Gilroy
– Gilroy High School Principal James Maxwell and Assistant
Principal Mary Ann Boylan will likely face a complaint of
misconduct at the state level after a board decision and a second
letter of apology failed to make amends with GHS parent Kevin
Kang.
Gilroy – Gilroy High School Principal James Maxwell and Assistant Principal Mary Ann Boylan will likely face a complaint of misconduct at the state level after a board decision and a second letter of apology failed to make amends with GHS parent Kevin Kang.
Kang – who alleges that Maxwell and Boylan threatened to suspend Kang’s daughter if Kang pursued an assault complaint against another girl that his daughter said had hit her on the head with a tennis racquet – has vowed not to rest until his complaint goes into the personnel files of the two administrators.
Having his complaint on their record will make it easier for other parents who are upset with Maxwell or Boylan to make a case against them, Kang said.
However, Kang’s pursuit of a public notice of having his complaint put in Boylan and Maxwell’s personnel file is unattainable, said Linda Piceno, assistant superintendent of human resources for the Gilroy Unified School District.
The problem is the public is not able to access those records.
So, while Kang’s complaint could be placed in Maxwell and Boylan’s personnel files, or could have already been placed in them, Kang would have no way to know whether it had and the district is not authorized to tell him.
Any complaint, moreover, would become invalid four years after having been placed in the administrators’ records.
The furor started Dec. 7 when, Kang alleges, a classmate hit his daughter on the head with a tennis racquet during a physical education class. According to a district report, when his daughter complained to the principal, Maxwell dismissed her concerns because there was no evidence of injury and no witnesses to the infraction.
Kang and his wife allege that the school administrators told them at a Dec. 13 meeting not to pursue the matter further or their daughter would be suspended for making false accusations against a fellow student.
The Kangs then filed a complaint with the district the next day on Dec. 14, asking for the suspension or transfer of the administrators. On Jan. 18, Piceno, given a doctor’s evaluation that Kang’s daughter had suffered a concussion Dec. 7, acknowledged the injury in a report and Maxwell apologized for concluding that Kang’s daughter had not been injured.
Kang, unsatisfied, appealed the report, but dropped the request to have the administrators suspended or transferred. Instead, he asked that the administrators make a public apology and that the district review the antiviolence policy at the school.
The district Board of Trustees replied to the appeal Thursday. It denied Kang’s request for a public apology, but offered to continue to train administrators in how to deal properly with parent complaints. Boylan also wrote a second letter of apology in which she said that she and Maxwell never intended to intimidate Kang or discourage him from pursuing his daughter’s case.
Kang received the board decision and second letter of apology Friday and has until March 17 to accept or appeal the decision to the California Department of Education.
Because the board did not make his allegations of Maxwell and Boylan’s misconduct public, Kang said he plans to pen an appeal.
“I’m just trying to write it right now,” he said.
