Schools in Wisconsin Charge Big Money for Teacher Misconduct Records

Across Wisconsin, public school districts sought thousands of dollars to provide records on employee investigations into sexual misconduct, harassment and inappropriate relationships with students. Some district officials claimed they could not provide the records at all or they did not have any to release. 

To examine the breadth of sexual misconduct and grooming by teachers in Wisconsin, the Cap Times set out to gather internal records of these complaints from the state’s 20 largest school districts. 

The ensuing journey — a year of negotiating with records clerks, lawyers and district administrators — underscores just how little schools are tracking complaints and investigations of teacher sexual misconduct and how that practice keeps the public in the dark. 

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Some school districts lack organized record-keeping on educator sexual misconduct and are not keeping data on how often the district is investigating this behavior.  

No statewide tracking of sexual misconduct and grooming by teachers exists in Wisconsin, including at the state Department of Public Instruction, which oversees educator licenses. 

A federal study estimates one in 10 students across the country experiences these behaviors during their K-12 schooling, and a Cap Times investigation uncovered over 200 Wisconsin teacher license investigations into alleged educator sexual misconduct and grooming from 2018 to 2023. 

Under state open records laws, the Cap Times asked the state’s 20 largest districts by enrollment to release copies of any resignation agreements, reprimands, investigation reports or other sexual misconduct complaint records from the last eight years. 

District records eventually obtained by the Cap Times showed: 

• A fellow educator saw a Racine teacher kissing a high school student. District administrators let the teacher resign and provided him with a neutral letter of reference.
• Stevens Point administrators directed a teacher to stop being alone with students after they found he violated the district’s sexual harassment policy. Administrators let him keep teaching, though. 
• Colleagues saw a Sheboygan special education aide kiss a fifth grader on the lips. However, school investigators determined the conduct was “motherly.”

The Racine Unified School District initially denied part of the Cap Times’ request for complaint and investigation records of teacher sexual misconduct, saying a search would be too burdensome, while the Stevens Point Area School District wanted $1,500 to look for its own public records. 

The Sheboygan Area School District wanted over $17,000 for its search — and that wasn’t the biggest cost estimate. The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District wanted $40,000, and the School District of Janesville wanted $245,000. 

In each of these cases, school officials argued their teacher sexual misconduct records were difficult to find. The records were scattered throughout individual personnel files or existed only in paper form, or administrators had not organized the records by types of misconduct. 

The Janesville school district arrived at its $245,000 estimate by assuming it would take an employee, earning $35.54 per hour, about 6,900 hours to search for all the relevant records. That’s equivalent to a full-time worker devoting nearly three and a half years to that task alone. 

Even after school districts agreed to release records, for some, the response showed lax recordkeeping or noncompliance with state open records laws. Officials failed to find and turn over some teacher sexual misconduct records until the Cap Times asked for educators’ files by name. 

Advocates for increasing government transparency and preventing teacher sexual misconduct raised alarm about the response by Wisconsin’s largest school districts. 

Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, was surprised and disturbed to learn disciplinary actions against teachers aren’t routinely and uniformly tracked.  

“Teachers should definitely be among the group of professionals whose conduct is under scrutiny,” said Lueders, whose nonpartisan council advocates for public access to government meetings and records statewide. “They are in a position to do tremendous damage to young people.” 

There is a high public interest in understanding how school administrators are investigating and disciplining educators for misconduct, said Christa Westerberg, an open government attorney with Pines Bach who also serves on the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council. 

“We’re not just looking at the conduct of the employee whose behavior is being questioned, but how the governmental body responds to that,” she said. “Whether it's doing a sufficient investigation, handling the situation appropriately and fulfilling its duties, in this case, to protect students who are enrolled in public schools.” 

Schools that are not reviewing their investigations into educator sexual misconduct and tracking these complaints are missing opportunities to see what officials need to address or change, said Shiwali Patel, an attorney with the National Women’s Law Center who focuses on sexual harassment in schools.  

“I think it shows how sexual misconduct is like an afterthought. It’s not about being proactive in handling and responding,” she said. “It's more seen as dealing with it afterwards.” 

‘A colossal failure’  

The Janesville school district, about an hour southeast of Madison, is the state’s ninth largest public school district with an enrollment of 9,400 students last school year.  

Janesville district administrators by far sought the highest payment of any of the 20 school districts from which the Cap Times requested sexual misconduct records, quoting the newsroom more than $245,000. 

After a Cap Times reporter spoke on the phone with Janesville Assistant Superintendent Scott Garner, the cost disappeared. The newsroom said it was seeking personnel investigation records and resignation agreements, particularly for educators referred to the state educator licensing agency. The district dropped the cost and released its investigation files for free.  

Jacob Konrath, the superintendent of the Sheboygan Area School District, had a similar response.  

The district originally quoted the Cap Times $17,550 to search for records. The newsroom narrowed the scope of its requests to educators who were referred to the state licensing agency and investigations conducted under federal civil rights law. The district ultimately released the records for nine educators for free.  

The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District claimed it would need to hand inspect each of the district’s 3,500 personnel files, according to the district’s attorney, Doug Witte. 

To do so would cost $40,443. Instead, the Cap Times narrowed its request to a single known complaint of educator sexual misconduct, which the district took over a month to provide. The record outlined a 2022 allegation against an unnamed substitute teacher who a student reported was “massaging 2 students’ necks and adjusting bra straps.” 

“Counselor and dean did extensive investigating and found all allegations to be false,” according to the district record. But there is no documentation of what the investigation entailed, such as whether any other witnesses were interviewed. 

Then there were districts — Racine and Waukesha — where officials said they could not provide records at all. 

“The district lacks the resources necessary to review the extremely large volume of records that would be generated,” Keri Hanstedt, deputy chief of human resources for the Racine Unified School District, wrote in a letter to the Cap Times. 

When the Cap Times spoke with Handstedt about the request, she said a lot of the personnel files are on paper and the district does not track its misconduct investigations by type of infraction.  

“It's going to require us to go back and start looking through our files, which is kind of tedious,” she said.  

Waukesha Superintendent James Sebert said it would take “hundreds of hours to review each personnel file” and be “overly burdensome.” 

The high costs districts quoted raise concerns about access to this information, open government advocates said.   

“It's very easy for them to just kind of pick numbers that sound nice and are very large, and then those numbers tend to have a very strong deterrent effect,” said Tom Kamenick, founder of the Wisconsin Transparency Project, which advocates for access to public records.  

Lueders questioned whether Janesville and other districts were being truthful about the estimated cost of their searches. He also raised concerns about districts like Racine and Waukesha claiming they could not fulfill the request.  

If administrators actually need to charge tens of thousands of dollars or can’t produce sexual misconduct records, that points to an issue with their internal recordkeeping, he said.  

“That is something that should make the parents in these districts hopping mad,” Lueders said. “It means there has been a colossal failure on the part of these administrators. They are failing in their obligation to protect the kids in their care.” 

Kamenick said there is little incentive for school districts and other government entities to organize their records in an easily searchable way because they can charge large costs. 

“They’re almost better off being sloppy and disorganized,” he said. 

In every instance where districts sought more than a few hundred dollars, the Cap Times did not pay. Rather, the newsroom significantly narrowed the scope of its requests to a few educators whose conduct generated media coverage or resulted in their resignation or termination.  

This limited the number of records the newsroom obtained and was able to review, making it impossible to determine the actual prevalence of reported educator sexual misconduct. 

Missing records 

For some districts, records were missing after officials claimed they’d provided all their documentation of employee investigations or they said had no files at all.  

Because the Madison Metropolitan School District wanted over $4,500 to search for records, the Cap Times specifically asked for records related to three sexual assaults by staff at Kennedy Elementary from the 2021-22 school year. The district self-reported these incidents to the federal government during an education data collection survey. 

The newsroom filed that request in April. In August, the district said it had no records affiliated with the three incidents and closed the request.  

The Madison Metropolitan School District was also the only district out of the 20 the Cap Times sought records from that refused to provide the name of the employee responding to the request, opting for an anonymous email address instead.  

“We choose to limit the means by which people are able to contact them to only the email address,” said Ian Folger, district spokesperson.  

Billie-Jo Grant, the CEO of McGrath Training Solutions, which provides instruction on educator misconduct prevention, said maintaining proper documentation is crucial because sexual misconduct thrives in secrecy.  

“That’s really important to have the investigation and document that this person violated these policies,” she said. 

School districts should be tracking who they have investigated for sexual harassment or violence toward students from a prevention standpoint, Patel said.  

“Tracking can also help the school determine if they need to implement more trainings, if they need to implement certain protocols to prevent this from happening,” she said. 

Officials at the Elmbrook School District near Milwaukee quoted the Cap Times $160 to search for employee sexual misconduct investigation records from 2017 to 2025, and the newsroom paid.  

But then the district said it had no records at all: no investigation reports, no reprimands, no resignation letters. 

“This is not a denial of your request, rather no public records exist,” Christy Westfall, the district’s executive assistant to the superintendent, wrote in an email.  

But there were three former employees accused of sexual misconduct whose records fell within the scope of the Cap Times’ request. Only when the Cap Times asked for those files by name did the district hand them all over in August, over two months after officials originally claimed to have no records. 

Elmbrook Superintendent Mark Hansen said the district didn’t originally find the records related to those educators because one was a substitute teacher employed by an outside agency and another teacher’s conduct was not directed toward students.  

Hansen didn’t provide an explanation as to why the third educator’s file was not originally provided.  

Similar situations happened with the Janesville and Wausau school districts. After the districts claimed to have provided all relevant records, the Cap Times had to specifically ask for educators by name who were investigated but whose records were not provided.  

In Janesville, officials withheld the investigation file for a teacher who was accused of grooming a student while she was in high school and then starting a sexual relationship with her immediately after she graduated.  

Once the Cap Times obtained the documents, they showed the district entered into an agreement with the teacher in 2021 where officials provided him a letter of reference and agreed to close the investigation in exchange for his resignation. The agreement also included a confidentiality clause, prohibiting district administrators or the teacher from disclosing its existence, unless required to by law.  

Westerberg, the attorney, said it’s concerning when records are not provided because many people seeking information from government bodies won’t know if documents are missing that should have been released.