Teacher misconduct reports are rising, but shortage of investigators causes backlog
A hallway at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in South Salt Lake is pictured on Tuesday, March 12, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
Misconduct complaints against educators in Utah public schools have been on the rise during the first months of 2025, representatives of the Utah State Board of Education told legislators on Wednesday. But, requests for funding to hire more attorneys to review the cases have failed since 2023.
The Utah Professional Practices Advisory Commission (UPPAC), a panel that reviews and investigates complaints on educators to determine whether they get to keep their licenses, usually takes about 11 months until making a final decision.
There are various reasons why a case may take a long time, Ben Rasmussen, executive secretary of UPPAC told the Education Interim Committee — it may be the time it takes to investigate it or reach an agreement with the educator's attorneys. The commission's staff capacity can also delay the process, and sometimes, whenever there are criminal charges involved, the panel waits for courts' decisions before taking disciplinary action.
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Since Rasmussen started his role in 2015, the number of cases his office investigates has almost tripled, going from 63 to 173 in 2024. This year alone, the panel has already received 93 complaints.
'Leading up to the last couple of years, it was typical that UPPAC would review maybe 10 to 15 cases on a monthly basis,' Rasmussen said. 'Given changes in board rules that have increased requirements for (schools') reports and given increases in hotline complaints, you can see that it's not uncommon for us to be reviewing closer to 50 cases a month now.'
During the discussion of the delays, committee chair Rep. Candice Pierucci, R-Herriman, said she was already planning to submit a funding request to help clear out the backlog.
Since 2015, the most frequent cases centered around 'boundary violations,' accounting for 222 allegations. That's followed by 'violence and discipline' with 150 cases, and 'miscellaneous ethical violations' with 118.
'The trend that I've seen increasing the most is getting cases in the 'violence and discipline category,' which is teachers that are generally getting hands on, to some extent, in their discipline of students or losing temper with students,' Rasmussen said.
There were also 75 alleged sexual misconduct cases, 48 pornography allegations and 29 investigations of sexual harassment since 2015. Those were the ones that prompted lawmakers to study how schools address issues of child abuse and misconduct during this year's interim.
According to the description in the committee's study list, legislators intend to review local and state discipline procedures, the process for background checks, and seek solutions to the cases backlog accumulated at UPPAC.
Additionally, now that HB497, a bill the Legislature passed this year, is effective, the state requires the commission to create a system to address complaints 'in a timely and expedient manner.'
That includes changing the way the commission prioritizes cases to ensure the safety of students. However, for the most serious violations, schools usually terminate educators before the case is referred to UPPAC.
'Most cases where it's like a sexual misconduct case or a serious student danger issue, these are cases where the (school) has removed the teacher from the classroom, and so that's usually not a priority,' Rasmussen said. 'But if that kind of case were still in the classroom, we would certainly prioritize that.'
At the same time, while acknowledging the importance of kids' safety, lawmakers who are also educators questioned whether the process did enough to protect teachers who are later found innocent.
'Something that somebody has brought up to me more than one time is that they felt like it was very lopsided and that they didn't really have a voice in the process, and they felt that all of the questioning was very one-sided,' Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, said.
Riebe also described the action of flagging licenses for potential misconduct in the state's credential database while an investigation is underway as 'really punitive.'
'It's kind of shocking that you'd be guilty the minute somebody brought you up on an accusation,' she said.
Pierucci pushed back on that, arguing that whenever there's a serious allegation, especially of sexual abuse, the teacher should not be in the classroom anymore.
'I want to be really careful saying this isn't everyone, but there are some people who are dealing and interacting with their children that should not be there,' she said.
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