Phoenix school district didn’t inform parents of sexual abuse settlement

Since the beginning of the year, Phoenix Elementary School District No. 1 has been mired in turmoil.

In March, the school board angered some parents by voting to close two schools and end a lease with ASU Preparatory Academy. Not long after, Phoenix New Times reported that school board president Jessica Bueno had bailed out a former business associate who’d been caught — and later convicted — in an underage sex sting. Weeks after that, in the face of vociferous parent backlash, Bueno resigned.

Two of those angry parents were Allison Gullick and Paul Booth, whose 4-year-old son attends preschool at Faith North Elementary in the district and whose youngest child will start at Shaw Montessori School in the fall. Since the beginning of the year, they’ve spoken at school board meetings and dived into public records to learn everything they can about the embattled school district. They even created a pamphlet chock-full of information about the schools the board voted to close.

It was amid her public records research that Gullick learned something alarming. The district had paid $200,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a former student over sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her math teacher. The lawsuit wasn’t news — it had been filed in 2023 — and the teacher in question had already been tried and convicted in criminal court. That the district had settled the suit wasn’t even the issue.

For Gullick, the problem was that she’d had to dig to even find out about it. The school district hadn’t said a word to parents about it, and the settlement never appeared on the school board meeting agenda. According to a district spokesperson, the school board never even discussed it in executive session.

Gullick and other parents felt kept in the dark.

“The complete disregard for even mentioning that was going on shows the district’s repeated lack of transparency that they have with parents,” Gullick said.

The lawsuit

The lawsuit and the allegations at the center of it were familiar to community members. In December 2019, Phoenix police arrested Capitol Elementary School math teacher Manuel Gavina for sexually abusing students, who accused him of fondling their breasts during classes. Some of his first victims informed school staff of Gavina’s actions as early as 2017, but police weren’t notified until 2019, when more victims came forward. In 2023, Gavina was convicted on 14 counts for sexually abusing seven girls and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The same year, former Capitol Elementary student Betzaida Gonzales Pelayo and her mother filed a lawsuit against the district and several other defendants. The suit claimed that several district employees failed their “common-law and statutory duty to protect” Pelayo from harm by not “properly and carefully supervising, discipling, terminating and immediately reporting” Gavina.

According to the suit, Gavina began abusing Pelayo in his seventh-grade math class in 2017 by “touching and fondling Pelayo’s breasts when she would ask Gavina for math instruction.” The suit said Pelayo, other students and Pelayo’s mother reported Gavina to school staff, including then-principal Dirk Olmstead, whom the suit said “wrongfully tried to cover up Gavina’s misconduct” and “threatened” that Pelayo’s graduation would be jeopardized.

According to court documents, Olmstead finally called police in 2019 when another of Gavina’s students reported similar abuse. In 2022, Olmstead became the principal of Whittier Elementary, another school in the district. In November 2023, the same month Gavina was convicted, Olmstead switched from principal to director of plant services/operations, according to his LinkedIn page.

Olmstead was also named as a defendant in Pelayo’s lawsuit, though the claims against him have now been dismissed with prejudice, meaning they cannot be refiled. That’s thanks to the school district’s settlement, which offered $200,000 in exchange for dismissing claims against Olmstead and five other district employees.

The records of that settlement are public, though parents in the district would need to have been following the court case to know about them. The fact that the lawsuit was not discussed openly at school board meetings or by district personnel unnerves some who are planning to send their students to Capitol Elementary.

“What has happened since then?” Booth asked. “I wouldn’t feel safe sending my kid there without more knowledge of what they’ve done since then.”

Angelica Luna’s 7-year-old daughter was slated to attend Capitol after the district’s closure of Maie Bartlett Heard Elementary, but Luna will send her daughter elsewhere. For her, the lawsuit “reflects a broader pattern of leadership that seems to be more focused on saving face than protecting students or restoring trust,” she wrote in a text to New Times. “Our kids deserve a district that puts their safety and well-being above all else.”

In the dark

But was the district legally required to tell parents about the lawsuit and the settlement? It appears not.

The district was represented in the suit by a lawyer paid for by the Arizona Risk Retention Trust. The Trust, as it is commonly known, is a nonprofit corporation established by Arizona law that acts like an insurance company for school districts, serving nearly 250 districts and community colleges throughout the state.

Through its contract with Phoenix Elementary School District No. 1, it provides legal counsel for the district, among other services. It also pays settlement money, said district spokesperson Nicole Baker. That’s why the school board never voted to approve the settlement, which Baker said did not come out of the district’s coffers.

“They hired the lawyer for it and they took care of it,” Baker said of the Trust. “In this case, the settlement money comes from (the Trust). They’re the ones who did all that.”

New Times consulted several legal scholars about whether the district had an obligation to disclose the settlement to parents and was unable to get a firm answer.

“Often when these things are settled by insurance, it never ends up coming up at a public meeting,” said Gregg Leslie, the executive director of Arizona State University’s First Amendment Clinic. But, he added, “I can’t be sure there isn’t some other process I’m not aware of.”

Paul Bender, a constitutional attorney and former dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, said his “uninformed reaction” was “that they probably don’t have a legal responsibility” to discuss the suit in an open meeting. At the suggestion of both men, New Times reached out to David Bodney, a litigator focused on media and constitutional law. But Bodney told New Times in an email that he was unable to address the question due to a potential conflict of interest.

Whether or not the district was legally required to inform parents about the lawsuit, several parents are upset that the district chose to stay silent. They can’t help but connect the silence about the settlement to the other issues that were roiling the district at the time.

On March 31, the district offered $200,000 to Pelayo as part of what’s called a Rule 68 Offer of Judgment. The offer is a bit of a leverage play: Under Rule 68 of the Arizona Rules of Civil Procedure, if Pelayo rejected this offer and didn’t obtain a more favorable judgment in the case down the road, she’d be required to pay sanctions. She accepted the offer less than two weeks later.

As this was all happening behind closed doors, the district’s governing board was busy. Six days prior to the district’s judgment offer, the board voted to close two schools. And three days after Pelayo accepted the offer, New Times reported that Bueno had bailed out her now-convicted friend. By the time the judge signed off on the judgment, Bueno had resigned from her position.

“It’s more than concerning,” Gullick said. “It’s troubling. This is not cool anymore.”

Bueno’s position remains vacant, and many district parents who pushed to oust her hope that a more transparent school board president will take her place. Gullick has thrown her hat in the ring for the job, submitting an interest form to Maricopa County Superintendent Shelli Boggs, who will select a new board member. Then the board will vote to determine who serves as president.

“School safety should be a foundational value,” Gullick said. “We need leadership that supports the victims and stops ignoring violence that’s happening in the schools and holds people accountable.”