This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KQED. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
A San Francisco Bay Area school district has replaced a middle school math teacher for the remainder of the academic year following an investigation by KQED and ProPublica that showed he had been accused of inappropriately touching students at two previous jobs.
The Redwood City School District has received at least two new complaints against Jason Agan, according to the parents who filed the complaints as well as emails from the district to the parents saying it is investigating both.
The news outlets found that the state teacher licensing agency allowed Agan to keep his credentials following his 2019 firing from a high school in the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District for what district officials characterized as sexual harassment of female students. At least 11 students and one parent at Angelo Rodriguez High School submitted written complaints about Agan’s behavior to school administrators, drawing at least two warnings to stop, KQED and ProPublica’s investigation found.
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Students in that district testified during Agan’s dismissal hearing that he made them uncomfortable by massaging their neck or shoulders as well as commenting on female students’ clothing, prompting an independent panel to deem him “unfit to teach,” according to records obtained by the news outlets.
The Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the agency responsible for educators’ licenses, suspended Agan’s teaching license for seven days in 2021, after he had already gotten another job teaching math at Ephraim Williams College Prep Middle School in the Fortune network of charter schools in Sacramento, an hour away from his first school.
The discipline — along with a red flag icon — is noted in the state’s public database of credentialed educators, but no specific reason is given for the sanction. Anyone searching his name in the database would see he still held credentials indicating he was legally fit to teach.
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