Review of Duval County teacher complaints starts; no talk of replacing superintendent

Superintendent Diana Greene left a Duval County School Board meeting Wednesday with the same job she had walking in, despite rumors that her future was imperiled by teacher misconduct complaints.

CBS-47/FOX-30 newsroom Action News Jax reported anonymous claims that Greene was negotiating terms to retire before her contract ends in 2025, but that couldn’t be immediately confirmed.

Asked after the meeting whether she had comment on rumors involving her or pressure to resign, Greene answered simply, “no.”

The meeting was a step in a school district review of a growing list of complaints involving faculty at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, as well as a recent claim that the district hadn’t forwarded dozens of complaints about district employees to a state office that tracks professional conduct.

Another meeting about "board member concerns resulting from recent events at Douglas Anderson" is scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday.

Greene endorsed the review, to be carried out by a Fort Lauderdale-based law firm that has represented dozens of Florida school districts in employment law issues.

"I am in full support of this investigation,” the superintendent said. “… If there are things that are wrong with our systems, we need to get it fixed. And I am confident that we will resolve these issues.”

The school system has been dogged for weeks by complaints from Douglas Anderson alumni and families following the March arrest of longtime vocal teacher Jeffrey Clayton on charges of lewd conduct with a student.

School district records reflected a series of complaints involving Clayton, and on Tuesday state Education Commissioner Manny Diaz wrote Greene that an office in Florida’s Department of Education had found the school district “previously investigated Mr. Clayton on multiple occasions … as far back as 2006, without ever reporting the allegations” to the state’s professional standards office.

Greene has been superintendent since 2018.

Complicating the review, Diaz added that the Office of Professional Practices Services had received 50 cases from Duval County on Friday.

“These cases date back as far as 2020, span three different school years and were not previously reported” to the office, Diaz stated, calling it “completely unacceptable that DCPS did not timely report these cases” as state law requires.

School Board Chair Kelly Coker and Greene both expressed alarm about Diaz’s letter Tuesday, and Wednesday a district spokesman said the supervisor of the district’s professional standards office, Reginald Johnson, had himself been reassigned pending a professional standards investigation.

Coker said Wednesday that the previously scheduled meeting was important for stating to reckon with problems that had gone uncorrected earlier.

“Today, our board took the appropriate and necessary action to begin the process of determining the system failures that allowed Jeffrey Clayton to remain in the classroom for years after multiple district-led investigations involving inappropriate conduct,” Coker said in written comments.

Noting that the review would include the 50 cases Diaz wrote about, Coker said that “[t]o be thorough, this investigation will take time; however, it is necessary to ensure the safety and security of our students moving forward.”

The law firm recommended to handle the school district’s review, Weiss Serota Helfman Cole & Bierman, was screened for conflicts by attorneys at Jacksonville’s Office of General Counsel. An initial budget of $25,000 was projected for attorney bills, but that amount could increase, city attorney Jon Phillips cautioned.

The review could continue into the next school year.

Findings from agencies that handled the teacher records may conflict with one another.

While Diaz wrote that the school district racked up complaints about Clayton “without ever reporting the allegations” until this year, district officials last week sent reporters a log of complaints about inappropriate physical contact by district employees that seemed to indicate a complaint about Clayton had been substantiated and in November 2021 reported to “PPS,” the acronym of the state’s Office of Professional Practices Services.

A file on the 2021 Clayton complaint, which didn’t find sexual harassment had occurred, was sent to the state through regular mail, which doesn’t require a receipt proving delivery, according to response Greene’s office sent to state officials last week.

A string of residents who address the board during a public comment period said they were concerned that Greene would be pressured to leave her $300,000-a-year job because of issues that either existed since before she took the job or never involved the superintendent.

“The policy you’re talking about was violated by the teacher or the administrator,” local attorney A. Wellington Barlow told board members. “This is way out of bounds. … Superintendent, please don’t resign.”

At least nine appointed superintendents have reportedly resigned or been replaced since November at school boards around the sate’s 67 counties. Some of Greene’s defenders have argued that superintendents have been targeted because of conflicts with officials in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration.

Talking to reporters after the meeting, Greene was upbeat about the review.

"We’re going through an issue right now and we’re going to work through that,” she said. “And as superintendent, I’m going to continue doing my job."

Times-Union staff writers Mark Woods and Beth Reese Cravey contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Duval superintendent stays on job as School Board starts legal review