Finding: Charter Covered Up Misconduct

The Achievement First (AF) network covered up a principal’s aggressive interactions with students over the years, an investigator concluded in a newly released report detailing failures of leadership.

Last October, Principal Morgan Barth grabbed an Amistad High School student who was trying to leave his office, tugging the young man’s left arm, jerking it behind his back and then shoving him into a corner.

The charter network’s administrators disciplined Barth with only a verbal reprimand and a refresher course in how to restrain and deescalate.

Achievement First’s leaders tried to keep that secret, even from the school’s governing board. For three months, they didn’t tell anyone what had happened — until just before the Independent published a video of the altercation online. Barth immediately submitted his resignation.

On Wednesday night, in a two-and-a-half-hour private meeting inside Amistad High School’s Room 125 — just across the hall from where Barth had pushed the student last fall — an outside investigator provided the first glimpse of how AF Network’s administrators responded after Barth improperly restrained a student. (Amistad is the AF network’s flagship high school.)

Leander Dolphin, an investigator from the law firm Shipman & Goodwin, spent the last two months interviewing witnesses, reading confidential documents and watching the security-camera footage. After that review of the evidence, Dolphin concluded that Achievement First had mishandled the incident. The charter school’s boards voted at the end of its private session to publicly release a three-page summary of her report.

In those findings, Dolphin wrote that Achievement First’s leadership had covered up Barth’s behavior, leaving no written reprimand in his personnel file and keeping the school’s directors in the dark. Worse, she added, Achievement First’s leadership had repeatedly failed to address complaints about Barth that dated back years.

Dolphin also pointed out that she’d been told to keep her investigation narrow, focusing only on the network’s rules and guidelines, not any administrator’s personal liability.

That’s contrary to what co-CEOs Dacia Toll and Doug McCurry had told staff throughout the network in a January email, saying they hoped the board would ​“use the final report to determine if additional consequences should be implemented, including for the two of us.”

Dolphin said the board limited her investigation just to recommendations about ​“policy and practices with respect to performance management of principals.” She explained to every witnesses she interviewed that, ​“as a result, the scope of the investigation was limited.”

Dolphin’s report was so highly anticipated that teachers and students stayed late to grab a copy. The high school’s social worker hired a babysitter; a student who lives in Bridgeport stayed at school until 9 p.m., even though she said she’d have to wake up at 5:30 a.m. the next morning for class.

But the charter school’s governing boards excluded the public from hearing their reaction to the investigator’s conclusions, and they refused to share any additional information about what they plan to do next.

After the report was released, Toll stated the network should have told its governing board earlier. She did not publicly apologize for anything that Achievement First had done, indicating repeated failures to evaluate Barth’s behavior over the years were essentially a paperwork problem.

She claims Achievement First is trying to do better, despite teachers expressing ​“disgust and disappointment at the lack of transparency.”

While Dolphin faulted the network for perpetrating a coverup, the co-CEOs did not give any answers about their own roles. Toll said only that, ​“in this difficult moment, I am doing what needs to be done – leaning into the challenge and making us stronger.”

(Update: After this article was published, Toll provided an additional statement. ​“I am profoundly sorry about everything that has happened at AF Amistad High,” she was quoted as saying. ​“In January, I stood in front of hundreds of parents and students, apologized, and accepted personal responsibility for what happened. And I did the same with staff — both at the school and network-wide. I am not running from this.”)

Instead, the charter network’s spokesperson sent out quotes about the charter network’s success in expanding to three states under the pair’s direction.

“Doug and Dacia … founded one great school and, with a lot of heart and hard work, they have grown a 36-school network that is supporting more than 13,000 students — all of whom chose and continue to choose AF,” Andy Boas, an investment banker who chairs the AF Network Support Board, was quoted as saying. ​“Doug and Dacia have been the first to suggest they made mistakes in handling this situation, but that does not overshadow 20 years of service and success.”

Steven Cotton, a former behavioral specialist at Amistad who initiated the conversation about the high school’s culture after he resigned in protest and posted a viral Facebook video, said he believes Achievement First will not change until its leaders take responsibility for how deep problems within the network go.

“When you accept responsibility, you have to take the consequences or commit to real action. But they don’t want to take action; they want to do what they’ve been doing,” Cotton said. ​“It’s been one cover-up, and it’s still going on. I feel bad for all those parents who believe that the school is going to do what’s best for their child. They’re not if the parents aren’t right there watching them.”

No Reason To Hide It

In her brief report, Dolphin, the Shipman & Goodwin investigator, stated that Achievement First had erred in not alerting its governing board about Barth’s behavior.

After Achievement First’s administrators found out what happened, they quickly conducted an investigation. Finding that he had ​“failed to maintain appropriate professional boundaries,” administrators verbally reprimanded him and ordered him to attend a restraint and deescalation training. But they did not inform the school’s board.

Dolphin did note that there’s some ​“ambiguity” in Amistad’s guiding documents. She said there wasn’t any clear rule that administrators had violated in not telling the board. Outside a mandated annual review, there’s no other process outlined in the network’s policies for when the board should be notified about a principal’s mid-year performance issues, she said.

“Nevertheless, I conclude that AF should have informed the School’s Board about the incident, and about AF’s investigation of the incident, as the incident involved the principal’s alleged misconduct,” Dolphin wrote. ​“Moreover, AF should have discussed its conclusion and recommended personnel action with the School’s Board, so that the Board could weigh in as to whether the recommended personnel action was appropriate under the circumstances.”

Dolphin recommended that the school’s governing board should decide whether to release confidential documents about their handling of the October 2018 incident, including internal legal advice from Achievement First’s former General Counsel Peter Cymrot; amend the Charter Management Agreement to clarify when the board should be alerted about personnel matters; revise existing policies on restraint and seclusion of students; and ensure regional superintendents receive proper training on supervising and managing principals.

Toll said that the network would implement those recommendations and report back at the school boards’ September meetings.

Not The First Time

In her most damning conclusion, Dolphin said that the latest incident with Barth fit into a larger pattern at Achievement First of failing to document and deal with problematic behavior.

“While the nature and extent of disciplinary actions are ultimately judgment decisions, AF-network administrators reviewing the incident did not consider other prior reported concerns about some of Mr. Barth’s interactions with students when determining appropriate discipline for the October 2018 incident,” Dolphin wrote. ​“This is due, at least in part, to the fact that AF failed to adequately or formally address prior reported concerns about some of Mr. Barth’s interactions with students; the response to such prior reported concerns was insufficient.”

Dolphin didn’t reference any specific incidents, but records of Barth’s previous run-ins with students, which were provided to the Independent in response to a Connecticut Freedom of Information Act request, detail the way Achievement First’s administrators overlooked previous allegations of misconduct dating back to 2013.

In nine pages the network released, there’s no record of Barth receiving any discipline for restraining or secluding a student. In one case, the regional superintendent even justified Barth’s behavior to a parent who was disturbed at the way he’d berated her son, a high school freshman with special needs, for not paying attention in the first days of the school year.

First, at AF Bridgeport Academy Middle School in June 2013, Barth repeatedly restrained a student who was trying to leave the in-school suspension room and walk out of the school.

At first, after the boy was acting as if he were playing ​“hide and seek” in the hallways, Barth said he firmly guided the boy to the dean’s office. There, Barth said he held a door shut from the outside that the boy was throwing himself against. Barth said he then observed the boy jump off a desk and fall out of a chair.

When the boy continued trying to break out of the office, Barth used additional restraints. He wrapped his arm around the boy’s shoulders, and he grabbed the boy’s arm and wrist. Barth then held on to the boy’s belt, but when the boy yelled, ​“Let go,” Barth said he did. That caused the boy to stumble to the ground.

“In my opinion he fell very dramatically (as if he was acting out a cartoonish fall) and once he was down he kicked over the nearby trashcans,” Barth wrote in a letter to the boy’s guardian the next day.

Barth explained to the guardian that he felt he’d needed to restrain the boy to protect the school’s ​“learning environment.”

“I feel very confident that my actions were both appropriate and within school policy,” he wrote. ​“I was certainly acting in a ​‘hands-on’ way. But I was doing so safely and appropriately. I hope you understand that we want [the student] to be successful but that we cannot have him if he is running away from adults, leaving the designated area, entering unsupervised places, trying to leave the building or jumping off furniture.”

After a three-hour meeting the next day, Barth told his supervisor that the guardian ​“was out to pick apart very small inconsistencies in my incident report (very trivial things that she used to ​‘prove’ I was lying).”

The pages released by Achievement First do not include any written documentation of the guardian’s complaint, any statements from eight staff witnesses, or any conclusions from network administrators about whether Barth’s restraints were appropriate.

Second, at Amistad High School in August 2017, Barth yelled at a freshman boy with special needs for not paying attention in class.

According to a complaint the mom filed, her son started drifting off in class while Barth was observing a lesson. She said that, after the teacher privately asked the boy to pay attention, Barth walked over to his desk, bent down and ​“started staring at him intently” until he snapped to attention.

The mom said that, after Barth yelled at the boy to get out of class, he then ​“physically moved [the student’s] desk in an aggressive manner because [he] wasn’t moving fast enough.”

The mom added that, after escorting the boy to another room, Barth continued to yell, saying, ​“This is unacceptable. You need to stop doing this. Do you understand?” She said Barth told her son he would return later ​“to see if [he] really understood.”

Summing it up to another Amistad leader, the mom said she felt ​“Mr. Barth was trying to intimidate [her son], and she expressed that she is not sure that she feels that her son is safe in the school where staff members behave this way.”

The mom later explained that her son takes medication for his diagnoses. She said that he’s sensitive to ​“noise and crowds of people.” She said she knew that her kid has ​“some behavioral issues,” but added that he often visits the school’s social worker for help. Barth later said he would have acted differently if he had known the student had a disability.

After not hearing a response for two weeks after she’d filed her complaint, the mom reached out to Barth’s boss, Regional Superintendent Jeff Sudmyer, who left the network shortly after Barth’s resignation for reasons that Achievement First is still keeping secret.

Three days later, Sudmyer told the mom that he’d actually witnessed the whole interaction himself. He said Barth had acted appropriately.

“Although I can appreciate your viewpoint, I did not experience the incident in the same manner,” Sudmyer wrote. ​“After Mr. Barth became involved, [the student] continued to argue back at Mr. Barth and did not follow instructions. As an educator of 19 years, including 13 at Achievement First schools, I observed Mr. Barth to be controlled and purposeful in his corrections of [the student], including how he spoke and how he moved the desk so [the student] could get up. Mr. Barth did not act outside the normal bounds of professionalism and was not purposefully intimidating, although he was absolutely stern and direct with your scholar.”

The pages released by Achievement First do not include any additional conclusions from Sudmyer about how the complaint was resolved, even though the mom had asked additional questions about whether it was normal to ​“continue to have a ​‘STERN’ conversation with a child” isolated in a ​“removal room.”

In an interview on Wednesday night, Barth stood by his actions, saying that he believed he had acted appropriately in both cases. He said that, when a student outburst puts other kids at risk, educators sometimes have to make the tough call to physically intervene.

“I worked really hard throughout 15 years in New Haven to create opportunity for students, and I’m proud of my work. Like every educator, I had to work hard when a very small minority of students struggled behaviorally. Those are difficult situations, but I have always acted in good faith to help students through those,” he said.

“When students are acting in a way that’s potentially harmful, you have to make the hard decision about how to support and deescalate and keep everybody safe,” Barth added. ​“I think I did those the best that I can, but they’re hard situations to handle.”

The Cover Up Continues

Despite Dolphin’s findings, Achievement First still won’t answer questions about how and why Barth’s behavior — justifiable or not — was kept hidden for so long.

Right after the meeting, the Independent contacted Amanda Pinto, Achievement First’s spokesperson, with a list of questions for Toll, who co-founded Achievement First.

An hour and a half later, Pinto emailed back a statement that answered only one of those questions directly, though she supplemented it with additional answers from Toll on Thursday afternoon.

Still, Toll did not answer why Achievement First administrators ignored repeated concerns about Barth’s behavior in prior years, noting only that they’ll do a better job collecting and storing paperwork from now on.

“We will be implementing stronger personnel file maintenance practices to ensure incidents with teammates have documentation that is maintained properly and travels with them between schools,” Toll was quoted as saying.

Toll also did not answer why Regional Superintendent Sudmyer, who supervised Barth, was replaced in January and why he no longer works for the Achievement First network.

Toll did offer a few explanations, though, for why Achievement First hadn’t documented Barth’s discipline or told the governing board.

Toll said Barth never received a written reprimand because of a paperwork issue.

“AF made the decision that Mr. Barth should receive a written reprimand, as a result of the investigation that was conducted shortly after the October incident. The letter was drafted and finalized, but we discovered months later that it was never actually delivered to him,” Toll was quoted as saying. ​“We have already increased accountability to ensure this does not happen again.”

Toll said administrators did not inform the school board because the network’s reporting policies weren’t clear.

“Fortunately, situations like this are extremely rare at AF, so we just didn’t have any norms about it. As [Dolphin’s] report says, our agreement with the board states AF has ​‘the authority and responsibility to recruit, supervise and hold the principal accountable for the success of the School.’ You could read this as saying it was our responsibility to handle situations like this,” Toll was quoted as saying. ​“But, whatever the language, we agree that we should have notified the board and have already closed this gap going forward.”

Toll herself avoided speaking to the Independent directly.

In a network-wide email on Thursday morning, Toll and McCurry said that Achievement First is working to improve its procedures.

They said the charter network is issuing a new policy on ​“appropriate interactions with scholars,” including when they can be restrained; creating ​“a more accessible” and ​“safe” process for reporting human resources concerns; reviewing its discipline policies ​“with a racial equity lens”; implementing social-emotional learning programs, like Yale’s RULER program, in elementary schools; and revising its curriculum and teacher training to focus more on ​“student-teacher relationships, student voice and discourse, and student independence.”

“We know trust has been broken in our community this year, and we have been working hard to rebuild it — not just with our words, but with our actions. We can’t go back in time, but we can make sure that we really embrace the challenge, learn from it, and lead meaningful change in how we operate — and, most importantly, in how we ensure a more consistently excellent experience for scholars across our network,” Toll and McCurry wrote. ​“This last chapter has been particularly tough — for us, for many of you, and especially for the AF Amistad High community. Let’s work together to make sure we embrace this challenge to deliver the student experience our scholars deserve.”

Members of Achievement First’s boards, meanwhile, also dodged questions about what would happen next in carrying out Dolphin’s recommendations.

After Wednesday night’s meeting adjourned, Jane Levin, a former Yale professor who chairs the joint high school committee, remained silent as the Independent asked her repeated questions about how her committee would take up the recommendations, when her committee planned to meet next, and whether her committee would seek any parent feedback.

Carolyn Greenspan, the owner of Blue State Coffee who chairs Amistad Academy’s board, also declined to answer any questions about when her board would be taking up the recommendations.

“I can’t say. We weren’t at that point,” Greenspan said. ​“I’m not going to answer any more questions. So you can ask a lot, but I’m still going to say, ​‘I can’t say.’ But thank you for being here. I really appreciate you being here. I do want members of the public and the press here. We want to get out the word that things are being done.”

But after all that, what actually was done? What had really changed about Achievement First after Wednesday night’s revelations?

“We agreed to release the report today. That’s where we are,” Greenspan said. She headed for the exit, brushing off other questions. ​“Good night.”