Students and parents at a downtown Toronto high school claim school administrators neglected allegations of “sexualized behaviour” by a teacher who has been the subject of several complaints over the last five years.

Sean Gacich, a humanities teacher at Harbord Collegiate Institute, is currently on home assignment pending a school board investigation into his conduct.

This comes after a group of 28 parents banded together to confront the board and Harbord’s administration about their “failure to take immediate action” after allegations surfaced and, they claim, a petition was signed by over 100 students and sent to the vice-principal about Gacich’s conduct.

“As parents, we feel sick sending our children to school knowing that they and their peers have to endure being taught by this individual,” the parent group wrote in a joint letter to Toronto District School Board and school officials in late January.

The letter referred to “a series of complaints about what appears to be very inappropriate sexualized behaviour.”

Gacich declined to comment on his case when reached by the Star, citing advice from his union.

“We have received a number of concerns and allegations from Harbord CI parents,” board spokesperson Ryan Bird confirmed to the Star, adding that an investigator had been assigned to look into the allegations.

“As you can appreciate, we’re not able to provide specific details,” Bird said in an email. “In general though, the Board investigation is looking into a number of allegations, including new information that has been brought forward with regards to previously-made allegations.”

“Student safety is our highest priority. If allegations are found to have occurred, teachers face disciplinary action up to and including dismissal.”

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In their letter to education officials, the 28 parents claim that while discussing a book in class this year, Gacich asked students if their parents showered together, how the students felt about that, and whether the students had ever showered with someone else. The letter also cites allegations including that he was repeatedly seen “leering or staring at female students breasts and buttocks” and dropping objects and asking students to pick them up in front of him.

In their letter, parents said some students, “have modified their choice of clothing on days they have a class with this teacher, and that they try their best to avoid being alone with him.”

“While many of us are prepared to work with Harbord and the TDSB to figure out how these issues can be dealt with better in the future, none of that provides any excuse for Harbord and the TDSB’s failure to take immediate action to safeguard the health and safety of its students,” the parents wrote.

According to the letter, Gacich also allegedly touched “a number of female students” between, or on, the legs with a frozen treat called a “freezie” while they were on an overnight trip last fall. The current administration was made aware of the situation at the time after student complaints, said a Harbord teacher who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to possible legal repercussions. She said after the freezie incident, all of the teachers were forbidden from sitting with the students for meals.

Student concerns at Harbord — a red-brick high school near Bloor and Bathurst Sts. — began five years ago, when Gacich assigned his French-language civics class a project to make presentations about non-traditional careers by dressing up as the various roles. Dominatrix and exotic dancer were included as optional choices on the assignment, a copy of which was provided to the Star, and also included careers like dog-walker and private investigator.

School and board officials were made aware of the assignment at the time, according to the Jan. 26 letter by parents. The board told the Star that it investigated every complaint and allegation brought forward, but students and another Harbord teacher who spoke to the Star said the administration didn’t take any visible action.

The teacher who spoke on condition of anonymity said she first learned of students’ concerns with Gacich over that assignment in the 2012-13 school year. Students reported the situation to administrators under former principal Rodrigo Fuentes, the teacher said.

“It just wasn’t appropriate, I think, for him to be teaching us about that,” said Ruby Watts, a student in Gacich’s class at the time who is now in university. Watts had created a Facebook message group with around 10 to 15 students to collect reactions from her peers on the assignment, she said.

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But the chat got “out of hand,” she said.

Days later, Watts said she was called into the office for a meeting with administrators. “I was ready to talk about it,” she told the Star. But the meeting wasn’t about her concerns with the assignment, she explained.

“It was all about how they were concerned for his safety, and felt like they might need to get the police involved,” she said, adding that the administration was seeking reassurance that the students weren’t planning to cause any harm to Gacich.

“It just felt to me like the purpose of that meeting should have been more of a concern of what a teacher was assigning to their students,” she said. “I think it’s just a huge problem with administration, but also just our general society with this sort of issue … it’s kind of pushed under.”

Noa Benishai, who went to Harbord from 2010 to 2014, was also in the class where Gacich assigned the project.

“When you’re that young, you don’t even have the language to talk about it,” said Benishai, who confided in another teacher about what happened at the time. “At this point, I’m way more confident in my ability to decipher what boundaries should be in place between a person of authority and a young student.”

Now a university student, Benishai said she feels emboldened by emerging discussions worldwide about sexual harassment in professional fields, but would not have felt comfortable talking about the incident to administrators during her high school years. The 21-year-old said she is disappointed in administration’s handling of the allegations.

Last year, according to the parents’ letter, the vice-principal received a petition signed by over 100 students, claiming Gacich did not respect “the personal space of his students.”

Under the Ontario College of Teachers Act, if a teacher’s duties are restricted for reasons of professional misconduct, the matter must be reported to the college. But sending a teacher home during an investigation doesn’t qualify as a restriction of duties, college spokesperson Gabrielle Barkany explained to the Star over email.

“An employer’s duty to report is not triggered upon receipt of an allegation,” she wrote in discussion of the case at Harbord. “Rather, the duty to report is only triggered by the imposition of a restriction of duties against the member following the employer’s investigation, or if the member resigns.”

The College only discloses cases against teachers when they reach the discipline committee. They receive approximately 1,000 expressions of concern, calls and queries about members and the College’s role per year, according to their March 2018 “Professionally Speaking” publication.

And not all incidents warranting discipline reach the Ontario College of Teachers and become public. The college handles cases that are reported to them, whether by the school board, other teachers or by a member of the public. Incidents handled by a school board alone are kept sealed in human resource files.