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EDUCATION

Middle school employee out after investigation into letters to students

The superintendent asked families to speak with their children about appropriate interactions between students and staff members

North Kingstown High SchoolMARK STOCKWELL FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — An investigation has determined that an employee at the Wickford Middle School wrote letters to students that were “not acceptable” and will not be returning to the school, the North Kingstown superintendent said Thursday.

The employee, who is not a teacher, had been placed on administrative leave during the investigation for writing letters to students “with a tone and language not acceptable between a staff member and a student,” Superintendent Kenneth A. Duva said in a letter emailed to the school community. The employee was not named.

The superintendent did not specify what was in the letters or how they came to the attention of the administration, or the state authorities who the school notified about the incident. He asked families of students at the middle school to speak with their children about appropriate interactions between students and staff members.

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The superintendent’s announcement included a link to a form for parents or guardians to contact the school to report any inappropriate interactions, as well as a link to the School Department’s “Stay Safe” website for resources, information, and reporting incidents of bullying, discrimination, and harassment.

Duva did not respond to the Globe’s requests for comment Thursday afternoon.

Lawyer Timothy J. Conlon, who represents several current and former North Kingstown students in complaints about teachers behaving inappropriately, said Duva’s announcement was “a marked, dramatic, and significant improvement” in how the school department was handling complaints.

Conlon said multiple families had reported letters or notes that a male staff member at the middle school had sent to female students, “and the tenor of the letters is outside what’s appropriate.”

Duva’s letter to the school community, which took care to direct families to resources on how to talk to their children and report any incidents, was “an excellent example of how you can and should alert parents,” Conlon said.

“You can’t protect kids when you ignore things that are inappropriate,” he said.

It wasn’t lost on people in the community that the school department’s reaction was “radically different” than how it had handled complaints about its celebrated high school basketball coach just a few years ago, Conlon said.

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Aaron Thomas had been conducting “naked fat tests” on teen male athletes for more than 20 years, with no interference. While school administrators were first alerted in 2017, Thomas wasn’t terminated until early 2021 after more complaints surfaced. Thomas instead quietly resigned and got another job at a private Catholic school in a nearby community, which later told the media that North Kingstown school officials didn’t mention the allegations.

The community at large didn’t know anything until late October 2021, when the explosive allegations became public.

Thomas is awaiting trial next year on felony charges of second-degree sexual assault and second-degree child abuse. He is also facing a civil lawsuit brought by several former athletes.

Thomas’ case rocked the administration, some of whom soon resigned or retired, and also launched multiple investigations into the school department to determine the extent of the allegations — and why school officials missed what former athletes called “an open secret” of alleged abuse.

The independent investigations for the school department and the town all found that school officials had failed to keep students safe and recommended training and sexual harassment reporting.

The investigations also exposed two other teachers accused of harassing students:

Michael Thibodeau, a music teacher at Davisville Middle School and former track coach, “engaged in humiliating, degrading and belittling conduct in front of other students to the point where it caused significant emotional harm to a 13-year-old student,” according to an investigator’s report. Some middle school boys kept a “pedo database” to document the teacher’s behavior with girls. Thibodeau resigned at the end of the school year in 2023.

Another investigator found the way that high school teacher Jason Shabo assisted female students in the weight room “resulted in unwelcome physical contact.” Shabo was allowed to continue teaching, but could no longer coach or supervise students in the weight room; he also had to undergo training in “personal boundaries.”

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The US attorney’s office opened a civil rights investigation into the school district in December 2021 and found that the problems with Thomas were endemic of broader failures in the school district to implement the reporting policies and procedures.

In January 2024, the US attorney’s office said the school department’s new leadership had taken steps to ensure that sexual harassment complaints are investigated appropriately and addressed previous failures.


Amanda Milkovits can be reached at amanda.milkovits@globe.com. Follow her @AmandaMilkovits.