King’s letter of reprimand. View the full document here
Lowell Elementary’s principal Gregory King will keep his job despite a Seattle Public Schools finding determining he failed to properly investigate a report of inappropriate student contact by a staff member at the school and withheld information when he launched an investigation of two Lowell employees who first raised issues about the contact.
“Gregory King did not ever resign from his post at Lowell,” a SPS rep tells CHS. “He is and will continue to be principal at Lowell.” In February, King said he was taking a job in Tacoma but that school district backed off on the decision to hire King after learning about the Lowell investigation.
King has received a written reprimand for his part in the wrongdoings.
In the results of the investigation released Friday afternoon, King and assistant principal Rina Geoghagan were found to have mishandled reports of possible inappropriate contact between a teacher’s assistant and a student. The investigator hired by SPS later found that the reported January 2011 “foot kissing” incident was only an assistant’s attempt to calm an upset student — but the incident set off a chain of events that included King and Geoghagan witholding information from SPS’s human resources administrators when requesting two employees who reported the case be investigated, the resignation of one of those employees who reported the possible misconduct and findings by the investigator that race had clouded King’s judgement in how he handled the case. According to the report on the investigation, the staff member who made the initial allegation is white and the employee she was concerned about is black as is King.
The Seattle Times talks to the employee who resigned here.
We have included the entire report on the Lowell investigation below. It is heavily redacted and only King and Geoghagan’s name appear in the text. Two follow-up investigations corroborated the findings of the main report, below.
This incident is bad enough, but worse is the damage caused. Just a few years ago, Lowell Elementary had the highest test scores in all of Washington state. Now, with most of the students and parents forcibly pushed out to other schools, with many of the good teachers driven out by Greg King, there is little left. The successful Lowell Elementary that once was is gone now.
It is remarkable how bad the administration of our public schools is. It’s like Seattle Public Schools district administrators looked at a successful school, said, “We can’t have that, it makes other schools look bad,” and actively targeted it for destruction. It really is remarkable.
Terrible stuff going on there. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s worse physical contact going on between elementary school children and grown teachers and assistants. Is this the same school with the convicted felon chaperoning kids and swat teams not able to find the man?
I don’t think anyone could have made this stuff up. Public schools have really hit rock bottom.
Interesting, since the links below show a quote that says he IS leaving. The words below state the man is leaving. If he pulled that back and the district accepted, they need to be up front about it.
“It is a very difficult decision to make given the great community, students, parents, and staff we have,” King wrote. “But, I am leaving because it is in my best interest for professional and personal financial growth as a principal and future leader.”
http://capitolhill.komonews.com/news/schools/717800-lowell-e
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017457916_l
Really? He drove them out like St. Patrick and the snakes? Or with a stick?
It’s as though when he moved here, he asked, “Hey could you close TT Minor and then shove as many unrelated programs as possible into Lowell before sending me there? That’s sure to send the good teachers packing.”
The ‘Ministrators’ at Seattle’s school board don’t have a habit of going back once they accept a resignation. If you read the .PDF report here or at Sea Times you’re probably aware that Seattle’s school board didn’t allow one of the complainants to withdraw her resignation. She was one of the two that was investigated because she was a whistleblower when a school employee was routinely getting too physical with elementary/special ed students via kissing students feet and giving awkward hugs.
That fucked up school has the inmates running the asylum. Neither of the principals are aware of policy regarding reporting of suspected child sexual/physical abuse. Lowell Principal Greg King seems to have outright lied to the investigators who thoroughly (thanks for the thorough investigation) investigated the situation. Either that or he’s suffering from a severe case of amnesia, in either case he’s **UNFIT** to be an elementary school principal. It’s sad for our kids that these people are in charge of our public schools.
Why are these child endangering/pedophile people allowed to run elementary schools and not in prison?
Those news reports were from early February. When the Tacoma school district caught wind that King was currently under investigation (from the Seattle Times article) they retracted the job offer and he was allowed to stay on a Lowell. Interestingly, the Speech and Language Pathologist who made the original complaint was not allowed to get her job back immediately after resigning because it’s against SPS policy. Hmmmm?
You’re totally incompetent, a known and documented liar and I’d bet most school systems wouldn’t allow you on their property after you had whistleblowers of child abuse investigated. Speaking of sticks and the perverted school you ran with adults perving on young kids, you should be taught a lesson or two!
Greg King should have been sent to the pasture once he decided that Tacoma would pay more. Once Tacoma decided to not have the man have anything to do with their schools, Seattle should have shown him the same door he choose to walk through to greener pastures, with his “personal financial growth” at stake and all.
He still should be prosecuted for crimes such as endangering children, public corruption, etc…
The test scores were only high because Lowell at Capitol Hill used to house the APP Program (“Highly Gifted” – top 2% in IQ) and these kids were bused in from all over North Seattle. Those kids made up the majority of the school but it also housed a medically fragile (SPED) program, also bused in from elsewhere. When the District moved towards the Attendance Area model, they opened the school up to local General Ed kids and simultaneously shut down neighboring schools. It was a short-sighted plan and the school was almost 150% over-capacity by last summer so they pulled the APP Program out (because they are the most mobile) who are now temporarily housed at Lincoln in Wallingford until SPS find a more permanent solution. THAT is why the test scores used to be so high and no longer are. Rina Geoghagan is now a fully-fledged Principal at Lowell@Lincoln.
Having said that, Greg King did force out a large number of talented teachers, definitely from the APP Program (I’m not sure if the same applies to General Ed teachers – probably).
Yes, it’s the same school who discovered a known felon chaperoning a field trip.
However, you need to get your facts straight about the “abuse”. It was discovered that no abuse actually occurred. Even the person who made the complaint in the first place didn’t see the actions as sexually inappropriate, but was suggesting that the caregiver should go through additional training as to what was appropriate physical contact. The problem was the failure to take a complaint seriously and go through the correct channels to report it.
I’ve just spent a long time reading through the articles, reader comments, blogs and (most importantly) the investigative reports on the subject and it upsets me that people get all wound up when they read the words “foot kissing” and think it’s tantamount to rape! The back story is that the disabled girl was upset and the caregiver was trying to cheer her up by doing a “stinky foot!” routine. Inappropriate? Yes, but sexually motivated? No.
In this case she shares the responsibility. While I cannot comment on either one of the two principal’s work, this is not about just one of them.
And not the type of shakeups where employees and higher-ups are just shuffled around from district to district like Lowell’s principal was trying to do by leaving for Tacoma. It’s a school system and the number one priority of every employee should be students’ safety and students’ education.