Benefit of the Doubt

How Portland Public schools helped an educator evade sexual misconduct allegations

BY BETHANY BARNES

Something broke inside 17-year-old Rose Soto when Marshall High teacher Mitch Whitehurst called attention to her pants.

"You know why they're so great?" Whitehurst said as he walked behind her up an empty stairway, according to an account she would tell police and school officials. "It's because of the zipper in the back. You just unzip them and boom we're on it."

The 2001 remark capped a year of unrelenting sexual advances from the Portland educator who'd tapped her to be his student aide, she told police.

More importantly, it served as an opportunity for Portland Public Schools to put a stop to Whitehurst's behavior.

When Soto mustered the courage to report him, it was the first time, records indicate, that Oregon's largest school district received a detailed first-person complaint that the charming educator and coach might pose a threat to students.

But there are no records showing that the lawyer who investigated the complaint for the district ever bothered to talk to Soto, and Whitehurst went unpunished.

Over the next 13 years, school and district officials would repeatedly protect Whitehurst and dismiss complaints from girls who said they were subjected to his leering, suggestive remarks or requests for oral sex, an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive found.

After Soto's report went nowhere, district officials discounted at least five other red flags about Whitehurst's conduct, records show.

He ultimately left under a cloud and surrendered his license in 2016, but only after a male colleague complained that Whitehurst mistreated him. That man's lawsuit alleging the district tolerated Whitehurst's bad behavior cost the district $534,000.

The Oregonian/OregonLive reviewed police reports, personnel records and state and district investigations into Whitehurst and interviewed three student victims mentioned in those records. Two additional women who had never before come forward also agreed to be interviewed. All contended that Whitehurst subjected them to inappropriate conduct or forced himself on them when they were students -- dating back to the 1980s.

Whitehurst would not agree to be interviewed for this story.

Portland Public Schools educator Mitch Whitehurst, shown in a old Marshall High yearbook.

Records and interviews show that the system protected Whitehurst, not children. District officials, including top lawyers, two human resource directors and at least three principals, downplayed complaints from students and staff as isolated instances, rumors or misunderstandings.

Employees designated to investigate complaints did not check basic facts that could have corroborated the accounts of students. They failed to look for other victims or to connect the dots between students and adults who raised concerns about his conduct at four different schools.

Complaints were kept confidential from all but a few top officials, meaning that principals had no way to spot worrisome patterns. And so, rumors that dogged Whitehurst for years seemed to be merely that.

Students who said they were exploited by Whitehurst suffered for decades. Soto said that having adults discount her story undermined her sense of self worth.

"I must not have mattered enough," she said. "I sure as hell didn't feel protected by anybody."

Rose Soto learned this summer what happened to a complaint she made about sexual harassment when she was a student at Marshall High in the early 2000s.

District leaders say they will soon put in place important changes that they believe will make it harder for warning signs to be ignored. They plan to hire an administrator to track all complaints of sexual misconduct, begin training staff members and conduct more thorough investigations when accusations arise.

The district acknowledges it did none of that in the case of Mitch Whitehurst.

"We clearly should have known better," says Interim Superintendent Yousef Awwad. "We should have connected the dots and addressed the concerns around this particular teacher."

School board members repeatedly asked staff members to scrutinize the Whitehurst case. But 10 months after their first request, no one has heeded that directive.

If they had, district officials would have found files revealing botched investigations and an enabling culture that repeatedly gave a rogue employee the benefit of the doubt.

MARSHALL HIGH SCHOOL: NOVEMBER 2001

Don't tell.

That was the advice of Rose Soto's closest friends when she confided about the Marshall High faculty member. He told her he made her his aide because she was "easy on the eyes," she told The Oregonian/OregonLive this summer. He wouldn't stop trying to date her.

And so, like most students who become the target of a school official's sexual advances, she kept quiet.

It was November 2001, and Mitch Whitehurst had worked for Portland Public Schools for 19 years. He'd served mostly as an integration specialist -- a quasi-counselor to promote positive school culture and help black students fit in. He was also a coach and gym teacher. By then, he was a dean, responsible for student discipline.

No one will listen, friends told her. It will come back on you.

Still, she recalled, every day that she sat elbow-to-elbow with him as he talked about her looks, fantasized out loud about dating her and hinted at getting physical, she would wonder:

Should I tell?

Then, one day, she said, he made the sexually suggestive comment about her khaki corduroy pants.

"I was absolutely alone with him," she said 16 years after the incident. "He could have done anything."

Yearbook image of Rose Soto when she was a student at Marshall High

Ten minutes later, she told police, they were back in the office with the door shut as usual. He asked how many pairs of pants with a zipper in the back did she own?

And so, despite her friends' advice, Soto did something most victims don't: She reported him to school authorities.

Soon, however, she worried that had been a mistake.

Portland Public Schools' top human resources attorney, Maureen Sloane, conducted the district's investigation. Records show it consisted of checking Whitehurst's file and talking to him. After Sloane interviewed Whitehurst, he was back at work the next day.

Soto felt like she was screaming and no one would hear her.

For more than a decade after she graduated, Soto wondered what happened to him.

This summer, she found out. The Oregonian/OregonLive provided the 33-year-old mother a copy of the district's investigatory file. The seven pages enraged her.

"This is the lamest compilation of notes for the information I provided them," she said. "It's insulting."

In her loopy teen handwriting, Soto had written a detailed two-page statement about Whitehurst's sexually suggestive overtures and turned it in to the school office. She also gave a more extensive account to Portland police. The detective concluded Whitehurst hadn't committed a crime but noted in his report that the school district would follow up with an investigation of its own.

Soto now held the results in her hands.

She gasped reading Sloane's handwritten notes from her interview with Whitehurst.

Whitehurst denied picking her as his aide, the notes said. He denied he ever shut the door to his office, Sloane wrote. These were facts Sloane could have tried to confirm.

How had he explained away her allegation that he wanted to take her to a hotel, have dinner and spend the night?

Whitehurst said he may have asked Soto for hotel recommendations for prom.

"He admitted to saying she looks nice today and may have said she was a nice person," Soto read aloud from Sloane's notes, rolling her eyes.

"She is not ugly -- but opening self up with what wearing," Soto continued to read, her jaw dropping. "Told her to be careful with pants that zip down back. Trying to tell her to be careful with the message she was sending."

She put down the file. "This is disgusting."

In her memo, Sloane said the district had interviewed Whitehurst's other student aides and none of them said anything about misconduct. But the district could not provide any notes or other records to suggest any aides or other students were interviewed.

Soto said Sloane never interviewed her.

The attorney did report the allegation to the state's teacher licensing agency. But she also forwarded her conclusion that Soto could be confused and Whitehurst was fit to teach.

Licensing board officials took no action.

Soto doesn't understand why no one from the state asked her about her complaint. The agency did not respond to questions about why it did not follow up.

The fear of running into Whitehurst consumed school life, Soto said. In common areas, she kept constant watch to make sure he wasn't around.

One day, as she waited alone at her bus stop, he pulled up in his sports car.

"You know, Rose, I really need a jazzy girl like you in my life," she remembers him saying. "Why don't you get in?"

Soto's experience diminished her confidence for years, she said.

"When you're brave enough to have a voice and you're just blown off and told 'That's just not what it was,' it leaves you with a big sense of self-doubt."

EXPERT: PRIORITIZING 'COMFORT OF ADULTS'

For years, experts have urged district leaders to follow simple best practices to minimize sexual misconduct by adults who work in schools.

Most abusers are gregarious and well-liked, giving them a sheen of protection, and few victims come forward to complain, says Charol Shakeshaft, a leading expert on educator abuse who has studied the problem for more than 20 years. Students who do report abusive behavior should be taken seriously, she says.

Absent first-hand complaints, persistent rumors can serve as clues that an educator may be crossing the lines, Shakeshaft says. And any time there is a credible report of a violation, school leaders should check carefully to see whether there are other victims, she says.

An educator who triggers a complaint that can't be substantiated should be closely observed to let them know misconduct won't go unnoticed, she says.

In the case of Whitehurst, she said Portland school officials seemed to be overly credulous, believing his strange explanations for talking to a student about hotels and the closure on her pants.

Speaking broadly of the district's treatment of Whitehurst, Shakeshaft said, "They put the comfort of adults over the safety of children and the safety of women within the school district. It's outrageous."

MAUREEN SLOANE'S OFFICE: JANUARY 2008

Rose Soto may have been the first student to report Mitch Whitehurst. But she wasn't the first to encounter his abusive behavior, records indicate.

In 1984, Whitehurst invited two female students to his apartment.

Both were seniors at Franklin High, where Whitehurst, then in his second year with Portland Public Schools, worked. One of the teens was named Caprice.

At Whitehurst's apartment, Caprice said, he told them that he expected them both to perform oral sex. Caprice left. The friend, she said, stayed.

Caprice agreed to an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive on the condition she be identified only by her first name.

She did not report the incident at the time.

Caprice did not worry he'd harm other students because, shortly after she graduated, she heard that he'd been fired for similar misconduct. She believed he was no longer teaching, she said.

Nearly 24 years later, her aunt who worked for Portland schools set her straight. She complained about a creepy co-worker, then said his name: Mitch Whitehurst. Caprice immediately went to the school district with her account.

Early in 2008, she reported Whitehurst to the same person who'd handled Soto's case six years earlier: Maureen Sloane.

Sloane held substantial sway in Oregon's largest school district. She'd long been a partner at the top-drawer Portland law firm that had represented the district for decades, Miller Nash. She then was hired in-house to be the district's top human resources lawyer.

"I took down the details and agreed that I would look into it," Sloane wrote in a Jan. 25, 2008, memo. "I made no promises and told her that I would not be calling her to tell her what happened. She agreed that was a good decision."

This time, there is no record that Sloane interviewed Whitehurst. Nor did she report the allegation to Oregon's teacher licensing agency. Records do not indicate she made any effort to contact the second former Franklin High student, whom Caprice said Whitehurst had also asked for sex.

Her memo, dated the same day as she spoke with Caprice, concludes: "I will take no further action on this matter."

Memo written by Portland Public Schools lawyer Maureen Sloane in 2008.

Sloane would not agree to be interviewed for this article. Provided with detailed written questions about district records of her actions, Sloane wrote that she has "little recollection" of the events. She retired the year after Caprice filed her report.

Caprice disputed Sloane's account. She never agreed it was a good idea that she be kept in the dark, she said.

Caprice assumed Sloane would investigate, and if there were other reports such as Soto's, fire Whitehurst.

But, once again, he was off the hook.

RUMBLINGS AT JEFFERSON HIGH

Rumors continued to dog Whitehurst after he rose to the role of athletic director at Jefferson High. In 2010, someone plastered posters around campus with a photo of Whitehurst and the words "alleged molester!" The posters claimed he had been "violating young girls for over 20 years." One was even mailed to a Portland school board member. Whitehurst reported the poster campaign to police, saying that he believed a romantic rival was out to get him.

Poster distributed on the Jefferson High School campus and at Whitehurst's home in 2010.

Vice Principal Ricky Allen helped Whitehurst get the posters taken down, then he and Whitehurst went to breakfast, he noted in a 2011 memo. "That was the end of our encounter," he wrote.

Two years later, Whitehurst experienced his first career setback.

He was demoted from athletic director, a position that paid at least $88,000 a year, to gym teacher at Faubion, a small K-8 school. His pay dropped to $74,000 his first full year in that new job.

The records that should document what triggered the demotion or who signed off on it are missing from his personnel file.

When he landed at Faubion, neither the principal nor vice principal was warned about the complaints from Rose Soto or Caprice.

Whitehurst's PPS work assignments

Whitehurst was initially hired for a temporary job and changed schools each year until he landed a permanent spot his second year at Sellwood Middle School.

School year PPS school 1982-83 Marshall High School 1983-84 Franklin High School 1984-86 Sellwood Middle School 1986-97 Lincoln High School 1997-2007 Marshall High School 2007-2012 Jefferson High School 2012-2014 Faubion K-8 School

Last day worked for PPS: Sept. 27, 2014

Terminated: March 20, 2015

Source: Portland Public Schools

The influential teacher's union has insisted in contract negotiations that complaints that do not lead to formal discipline are not to be shared when one of its members transfers to a different school.

Jennifer McCalley, vice principal at Faubion K-8 School, told a detective that in 2012, "when Faubion had received Whitehurst's personnel file, it had been empty," the detective wrote. "And no one seemed to have any explanation as to why."

FAUBION K-8 SCHOOL: DECEMBER 2012

Mitch Whitehurst shown in a Lincoln High yearbook photo from the 1990s. He ended his career in Portland Public Schools as the gym teacher at Faubion K-8 School.

At Faubion, Caprice would again encounter Whitehurst.

She had become a teacher and often substituted there.

One day in December 2012, a Faubion employee told Caprice about an off-putting teacher on staff, state and district records show.

He made sexually suggestive comments in staff meetings, put his hands on people's legs, and gave back massages, Caprice recalled being told.

"I said, 'As long as his name isn't Whitehurst,'" Caprice remembered.

It was.

As if on cue, Whitehurst breezed by the two of them and drove off.

Caprice was stunned, she said. How could Whitehurst have kept his job after she had complained about him soliciting oral sex from high school girls?

She went to then-Principal LaShawn Lee and relayed to her what happened when she was a high school senior -- the same information she had given to Maureen Sloane. Records show that Lee immediately told her boss, and the report from Caprice ultimately landed with Human Resources Director Sean Murray and top district lawyer Jollee Patterson.

Based on Lee's action, human resources lawyer Siobhan Murphy checked Whitehurst's files and found the memo about what happened to Rose Soto. "My recommendation is we take some action here," she wrote to Murray and Patterson.

But Whitehurst suffered no consequences.

Caprice, however, said her substitute teaching assignments at Faubion dried up while Whitehurst worked there.

"I never subbed there again, because everyone who used to call me all of a sudden didn't," she said.

Patterson would not answer questions about the case. Murray did not respond to inquiries left at his new job working for the city of Portland.

By January 2013, a few months into his time teaching gym at Faubion, Whitehurst again faced questions about his conduct.

Eighth-grade girls began boycotting his class. School officials opened an investigation and interviewed all 23 eighth-grade girls. Fourteen of them said his wolfish stares and remarks about their bodies frightened them, according to records of interviews the school conducted with the students. To avoid him, girls hid in the bathroom or wore shoes unfit for gym class so they had to sit out.

"Most girls are really scared and shaking when they enter P.E.," one eighth-grade girl said in an interview the school conducted.

"I'm nervous about going to P.E.," another confided, "but I have to. It's a grade."

Portion of a student's response given during an 2013 inquiry into Mitch Whitehurst's behavior.

During the inquiry, Lee, the school's principal, sent an email to top district officials. She questioned the district's decision to allow Whitehurst to keep working with students while his conduct was under scrutiny.

"For the past 30 years, there have been rumblings about Coach Whitehurst and his 'overfriendlieness' with his female students and staff," she wrote. "I'm extremely concerned about this becoming a 'Penn State University' scandal."

The school's vice principal and a counselor wrote up their interviews with the eighth-grade girls. In those records, obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive, students described seeing Whitehurst's eyes linger on girls' backsides or chests.

"He takes time at each girl when he's looking."

"He'll focus on one person, or we'll walk by him and his eyes will follow them," said another. "This happens only to girls."

"If we don't wear the right shoes, he can't look at us like that. It's scary ... Lots of girls tie their jackets around their waists. I tie my jacket around my waist."

A majority of the girls said he had touched them on the shoulder. He told one girl that she had a perfect figure and would be a model, according to seven students who were unsettled by this comment, including the girl who'd caught his attention.

"He moved his hands in a curvy figure," one told the interviewer.

In the end, the district concluded the students' first-hand accounts were "rumors" and no action was justified, according to Stephanie Harper, the top human resources lawyer since March 2013.

There is no paperwork that explains who came to this conclusion. District officials including Harper, won't say.

Harper would not agree to be interviewed for this article but responded to some written questions. "I would agree the documentation ... could use improvement and clarity regarding what factual conclusions were drawn," she wrote.

Harper answered similar questions by repeatedly saying that the district concluded the girls' accounts were "rumors," according to court records reviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Whitehurst continued to teach.

FAUBION: SEPTEMBER 25, 2014

Ultimately, the catalyst for Whitehurst's downfall wasn't his conduct with female students, but a male school administrator.

In a classroom early one morning, before students were in school, Whitehurst poked the man in the anus, prompting the man to call Portland Police.

Portland Police sex crimes detective Mike Weinstein was assigned to investigate the poke.

But he heard so many other complaints from Portland school employees about Whitehurst's conduct that he noted them in his report, which spans more than 60 pages.

Even Portland Public Schools security director George Weatheroy knew about Whitehurst, the detective wrote, because there had been so many reports over the years.

McCalley, the vice principal, told him that girls complained about his inappropriate touching and comments. Female colleagues said he put his hands on their thighs and they had to physically remove his hand so he'd stop touching them, she said.

McCalley would not agree to be interviewed for this article.

Several Faubion employees told Weinstein they saw Whitehurst smack a male co-worker on the rear at a staff breakfast. Lee documented in a memo to human resources that same day that she warned him to "never touch any of my staff members on their butts again!"

Why, the detective asked McCalley three times, had Whitehurst been allowed to keep crossing lines at work?

McCalley speculated that the district "had possibly built up a 'tolerance' for his behavior," the detective wrote.

POLICE STATION: SEPTEMBER 30, 2014

Eventually, the detective sat down with Whitehurst.

Although it was only weeks since the staff breakfast, Whitehurst told the detective that no touching had occurred and that the principal had not rebuked him.

Weinstein pulled Whitehurst's attorney aside.

"I offered to (him) that I felt we were getting nowhere, in that, Whitehurst was simply lying about similar behavior," the detective wrote in his report. "I suggested he was not helping himself by outright lying."

Whitehurst pled guilty in December 2014 to misdemeanor harassment, for which he got probation. Portland Public Schools terminated him three months later.

But he was still licensed to teach.

Nearly two months after Whitehurst's conviction, the state licensing agency launched an investigation.

Whitehurst told investigators that he still planned to teach. "I just have a gift for coaching and working with kids," he said in a taped interview.

LISTEN: An excerpt from an Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission investigator interview with Mitch Whitehurst. Audio: Teacher Standards Practices Commission"

OREGON'S TEACHER LICENSING AGENCY: 2015

The licensing agency requested all the records the district had compiled on Whitehurst and, for the first time, learned of Caprice's allegation that Whitehurst had propositioned her and a friend back in 1984. The state investigator, Cristina Edgar noted that the district did nothing to look into the 1984 incident, records show, so she decided to add it to her scope.

Edgar tracked down Caprice, who repeated what she'd told district officials in 2008 and in 2012, records show.

Then Edgar did something the district had failed to do: She contacted Caprice's friend, now a married professional in her early 50s.

The woman recalled the day she and Caprice went to Whitehurst's apartment. She remembered that she was eventually alone with him, investigative records say. While Chaka Khan was playing from the stereo, Whitehurst emerged naked, with an erection, she recalled.

According to Edgar's investigative notes, the woman gave Whitehurst oral sex. She said she feared what would happen if she didn't. She said she wanted to do the least amount required to get out of his apartment, Edgar's investigative report and notes says.

LISTEN: An Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission investigator interviews Mitch Whitehurst about allegations he sexually abused two seniors at Franklin High. Audio: Teacher Standards Practices Commission"

When Edgar confronted Whitehurst about these allegations, he decided to surrender his teaching license. Although he denied the allegations from Caprice and the other woman, he stipulated in writing in January 2016 that he had engaged in sexual misconduct with them while they were students in 1984.

Yearbook image of Mitch Whitehurst, who worked with students in Portland Public Schools for 32 years.

A HOME OUTSIDE OREGON: FEBRUARY 2017

For 33 years, another woman kept silent about abuse she said Whitehurst inflicted when she attended Franklin High in the 1980s.

Then early in 2017, she Googled him. She read an article on OregonLive about the poked employee's lawsuit over Whitehurst's behavior. "My heart was pounding; my jaw was dropped. I couldn't believe it. I was just like 'Finally. I am glad that he got caught,' " she said.

She contacted The Oregonian/OregonLive to provide corroboration for other victims' accounts. She said that during the 1983-84 school year, when she was a high school junior, Whitehurst solicited oral sex at his apartment.

Because she never reported Whitehurst, her account could not be independently verified.

The woman said it had never occurred to her that anyone else had also been burdened with memories like hers for years.

She said she was mad at herself for being too afraid to speak up sooner.

"I knew those girls didn't make it up," she said. "Because he had done it to me."

Caprice, who still works in the district, worries, that even with Whitehurst gone, a tolerance for intolerable behavior remains.

"I really think the cancer that was there; it's still there, " she said. "All I want is from here on out to have a different method for dealing with this that has more accountability and more sunlight on the issue."

-- Bethany Barnes

Have information to share about this investigation? Email bbarnes@oregonian.com