The last time Unit 5 teacher Andrew “Drew” Miller was accused of inappropriate conduct with a student, he had some powerful allies in his corner: his teachers’ union.
The union mounted a vigorous defense on Miller’s behalf amid allegations of grooming-type behavior at a cheerleading camp while Miller was a coach at University High School. He was also a tenured teacher at Chiddix Junior High.
The teachers’ union’s unsuccessful attempts to dissuade Unit 5 from even issuing a warning in 2019 have not been previously reported. It’s revealed in dozens of emails and other documents obtained by WGLT through record requests.
The union repeatedly asserted Miller’s innocence, saying there was “no evidence to substantiate any discipline.” Miller’s representative said he was working with Miller to apply the terms of the warning, called a Notice to Remedy, and that he had “absolutely no intention of disobeying a reasonable directive.”
But this would not be the last time Miller, now 41, was accused of inappropriate conduct with a student. Seven years later, Miller is in jail charged with 56 counts of grooming, indecent solicitation and possession of child sexual materials involving multiple victims in what prosecutors say is a pattern of behavior spanning nearly 15 years.
Unit 5 has faced strong criticism for not doing more to protect its students by getting rid of Miller and another Chiddix teacher, Brandon Knapp, who is also jailed awaiting trial on grooming charges. Both teachers had red flags well before they were arrested, and Miller’s 2019 episode uncovers just how hard it is to discipline and fire teachers in Illinois’ public school districts.
The Illinois School Code, combined with a powerful teachers' union, protects teachers from retaliatory action by establishing a lengthy, multilayered path to termination.
According to the statute, when an Illinois public school district moves to fire a K-12 teacher with more than three consecutive years of service, a hearing officer is appointed by the Illinois State Board of Education to conduct an administrative process involving an investigation, the presentation of evidence, questioning of witnesses and cross-examination. If there’s a determination that dismissal is warranted, the teacher can appeal.
A more expedient tool is a provision of the school code which suspends a teacher’s license pending the outcome of any criminal charges.
“That gives the school district the ability to put them on [unpaid] leave because they can’t perform the functions of their job,” said Curt Richardson, the attorney for Unit 5. “That is helpful. However, that’s only after charges are filed.”
A school can also place a teacher on paid leave amid allegations of misconduct while performing an internal investigation, but there’s a high bar to meet when seeking termination.
“Under the law, if the employee is still being paid, they’re not suffering any injury,” said Steven Glink, a Chicago-area attorney who specializes in employee discipline matters in education across Illinois. “They don’t have a legal right to teach; they have a legal right to the salary until they’re determined to be guilty or responsible.”
Miller, a seventh-grade science and language arts teacher and track coach at Chiddix, is still employed by Unit 5 on unpaid leave. Knapp has resigned.
Harder to document a pattern?
Those who want to change laws to make it easier to fire a teacher will run into a powerful lobby in Springfield: the teachers' union.
A bill signed into law on July 24 puts up yet another roadblock, making it possible for teachers to get even a Notice to Remedy dismissed through binding arbitration.
The Illinois Education Association [IEA], the state’s largest labor union representing teachers which has a Unit 5 branch called UFEA, lobbied for the new law. State Rep. Sharon Chung and state Sen. Dave Koehler, Democrats representing Bloomington-Normal, in Springfield both voted for it.
“Prior to changes made legislatively this year, the Notice to Remedy process was not considered disciplinary and afforded employees no due process rights,” said Ben Matthews, the Bloomington-Normal based director of IEA’s UniServ program connecting educators with union representatives.
Matthews noted a Notice to Remedy is “not officially ‘discipline’ in the sense that it is a warning based on allegations rather than final action based on findings of fact.
“Notices were often overly broad and then led to actions based not on specific conduct but on ‘violations’ of overly broad warnings or directives. Employers were not required to give the teacher an opportunity to respond to the findings prior to a final vote, and there was no recourse if there were disagreements because there was no due process,” Matthews said in an email.
In a statement, Koehler said the Notice to Remedy is "intended to ensure teachers have an opportunity to respond to allegations before a school board takes action. It is not designed to shield misconduct or make it easier for someone to avoid consequences. It simply ensures employees have an opportunity to respond before disciplinary decisions are made."
But Unit 5 argued the new rule makes it harder for schools to document a pattern of behavior and build an argument for formal disciplinary action and eventual termination.
Glink said the law still provides a mechanism for schools to document legitimate misconduct.
“No system is perfect,” he said, “but it at least enables both parties to take their bite at the apple, so to speak.”
Chung did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
What happened in North Utica?
Unit 5 leveraged the Notice to Remedy as a tool in 2019, when the district issued one to Miller following the alleged incident in LaSalle County during a sanctioned trip on behalf of University High School. Miller allegedly had an inappropriate conversation of a sexual nature with a high school athlete, alone in a cabin late at night.
“Knowing that he was an employee of ours, information was shared through U-High,” said Richardson, Unit 5’s in-house attorney since 2011. “We opened our own investigation and cooperated with Normal Police Department through our reciprocal reporting agreement.”
A Memorandum of Understanding, established in 2012 as an intergovernmental agreement between public entities in McLean and Woodford Counties, describes expectations around information sharing between 14 school districts, including Unit 5 and Bloomington’s District 87, and law enforcement in cases involving students and staff. WGLT obtained a copy of the agreement through a public records request.
In this instance, Normal Police was notified by a DCFS investigator on Sept. 5, 2019, according to an NPD incident report obtained by WGLT, that a report had come to the child welfare agency on the advice of Illinois State University Police Chief Aaron Woodruff [whose jurisdiction includes University High School]. The report said a forensic interview was scheduled through the Children's Advocacy Center in McLean County.
In an interview with NPD, the person who contacted DCFS told a detective "rumors had been circulating this week about Miller having an inappropriate conversation with [name redacted]. He advised that he spoke with [name redacted] about this conversation and learned that Miller had asked him questions related to his virginity, getting a hand-job, a blow-job and being 'secure in his manhood.'"
An NPD detective contacted ISU's Title IX investigator, DCFS and Richardson at Unit 5, the incident report said, to inform them the case was being transferred it to North Utica, where the alleged incident took place.
“It was up to LaSalle County to investigate, and then also whether or not to file any charges,” said Richardson, “but we did have access to some of the police reports.”
According to the Notice to Remedy issued to Miller during a Unit 5 board meeting in 2020, the investigation determined Miller had exhibited “inappropriate and unprofessional acts as a teacher,” characterized by an “inappropriate conversation of a sexual nature with a high school athlete… including asking him about his virginity, his sexual activity and genitalia.”
The district characterized this as “inappropriate grooming-type behavior given the time and location of the conversation alone in a cabin late at night.”
Teachers' union mounts defense
Emails to Unit 5 obtained by WGLT through a Freedom of Information Act request show the teachers' union, namely Matthews, pushed back hard against issuing the Notice to Miller at all and squabbled over its language, offering a materially different version of what happened.
In several instances, Matthews implied or directly stated that Miller had been targeted and unfairly treated by Unit 5, saying he would be “happy to go toe-to-toe” with Jay Greening, an outside attorney hired to represent the district.
“I actually kind of enjoy it,” Matthews said, “and will not back down in my advocacy for Drew, but [Greening’s] approach is only costing the district unnecessary dollars.”
Unit 5 went ahead anyway, adopting only a few of the union’s specific recommendations.
Invoices acquired through a public records request show the district paid more than $15,600 in legal fees above and beyond union contract negotiations between August 2019 and July 2020. It is not clear what portion of that was for Miller specifically [line items were redacted in the documents received by WGLT].
In an Aug. 8, 2020, email to Roger Baldwin, who was Unit 5 director of human resources at the time, Matthews continued to object to statements within the Notice to Remedy “which are not true and not consistent with the facts as determined by much more thorough investigations.
“Drew did not persist in pursuing the conversation. In fact, the student — who was on the cheer team and at cheer camp — approached Drew and the assistant coach and then later approached Drew again that evening to follow-up about having a conversation after the student had expressed feelings of sadness and depression during a team activity. As a result, Drew did have a conversation with the student, and parts of the conversation were personal,” Matthews wrote in the email.
He added, “According to the student’s own testimony, law enforcement and DCFS, Drew did not sexualize the student or engage in grooming-type behavior.”
According to Unit 5 and North Utica Police Chief James Mandujano, a DCFS investigation at first concluded an indicated finding of “sexual exploitation,” a classification the child welfare agency defines as “sexual use of a child for sexual arousal, gratification, advantage or profit.” An “indicated” finding means DCFS found credible evidence of the alleged abuse.
In a message to WGLT last week, Matthews said the finding was overturned and expunged during Miller’s appeal process. DCFS would not confirm this, saying “all administrative hearings are confidential. This includes the parties involved, allegations, reports and findings.”
Unit 5 confirmed knowledge of the indicated finding being overturned.
In an Aug. 11, 2020, email to Baldwin obtained by WGLT, Matthews characterized the space between his version of events and the district’s a “factual disagreement.”
“Of course, the disagreement is not between me and the Board,” he wrote. “The disagreement is between the facts as determined by other entities, namely DCFS, after investigations and procedures where all relevant witnesses were heard from — and subject to cross-examination. The district’s investigation was not nearly as thorough, so it’s likely there [are] differences. I also know which set of facts I find more reliable.”
Speaking last week to WGLT, Richardson said school districts are restricted from participating in DCFS proceedings, and he admitted information sharing between the two bodies is narrow, but he feels confident in Unit 5’s investigation.
“Maybe some of the discrepancy between what the union thought had happened then and what we thought had happened was because we had some more information that they didn’t have,” said Richardson, again pointing to the district’s reciprocal reporting agreement with local law enforcement and University High School [through its affiliation with Illinois State University].
At the Aug. 12, 2020, school board meeting, Matthews made one more attempt to dissuade Unit 5 from moving ahead.
“Drew was provided a full, fair investigation which considered all of the facts by every other entity investigating these allegations. In fact, every other entity investigating this matter has concluded Drew did not engage in misconduct,” Matthews said.
That's not entirely true. It's common for police and prosecutors to be unable to file charges or to drop charges because of uncooperative or unavailable victims or witnesses or a lack of evidence, even in cases it's believed a crime occurred.
In this instance, North Utica Police investigated the 2019 incident at the Grand Bear Lodge hotel as a disorderly conduct case, and the LaSalle County state’s attorney ultimately declined to charge Miller.
In a phone call with WGLT, North Utica Chief of Police Mandujano said to move forward with a case, police and prosecutors need cooperation from victims, which can involve multiple interviews and court hearings in a yearslong legal process. When the alleged victim is a minor, they also need cooperation from the parents. If the parents don’t want to proceed, he said, the minor child effectively does not have a say.
Mandujano said NUPD’s investigation led them to believe Miller engaged in inappropriate conversation, adding the juvenile victim’s story did not change from when the case was passed to them from Normal Police to when they closed the case in September 2019.
The DCFS appeals process did not conclude until July 2020, according to Matthews.
“In this case, despite [the DCFS indicated finding] being overturned, despite the law enforcement and state’s attorney in LaSalle County not prosecuting, we felt that we had enough information based on our own investigation to move forward with a Notice to Remedy,” Richardson said.
‘Not that bad’
An expert on sexual violence said lack of cooperation from victims and families in a criminal case would not be unusual.
“It can be daunting,” said NaStasha Powers, assistant director of YWCA Stepping Stones in Bloomington. Powers has studied experiences of sexual assault survivors who report to law enforcement and is a Ph.D. student in criminal justice studies at Illinois State University.
“Think about a person being a victim of sexual assault, and then the case going for two to three years,” Powers said. “It’s not just the criminal justice system they’re navigating. It’s internally. It could be the school system. It could be work. Maybe their offender was a neighbor. All of those different things that they’re trying to navigate while still going through the criminal justice system. It’s hard. It’s heavy.”
Powers said victims may decline to participate in the criminal legal process as an act of self-preservation, and that it’s not uncommon for victims to minimize what they’ve experienced as a survival tactic, convincing themselves what they experienced was “not that bad.”
False allegations of sexual assault and abuse among children are rare [2-10% of all reports], according to RAINN, an anti-sexual violence organization. RAINN also says up to half of children will recant after making an initial allegation.
Glink, the Chicago-area education attorney, said he did not know of any statistics noting how often DCFS indicated findings are overturned, but that his last few cases are among them.
“You don’t get your appeal hearing with witnesses and cross-examination and things like that until after you’re indicated,” he said. “Many times, the legal process, especially cross-examination, reveals deficiencies in the case… and sometimes other witnesses come forward that weren’t even interviewed by DCFS and that can change the outcome.”
A maneuver to fire Miller?
The teachers' union made another argument against issuing Miller a Notice to Remedy: that Unit 5 shouldn’t punish one of its employees for alleged conduct which took place outside its jurisdiction. Remedial directives included provisions outside the workplace which Matthews said at the time were impossible to follow.
"I am concerned this Notice to Remedy is an effort to either push Drew to resign or provide the district with the ability to ‘catch him’ on a technicality and dismiss him as a result,” Matthews said in an Aug. 12, 2020, email to the district.
In a statement to WGLT last week, Matthews said his “role, job and legal obligation is to represent our members, be their advocate and ensure they get all of the rights to which they are entitled.”
He pointed to his statement to the school board in 2020 as his comment on the matter.
“I am asking you to weigh his lengthy work record and excellent reputation in the district,” the statement said, “the findings of every other entity that has engaged in much more thorough investigations which all determined Drew did not engage in any misconduct, and the fact that Drew has received and responded to every question posed to him in order to defend his reputation and demonstrate his innocence.”
In an interview with WGLT last week, Richardson said the district “took action where the evidence was. The evidence supported a Notice to Remedy.”
Richardson also disagreed that misconduct outside the district should not lead to disciplinary action.
“There’s case law which establishes that we have the right to be able to act as an employer based on misconduct that occurs outside to the school environment, especially criminal conduct,” he said. “Say somebody did abuse a child outside of their school. That obviously impacts their ability to be ability to remain being around children.”
But he didn’t reject the notion that Unit 5 considered moving to fire Miller.
“We absolutely did think about that and how we would pursue that,” Richardson said. “Ultimately there were two people in the room back then, so we would have had to have cooperation and evidence in order to proceed. Our next best option was to proceed with the Notice to Remedy.”
Miller has pleaded not guilty on all charges. His next court date is 2:30 p.m. Aug. 6 in Judge William Yoder's courtroom.
