Teacher Under Probe Hired On West Side Anthony Benson Being Investigated For Conduct At Greenacres Junior High, Could Lose Certificate

He’s been fired from two teaching jobs in the past 2-1/2 years for improper conduct with students, dogged by a lawsuit filed by angry parents, targeted for a state investigation.

But none of that’s kept a former Spokane Valley teacher out of Washington’s public schools.

Anthony P. Benson’s current employer - a high school near Seattle - knew nothing about his checkered past until contacted recently by The Spokesmani-Review.

For the past seven months, Benson, 42, has been teaching biology at Kent-Meridian High School. Administrators say he was hired based largely on glowing recommendations from several people at a West Side tribal school that fired him last year.

Word of Benson’s continued teaching career surprised educators at the Spokane Valley junior high school where he was fired amid several misconduct allegations, including sexual harassment of a 13-year-old girl.

“It’s a travesty of justice if he’s still teaching at a public school in this state,” said a teacher, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation from Benson.

Benson’s application file at Kent School District includes no mention of him being fired, said Margaret Whitney, assistant superintendent of personnel.

“I’m not aware that he has any discharge” on his record, said Kent-Meridian Principal Ben Dillard.

Officials at the Kent district, the state’s fourth largest, didn’t call Central Valley School District administrators before hiring Benson.

They also didn’t call the Office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. If they had, they would have learned that Benson is under investigation for his conduct at Greenacres Junior High in the Valley and could lose his teaching certificate.

But the fact that he continues to teach in Washington tells parents and others interested in public schools that it is still a difficult and lengthy process to remove a teacher from the profession.

Barriers include a reluctance to put students through the trauma of testifying, a backed-up court calendar in Spokane County, and an overloaded state investigative force.

Four state investigators are now juggling hundreds of background checks of new teachers and complaints about teachers, some three and four years old.

The state has struggled with the practice commonly known as “passing the trash” - sending a problem teacher on to a new district with good references.

In 1989, the Board of Education adopted a code of conduct for teachers. Among other things, it gives the school superintendent’s office the ability to punish educators who give a reference on a teacher that leaves out important information - the teacher’s dismissal, for instance. Yet, school officials are so wary of being sued, they rarely will tell another district straight-out that they fired a teacher.

Despite Benson’s troubles, some in the community still defend him as an excellent, if controversial, teacher.

He has repeatedly denied the sexual harassment incident that led to his discharge from Central Valley.

“All that nonsense” is how he described the accusation recently.

“I have tons of students ready to go to bat for me … I was crucified,” he said in a telephone interview.

Benson strongly implied that his firing was racially motivated. At the time, he had been with the district for 12 years and was the only black teacher in Central Valley.

Benson lost his job teaching at Greenacres Junior High after a May 1994 incident in a girls’ physical education class.

Benson told students they were acting like babies and needed a pacifier, according to the 13-year-old girl’s mother. The girl asked where her pacifier was.

“He grabbed her head and put it toward his waist and said, ‘Suck on this,”’ the mother said.

The district fired Benson; he appealed. In a settlement, Central Valley paid Benson $30,000, roughly a year’s pay. The girl’s parents, Betty and Larry Ford, sued Benson and the school district. Their negligence lawsuit is pending.

Since firing Benson, Central Valley has paid a total of $200,000 to two of Benson’s former students, settling unrelated lawsuits. Each girl sued after being hurt under Benson’s supervision, court documents state. One girl injured a nerve in her neck while lifting weights. The other needed two knee surgeries after Benson pushed on her leg, causing her to stretch improperly, according to the documents.

Benson - who is divorced and has five children, according to court records - wouldn’t talk about his employment at the Muckleshoot Tribal School last year or the reasons behind his departure. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

His file at the tribal school states he was hired Aug. 25, 1995, to teach physical education, said Mary Emery, business manager for the tribal school.

“They asked him to resign and he didn’t, so they terminated him,” Emery said. The reason “was an incident concerning a child. Uncalled-for rough handling, you could say.” She did not elaborate.

Muckleshoot Principal Harry Finks said in January he was unaware that Benson was fired from Central Valley. He wouldn’t talk about Benson’s departure from his own school.

“I don’t want to have this conversation,” Finks said.

Benson told the Kent district that he left the Muckleshoot school because funding for his job ran out, Whitney said.

“I do have a number of very positive recommendations from the Muckleshoots,” she said, including ones from the principal and the then-superintendent. Benson’s file also includes recommendations from a teacher and an assistant principal from Greenacres Junior High, Whitney said.

The Kent district doesn’t usually check with the state when hiring a teacher, Whitney said, beyond sending in fingerprints. The fingerprints are required by law for criminal background checks.

“Particularly with the number of teachers moving through a district of our size, without someone raising questions about an applicant, we do not check with SPI,” Whitney said. The Kent district has about 24,000 students and about 2,500 teachers.

School officials are often advised to ask former employees for a release before providing a reference. Without that release, it’s not prudent for school districts to offer information beyond verifying the employment, said Paul Clay, attorney for the Central Valley School District.

“It was agreed that Central Valley School District would not be providing any reference for Tony Benson,” he said.

Indeed, Central Valley school officials declined to comment on the record for this article, on Clay’s advice.

Nearly three years is a long time to have the cloud of a state investigation over one’s head. Yet the time lapse in Benson’s investigation is not unusual. Several problems slow progress in the Office of Professional Conduct, the investigating arm of the state superintendent’s office.

First, an investigation of a fired teacher ordinarily remains open until all related lawsuits are wrapped up.

The Ford case has a tentative trial date of April 15. However, the Fords’ attorney, Russell Van Camp, said he also has a criminal trial set on that date.

Another reason the Benson case is still open is a backlog of cases, said Linda Harrison, an investigator for the state Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Last month, the four investigators employed by SPI’s Office of Professional Conduct were working on 243 disciplinary investigations. Another 365 background checks were under way on teachers seeking certification.

About half of the disciplinary investigations involve sexual offenses, ranging from inappropriate touching or comments to ongoing sexual misconduct, Harrison said.

The Office of Professional Conduct has tried to keep up with its caseload, moving one investigator to Spokane in 1995 and adding a fourth investigator in 1996.

In 1990, the office had “one person in certification who took this on as an aside,” Harrison said. “We’ve come a long way.”

State investigators aren’t predicting when they might wrap up the Benson investigation.

“This case is being actively investigated,” said Rick Wilson, attorney for the state superintendent. “We have a real push on for the older cases in particular. In the last year, we’ve been closing out cases from ‘92, ‘93, ‘94, ‘95. Those have been priorities.”

At Kent, officials are now looking at Benson’s past, themselves.

“We are just in the process of investigating,” Whitney said. “We don’t yet have the information to make a decision.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Allegations A dismissal letter to Benson and other documents mention several allegations, including: Hurling a basketball at two students who were slow leaving the locker room. The ball hit a nearby teacher on the head and knocked her unconscious. Chasing a student with a disability and calling him “gimp” and “weak.” Commenting to other girls about their appearance and touching them inappropriately. Commenting during a sexual education unit about white breasts and dark breasts. Telling male students on the ninth-grade baseball team to “stare at the other team and imagine that they had just raped your sister.” Harassing two female teachers.