Principal’s Alleged Misconduct Kept Secret

For seven months, an elementary-school principal was under investigation for allegedly failing to report a teacher’s abuse of a kindergartener and for bullying staff members who eventually went to his superiors.

After all that time, the school district now refuses to say what it found.

This January, the principal, Daniel Bonet Ojeda of John C. Daniels School of International Communication, was quietly pulled off his job without any explanation, frustrating parents who say they’ve repeatedly been kept out of decision-making about the Congress Avenue magnet school.

City lawyers are still withholding almost all the records about that principal’s alleged misconduct — a denial that First Amendment lawyers say allows schools to cover up bad behavior possibly in violation of the state’s open-records law.

Elia Alexiades, the Board of Education’s new in-house attorney, said that all but three pages of records are exempt from disclosure under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act because they’re either legal advice or unfinished drafts.

The board did release those three pages to the Independent.

Even that small selection of records shows that the school district already had evidence of Bonet’s misbehavior.

The records state that about two months before he was placed on administrative leave, Bonet said, ​“I like smoking, I like drinking, and I like sex,” during a meeting with his leadership team, multiple employees told his direct supervisor, Iline Tracey, who has since taken over as superintendent. The records also confirm that the principal was accused of violating state mandates for reporting child abuse and of harassing staff at the school.

Alexiades said that an outside law firm, Shipman & Goodwin, conducted the investigation into Bonet, allowing the board to keep the rest of the files hidden from the public.

Bonet returned to work in mid-August, at the start of this school year.

After a 5 – 1 vote (with opposition from Ed Joyner, an elected school board member, and Lihame Arouna, a non-voting student representative who previously went to Daniels), Bonet was transferred to Hillhouse High School as an assistant principal.

Now working on establishing a ​“newcomer center” with three bilingual teachers, he is being paid the same year-round salary, though most other assistant principals work on a 10-month schedule.

At the time, then-Superintendent Carol Birks said that Hillhouse needed a Spanish-speaking administrator for its growing population of English learners. She wouldn’t say whether he was transferred involuntarily.

“This was a result of an investigation,” Birks said. ​“This is the outcome, and I am not at liberty to get into more details.”

Birks did not return a phone call seeking comment on Wednesday night.

In an interview this week, Bonet said he’d never seen the three pages of records that the district released to the Independent. He said he would stop by Central Office to look for them in his personnel file.

He said his rights have been ​“violated,” because he said a reporter knew more about the investigation than he did. He said that might be evidence of racial discrimination.

“Maybe they think, because I’m Latino, I don’t know my rights,” Bonet said. ​“I’m worried really that you have more information.”

He called the investigation ​“a big misunderstanding.” He said he doesn’t think he did anything wrong because he still has a job in the district.

“Nothing was found, nothing was discovered, I didn’t do anything wrong,” Bonet said. ​“I’m still working for the city.”

Parents at the school say they still want to know what happened. Sylvester Lee Salcedo, the school’s PTO president, said he wasn’t surprised that the district had put up ​“an information stonewall.”

“These matters should be open to a review by the public, or at least by a responsible, non-political, nonpartisan body to offer a report to the public, while guarding any sensitive personal info,” Salcedo said.

A Single Miscommunication? Or Repeated Misbehavior?

Since arriving at Daniels, after being recruited from Puerto Rico, Bonet had expanded the dual-language model to all grades, reorganized classrooms and tidied up the school, bringing in a crew to spruce up the yard and sometimes sweeping rooms himself.

Several parents described Bonet as ​“good-hearted.” He passed out his cell-phone number for anyone to get in touch. He connected with their kids, kneeling down and telling jokes. Chronic absenteeism, in his first year, fell to record lows for the school.

Nina Silva, a paraprofessional, said that Bonet had been ​“very supportive” of her, as she coped with a death in her family. ​“He does care for the students and his staff,” she said.

Other employees, who asked for anonymity because they feared retaliation, said that Bonet hadn’t been able to keep up with his work. He’d cut back on professional development at staff meetings, rarely stopped by classrooms and failed to find substitutes for teacher absences.

Throughout his first year, Bonet didn’t know teachers by names, mixing them up or just calling them ​“sister” instead, and on some evaluations, he copied wording that the prior principal had written, the employees said.

Bonet often raised his voice, using a tone that could be off-putting, several employees said. But that might have been a mistranslation from his native Spanish, Silva said.

“If someone took offense, he might have said it the wrong way,” she explained. ​“His brain thinks faster in Spanish than it comes out in English.”

Last fall, Bonet called a staff meeting to address an anonymous complaint about his behavior that had reached Central Office. According to multiple employees who later recounted what happened to Tracey during an investigation, Bonet sat at the head of an oval-shaped table, spread his palms and started talking about his vices.

“Listen, I’ll tell you that I like to drink, smoke and I like to have sex. I’m just being honest,” he said. ​“I don’t know why someone wrote [a complaint], because this is my business that I do on my own time.”

After asking around, Tracey said that she believed Bonet has used ​“inappropriate words” that made other staff members ​“uncomfortable.” Tracey told him that, as a building leader, he was held to ​“a higher standard,” and his words ​“need to be guarded.”

“This is inappropriate behavior from a school leader towards staff, and does not follow the [Connecticut] code of conduct,” Tracey wrote in a one-page letter.

When the Independent first asked Bonet about that staff meeting in a January phone call, he said, ​“I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

He was asked to clarify what he meant: Did it not happen, or did he not remember it?

“It would be a pretty memorable moment you shouldn’t forget,” Bonet responded. ​“It’s normal to feel uncomfortable with your boss to points, but not to that point, not to fear. I’m not that kind of person.”

The newly released records show that Bonet had already admitted to Tracey that he’d said everything except for the ​“sex” part, which he still denied. He also said he’d apologized to his staff for ​“anything offensive” he said and promised not to let it happen again.

In January, more complaints made it to Central Office, alleging a ​“failure to comply with [Department of Children and Families (DCF)] reporting mandates and bullying a subordinate,” Vallerie Hudson-Brown, the district’s former labor relations chief, wrote in a one-page letter placing Bonet on leave.

This week, Bonet said he never got a copy of that letter. ​“Nothing like that was filed; nothing was reported,” he said. ​“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bonet did admit that he didn’t strictly comply with the deadlines for mandated reporters, saying he was maybe ​“a little out of date.” But he said he eventually followed the procedures, and DCF called him as a witness that spring in the agency’s investigation into the teacher.

(Around the same time, a kindergarten teacher at Daniels was also placed on administrative leave for nearly 65 instructional days, before eventually being transferred to another elementary school this school year.)

But Bonet denied that anyone had complained about harassment. ​“That never happened. I was never accused of bullying. Nobody made that complaint,” he said. ​“That’s a lie.”

When he was first placed on leave in January, Bonet told the Independent that he didn’t know why. He said he felt ​“just shocked,” ​“fully surprised and astonished.” He said he thought he’d eventually be cleared, that it all would prove to be ​“just gossip.”

“I may understand that, when you’re sometimes the boss, people tend to take you out of context or hold grudges. I don’t think I have anything like that with my staff. I have a pretty good relationship with them, professionally obviously,” he said. ​“I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I dedicate my life to my kids and my students, my teachers and my beautiful school.”

“I have a lot of kids to help,” Bonet reiterated this week. ​“I love teaching. I love working. This is my passion. I’m here in New Haven for good.”

The ​“Outside Counsel” Dodge

Because the records are being withheld, it’s unclear what the outside investigators dug up, whether it was all just ​“gossip” as Bonet had said.

Tracey said she has never read the closing report, and she wasn’t sure whether she would.

“I didn’t want to get tied up with those things,” Tracey said. ​“Whatever they did with that, I’m moving on, from the point I took over. I really, to be honest with you, have my mind and energy on a lot more things.”

Legal experts said that the school district might be able to withhold Shipman & Goodwin’s final report, but they said they didn’t see the public interest in doing so. They said the school district could voluntarily waive its attorney-client privilege.

(In the past, New Haven has voluntarily released the closing reports written by law firms, as it did when Berchem Moses concluded that a school board member’s son ​“provoked” a fight with a high-school freshman.)

Adam Marshall, a staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said that it’s true an outside law firm’s report can be ​“shielded” from release, even though a similar report would be a public record if human resources had drafted it.

“It does seem somewhat perverse that, simply by hiring an outside firm, that a government entity could circumvent the intent of the legislature for [all records of personal misconduct] to be public,” he said.

Marshall said that some states, like Indiana and California, order governments to release certain misconduct records when there’s proven wrongdoing. It’s essentially ​“an exception to the exemption,” he said.

“Records reflecting government employee misconduct — or even the investigations into it — are the types of records where the public interest is at its height, really,” Marshall said. ​“The public needs to be able to verify what happened and if the government is taking appropriate remedial steps, if any are necessary.”

Even if the final report on Bonet remains off-limits, the school district should have produced all other records about Bonet’s alleged misconduct that were made before the law firm got involved, said Dan Barrett, the legal director of the state’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter.

“I’m guessing there’s a pile of stuff out there not generated by the law firm, all kinds of employment records: tips, notes, emails,” Barrett said. ​“Some other employees at one point contacted their employer and said, ​‘I think this guy is failing in his duties.’ Surely that’s written down in some way, so why aren’t they producing it?”

“Just because you package those up and send them to a law firm, it doesn’t make them privileged,” he added. ​“Otherwise, that’s what every person would do with every piece of damaging information.”

The Independent is planning to file a complaint to the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission.