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District officials are refusing to release a 2020 report detailing an investigation into a former Madison East High School educator.
David Kruchten allegedly placed hidden cameras in the hotel bathrooms of students he was chaperoning on school trips. Students found these cameras concealed in smoke detectors, alarm clocks and air fresheners while at a conference in Minneapolis in December 2019. Kruchten was arrested in January 2020 and faces state and federal charges for attempting to produce child pornography.
Promising in February 2020 to review “every detail” of the incident, then-superintendent Jane Belmore told parents in an email that a private attorney had been hired to conduct an independent, internal review of the incident. That report was completed in June 2020, but the school district has turned down requests for the full report from parents and the media. The district also confirmed to Isthmus that the full report has not been provided to school board members, either.
Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, asks, “Why should this investigation be secret?
“I suspect they want it secret because there is evidence of the district's own culpability and negligence on how this episode played out,” says Lueders, who is also editor of The Progressive. “This shouldn’t be allowed and people should be outraged.”
Lueders provided Isthmus with recent denial letters for open records requests for the full report submitted by the Wisconsin State Journal, and by a parent with a child who was on the school trip when the cameras were found. The letters cite “attorney-client privilege” as justification for denying access to the report.
“It basically provides the district an avenue to keep something secret when they really don't want it to see the light of day. All they have to do is hire a lawyer to do the investigation, and then claim that the lawyer’s work is protected by attorney-client privilege,” says Lueders. “[The district] could never get away with denying a public records request if the district had done its own investigation.”
Lueders says the district’s actions appear legal but are nevertheless troubling.
“This is the status quo now: If you're crooked, and you have something to hide, what you should do is hire an attorney to do an investigation so you can cover it up,” says Lueders. “It also bothers me that hiring an attorney — who's getting $300 an hour — is the most expensive way to conduct an investigation. Now it appears it’s also a way for [the school district] to avoid public scrutiny.”
The district also cited the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) as a reason to deny the full report of investigation to the media and parents. Lueders calls that “wrong.”
“They can redact the names and they can provide at least some information about it. That’s routine with sensitive public records,” says Lueders. “But in addition to coming up with that phony baloney reason, [the district] is asserting attorney-client privilege to hide the whole investigation.”
District spokesperson Tim LeMonds, via email, tells Isthmus the district “adheres to a belief the public has a right to know the inner-workings of governmental entities.” But he says that “adherence should not be done at the detriment of our students, families, and school communities.”
“It is our priority to continue to protect student confidentiality, including not disclosing investigative reports about children protected by attorney-client privilege for the purpose of a news story,” writes LeMonds. “Waiving this privilege for the purpose of your story, on a topic highly emotional and sensitive with our East students and the East community, would be irresponsible and create a precedent we believe potentially harmful to our students and our school district in the future.”
Isthmus spoke to several parents of the East students who were on the Minneapolis trip that Kruchten chaparoned; all asked to remain anonymous to protect their children's privacy.
“When all this first came out, parents were hungry for information. We wanted to know what happened so it could never happen again,” says one parent. “One thing [the district] tried to do was assure us all that they were going to get to the bottom of this. They were able to keep a lot of parents and students quiet for a time because there was that belief.”
This parent says the district’s subsequent actions have only increased suspicions that school officials never intended to be transparent.
Even though the report was completed in June, it took the district until Oct. 5 to email a two-page summary of the investigation to parents. The investigation found, according to the summary, that Kruchten violated district policy by using his personal cell phone to communicate with students and parents. Other than that, the summary concluded that “there was no failure on the part of district staff” and that statutory requirements for mandatory reporting of child abuse were met.
Another East parent says the summary “isn’t enough.”
“The district hasn’t met basic expectations and it makes you think, why? All parents want is information and that request has been met with silence,” says the parent. “We know they didn’t interview the kids. We know they didn’t interview parents who heard about the cameras while the kids were still on the trip. We don’t know who they interviewed. The information that was provided tells us nothing.”
This parent says the families impacted by Kruchten’s alleged actions are fed up, especially with the district claiming it would be “potentially harmful” to students if it releases the full report of its investigation. According to a Capital Times report, parents testified at an Oct. 26 school board meeting that the two-page summary of the investigation was released only after they contacted the district multiple times and that they did not find it helpful.
“If the district were concerned about student privacy, parents wouldn’t have to testify at public meetings because every other effort to get answers has failed,” says the parent. “The students involved in this incident are the victims and they did everything right, even when it meant putting themselves out there to be judged by their peers.”
A third East parent who spoke to Isthmus says efforts to get school board members to pressure district officials to release more information have not been successful.
“The board is worthless. They're just totally worthless. I don't even know why we have a school board,” says the parent. “The only message [parents] are receiving is that the district considers this matter closed. They just want us to forget about this.”
Isthmus emailed all seven members of the school board asking if the district had provided the full report of its investigation and if not, whether they had requested it. Not one responded to Isthmus’ inquiry.
In a follow-up email with LeMonds, the district spokesperson, confirmed that board members also have not been given access to the full report.
“How can the board justify its existence?” asks another East parent. “They need to explain this to voters.”
Lueders says the district seems to be arguing that not even the school board — the elected body responsible for overseeing school governance — has the right to know how district employees responded when hidden cameras were found in the hotel rooms of students.
“If they give it to the school board, they can't control the release of information any more. School board members can't be told 'You can see it, but you can't share it.' Some of them might rebel against that and share it and then the district is screwed,” says Lueders. “If the goal is secrecy, sharing it with the school board is a problem. The district is actively engaging in a cover-up, which I presume is to protect themselves from revelations of wrongdoing.”
Isthmus reported in February on another school district incident involving hidden cameras; in that case, Superintendent Carlton Jenkins acknowledged that district officials violated their own policy in 2019 by installing hidden cameras inside East High School in a failed attempt to catch a custodian sleeping while on the clock. Jenkins promised parents an independent review of the incident was being launched to root out any potential wrongdoing by district staff. Just like the investigation into events surrounding Kruchten, a private law firm was hired to conduct the internal investigation.
“I don’t see anything stopping the district from again invoking attorney-client privilege and keeping details of this new investigation secret,” says Lueders. “It may not be a great idea for me to be calling public attention to this. It might give people ideas about how they can get away with more crap. But I am representing the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council and the public should know about this.”
