Lake Forest parents storm school over principal’s ‘sexting’

More corruption and cover ups in Lake County IL

Updated 11-24-2011

http://triblocal.com/lake-forest/2011/11/25/sexual-harassment-of-interns-often-unreported/

Updated 11-22-2011  L.F. Mayor upset...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-lake-forest-texting-20111122,0,7759772.story


Updated 11-20-2011Principal resigns
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-lake-forest-principal-who-sexted-resigns-20111120,0,7471909.story




Lake Forest parents storm school over principal’s ‘sexting’


BY LINDA BLASER lblaser@pioneerlocal.com November 18, 2011 9:14PM

Updated: November 19, 2011 2:10AM

LAKE FOREST — School District 67 officials held a one-hour meeting with 60 or so angry parents at the district office’s at West Campus on Friday morning following a report that Deer Path Middle School Principal John Steinert sent nearly 50 vulgar text messages and photos to a former Lake Forest College student and Lake Forest Police Department intern over several months in 2008.

Parents expressed shock and disappointment over the behavior of Steinert — who was placed on paid administrative leave Thursday — and the district’s response. The District 67 Board will meet at 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 20, at the district office at Lake Forest High School’s West Campus concerning Steinert’s future with the district.

Additional social workers were at the school Friday for staff and students and additional administrative staff assigned to handle the day-to-day activities at the school.

District 67 Superintendent Harry Griffith said he didn’t know if Steinert — a Lindenhurst father of four who earns $170,000 a year — would be terminated in executive session Sunday as “there is a process we have to follow.”

This is not the first time the District 67 School Board has dealt with the arrest by Gurnee police of Steinert, 40. The board met “two or three times at consecutive meetings” in 2009 discussing how to discipline Steinert, Griffith said.

“John Steinert was a wonderful, excellent principal. We asked ourselves, ‘Can a good man make bad mistakes?’ At the time, we didn’t now how bad the mistakes were,’” Griffith said.

Even though legal counsel informed the board that it could terminate Steinert then based on information it had, the board did not fire him.

“We felt we should give him a second chance,” Griffith said. “We weighed the evidence, and we decided to continue with his employment.”

In an internal investigation of Steinert’s action, he told Griffith he engaged in “flirtatious” texting using district-owned equipment with the woman who visited the school as part of her internship.

“I asked, ‘What was texted?’ I understood it to be flirtatious between him and this other woman,” Griffith said. “He was embarrassed, contrite.”

The board froze Steinert’s pay, took away his cellphone, required mandatory counseling and “put him on notice that if anything happened like this again we would be terminated immediately,” Griffith said.

Griffith contends the board “made the best decision we could at the time” based on the evidence it had. Griffith added that “while off-duty Mr. Steinert sent a woman he knew inappropriate text messages. It did not involve a minor, a school district employee or a student.”

The police report the district received in February 2009 had been heavily blacked out, as is customary in a case before it goes to trial, so that it did not contain sexually explicit material. Griffith said,

“I wished I’d have known we could later on get the complete information,” he added. “It was naive on my part, not having been through this before, that I could obtain the complete report when the case was resolved.”

The unidentified woman with whom Steinert harassed with sexually explicit texts lived in Gurnee at the time. She made her report to Gurnee police in January 2009.

Griffith said he was made aware of the allegations, but not the contents of Steinert’s texts, by Gurnee police. Griffith escorted Gurnee police to Steinert’s office in January 2009, where they confiscated the district phone Steinert used to access his texts and returned it to the district.

Steinert pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment through electronic communications in May 2009.

Steinert is responsible for grades 5-8 at Deer Path, which serves all of Lake Forest. He joined the district in 2006 as an assistant principal. He was promoted to principal one year later.
 
Please read complete article at link  below:
 
http://newssun.suntimes.com/8926091-417/lake-forest-parents-storm-school-over-principals-sexting.html
 
Editor's note: This appears like a cover up. The intern was not just an ordinary student...She was an intern with the Lake Forest Police Dept.   Jan. 2009 complaint to present? This sounds like another Lake County IL corrupt cover up similar to the murder of Kyle Atnonacci at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, Probate Sharks.com