Myers a copy of his final evaluation for the year, in which he rated Myers’ performance as “unsatisfactory” and informed the teacher he would be placed on an improvement plan in the 2022-23 school year.

Myers responds

Reached for comment, Myers declined to speak on the record about specific instances with students A, B and C.

However, he described his 25-year career in special education, including 20 years at a residential facility in New York where he worked with moderate to severe special education learners. At VHS, he added, he had taught some of the school’s most highly impacted students.

Myers said he is currently employed as a special education teacher in another district in Washington state.

Throughout his career, he said, he had always placed the needs of the students first.

“The kids come first. For me that’s paramount,” he said, adding that this is a “thread” one can see throughout the documents about his tenure at VHS. “I have 20 years of keeping kids safe in some of the most difficult circumstances you can imagine. When it comes to my students I stand up for what I think is right and what is essential to maintain their well-being.”

Myers, 62, said he had enjoyed working with the special education team at VHS. As for the incidents with the three students described in district documents, he said he would not have done anything differently.

He said he worked well with other district staff members serving special education students.

“We were on track as a team, ” he said. “It was not just simply myself moving forward. It was team decisions.”

When he returned to the district in mid-August to begin the 2021-2022 school year, Myers said he was presented with an offer to make a settlement agreement with the district. He said he had not been represented by an attorney, and he and the district mutually agreed on the terms of the settlement.

“I acted and settled with them in good faith,” he said.

Myers said he believed the district could have handled his exit from the district differently.

“I don’t think districts are in the habit of settling and making those decisions lightly,” he said. “The alternative is to move a teacher through an evaluation process, and then they don’t renew the contract — that’s part of the hiring and firing of teachers — but for some reason, the district decided to handle this differently and I don’t know why,” he said.

McSheehy defends settlement

McSheehy said it was “rare but not unusual” for districts to reach settlement agreements, saying that in his career in education, he had worked through five to 10 such agreements with teachers.

The cost, speed, and greater certainty of reaching such agreements compared favorably with other potential outcomes, due to collective bargaining agreements that mandate strict due process rights for employees.

“I think our community expects our district and our board to seek out the best counsel and the best legal expert advice that we can get, and to follow those recommendations, because our board members are not experts,” he said. “And while I certainly have more expertise and experience, you know, in the end, I’m following … the legal counsel’s recommendations, and sharing those recommendations.”

McSheehy said that he was, more importantly, working in the best interests of students.

“I want to get the best person for our kids … Every day that we don’t have a teacher in front of our special needs students is not a great day,” he said.

After the resignations of Sears and Rees, McSheehy contacted the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, the state agency charged with certifying teachers, asking OSPI to conduct an investigation.

He did not do so with Myers, he said in an email, because Myers had followed the district’s directives not to repeat the conduct with students which administrators had informed him was in violation of Washington state laws.