Head of district being sued over sex abuse gets $145K job in Kansas City, Kan., schools

The head of a Kansas school district at the center of a federal lawsuit regarding the sexual abuse of a former student has been hired as the new Chief Operations Officer of the Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools.

At a salary of $145,000, McLouth Superintendent Steve Lilly is expected to start in July. While interviewing for and accepting the job, Lilly did not reveal the existence of federal lawsuit scheduled for trial in September in Kansas City, Kansas, the KCK district said.

“We were not aware of the litigation prior to hiring Mr. Lilly,” Edwin Birch, executive director of communications for the Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools, texted in response to a Star inquiry.

Lilly, whose hiring in KCK was announced in a February press release, is listed as a defendant in the lawsuit filed in July 2020. The McLouth Unified School District 342 is located an hour from Kansas City in Jefferson County.

Lilly did not respond to The Star’s requests for comment.

The lawsuit against the McLouth district centers on the sexual abuse of Haylee Weissenbach by a 32-year-old, married high school teacher over two years. It began when Weissenbach was a 16-year-old junior and Anthony “Tony” Kuckelman was 32. It did not end until she graduated, when she was 17, in May 2019.

Now age 20 and soon to graduate from Emporia State University, Weissenbach disclosed the sexual exploitation near the end of her college freshman year. Kuckelman was subsequently arrested and in July 2021 pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual relations. He is now serving a 32-month sentence in a Kansas prison.

The civil case, filed by Leawood attorney Daniel Zmijewski, aims to hold the McLouth school district liable. In court filings, Weissenbach’s attorney alleges that the district, under Lilly, failed to protect its student and that Lilly and other staff ignored rumors, signs and concerns that a criminal relationship between a teacher and student was, or had been, possibly taking place.

Instead of contacting the Kansas Department for Children and Families as they are mandated to do by law, the lawsuit contends, they ignored signs and concerns, making them not only negligent, but also violating Weissenbach’s constitutional protections and her protections against sexual harassment as outlined by Title IX.

Zmijewski outlines how a staff member alerted Lilly that Weissenbach had been seen leaving Kuckelman’s classroom from an outside door on a day that school was not in session. Video confirmed the fact. Lilly, along with the school’s principal, then called Weissenbach’s parents into the school and later called in Weissenbach to question her about whether anything “of a sexual nature” was occurring with Kuckelman.

Weissenbach, by then a senior, lied and said that there was not. Lilly did not contact DCF.

In court papers, the attorney for the district, Terelle Mock of Topeka’s Fisher Patterson Sayler & Smith, denied all allegations made against the district. The district holds that it did not violate Weissenbach’s Title IX rights because to do so it would have needed to meet the Title IX standard of showing “deliberate indifference” to an alleged abuse. And to do that, it also would have needed to have “actual knowledge” of an allegation.

Mock, in court papers, argues that neither Lilly nor any teacher or staff member had “actual knowledge” and thus the district should not be held liable under Title IX.

When Lilly takes over as COO of the Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools, he will be going from a district with 460 students to one with close to 22,000 students.

A press release announcing Lilly’s hiring as COO notes that he has been superintendent, as well as basketball coach, in McLouth for eight years. He received his bachelor’s degree from Kansas State University and his master’s from Pittsburg State University and, early in his career, taught in the Kansas City, Kansas, district.

Tammie Romstad was athletic director at Independence (Kansas) Community College, featured in Netflix’s “Last Chance U.” She resigned and took the A.D. post in the Kansas City, Kansas, school district.
Tammie Romstad was athletic director at Independence (Kansas) Community College, featured in Netflix’s “Last Chance U.” She resigned and took the A.D. post in the Kansas City, Kansas, school district.

In 2019, the Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools made headlines when it hired Tammie Romstad as the district’s new athletic director at a then salary of $102,000. Romstad had previously worked for 12 years at Independence Community College in Independence, Kansas.

The school’s football team and its abrasive and profanity-spewing coach, Jason Brown, was then the focus of seasons three and four of the Netflix series “Last Chance U.”

Throughout the series, Romstad had shown support for the coach who, in February 2019, resigned after a confrontation he had with a German player to whom the coach texted, “I’m your new Hitler.”

In June 2019, Brown faced eight felonies in Montgomery County that included blackmail and allegedly posing as a lawyer from Johnnie Cochran’s law firm in Los Angeles as part of a ruse to prevent a Kansas newspaper, the Montgomery County Chronicle, from writing negatively about him.

The charges were ultimately dropped.

The Kansas City, Kansas, district was not aware of the “Last Chance U” series or Romstad’s role in it at the time she was hired.