I was a new reporter for KQED in 2021 when former elementary school teacher Joseph Brian Hogue was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison for sexually abusing 10 students. He taught at the same school in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than 20 years. Were there any warning signs?
I soon found parents on social media complaining about Hog to school administrators for years. I also knew that the school could publicize such complaints if they were substantiated or the teacher was disciplined. So I filed a public records request with Hogue’s school, something anyone can do.
Within months, I received 43 pages of records showing that parents had reported Hogg to the principal at least four times since 2009. Parents complained that Hogg would ask students to strip down to their underwear in classrooms and come into locker rooms to try on costumes for plays he was directing. He also complained of touching the boys’ chests and stomachs and slapping one of the boys on the buttocks. I learned that the principal had warned Hogue twice not to touch students. However, he was allowed to continue teaching. (The principal said in a deposition that Ms. Hogue’s behavior crossed professional boundaries, but that it was not reported to her as sexual activity.)
Over the next two years, I reported similar incidents where teachers remained in classrooms after complaints of unwanted touching. Another Bay Area elementary school, in Benicia, filed a complaint with the state licensing agency after a teacher resigned amid accusations of misconduct. He was employed by another school and his teaching license remained in good standing until criminal charges were filed. (He is currently fighting those charges.)
This raised a completely different set of questions for me: Should these teachers have been allowed to continue teaching at the new school? How much did potential employers know about teachers’ disciplinary histories, and what was the state’s responsibility to act on and share the information it learned about these teachers?
After joining UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism in 2023, I wanted to investigate how common it is for teachers to continue working with children after cheating has been discovered in their school. California law prohibits teacher licensing agencies from releasing disciplinary records to the public, so my classmates and I requested the records from 300 of California’s largest school districts. We sought complaints of teacher sexual misconduct made against schools over the past five years. It also required schools to submit reports to the state’s Office of Teacher Licensing, which are required when a public school educator is fired or resigns due to allegations of misconduct.
Within two months, dozens of school districts responded. We started creating a spreadsheet of teachers who had complaints filed against them. Records were slow to obtain. California requires public agencies to determine within 10 days whether they have records to disclose and release them promptly, but most have stalled. Every time the school stopped responding, I copied the school board’s or attorney’s email, citing the law. By the time we graduated more than a year after filing the records request, we received more than 350 complaints, which we used in a recent investigation with KQED and ProPublica.
To this day, Los Angeles Unified, California’s largest school district, has not released records of teacher misconduct reported to the state. Instead, the district said it would charge me $8,000 ($100 an hour for 80 hours of work) for “a review of approximately 2,500 personnel files that may be addressed.” The First Amendment Coalition, a California nonprofit that advocates for free speech and government transparency, is representing me in the lawsuit filed in May. We allege that the Los Angeles School District violates public records laws by withholding documents regarding alleged educator misconduct. A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson told me in a written statement this week that the policy balances the public’s right to access records with “the responsible management of public resources” and the law.
It’s not just the district’s slow response that prevents students from getting records from schools. School districts typically notify teachers before making complaints public and give them an opportunity to prevent the documents from being released. Benicia, a former teacher who was criminally charged with sexually abusing a student in 2024, has filed suit to prevent two school districts from releasing the charges against her. The First Amendment Coalition represented me in this case as well, and we won. It took nine months to obtain the records. In another case in which I requested records, the court granted an injunction to prevent the release of the teacher’s records, but the legal filing contained details of the allegations against him, so the nature of the complaint became public anyway.
At least four teachers have called or emailed me directly asking why I am requesting disciplinary records. They wanted to share their side of the story, which I was very happy to hear, but some argued that their case was not worth my time. One person asked me to withdraw my request. (I didn’t.) Another sent a 1,700-word email saying the allegations were only partially true and lamenting that he didn’t have the money to defend himself.
Although he understood the complexity of each individual case, he believed that there could be important truth in the accusations of wrongdoing. Despite the school district’s resistance, I followed the public records people’s credo. “Even if records aren’t available from one institution, the answers you’re looking for may be found elsewhere.”
Records of state disciplinary hearings are presumed to be public when a teacher challenges a district’s firing or sues for license suspension or revocation. And those records are kept in the Department of General Services, a state agency that oversees another agency responsible for holding administrative hearings for public employees.
The agency proved useful in the case of San Francisco Bay Area math teacher Jason Agan, which KQED and ProPublica reported last month. Aghan was fired for sexually harassing high school students, but continued to teach at two more schools after an independent panel convened by the Office of Administrative Hearings deemed him “unfit to teach.” He had asked for an outside hearing after the district moved to fire him, so I requested those records.
It arrived the next day. The documents included summaries of testimony from students, administrators and Mr. Agan himself at the termination hearing. Mr. Agan, who has not been charged with a crime, admitted to touching the students’ shoulders but denied any sexual motive and said at his expulsion hearing that he did it to provide support and encouragement to the students. He maintained his teaching license.
Getting a response from the Department of General Services was like discovering a secret portal where records could be obtained quickly and easily.
So I requested five years’ worth of decisions about other teachers by the agency’s independent panel for more insight into how the state’s teacher discipline system works and where it falls short. Within a week I had a treasure trove of documents.
I learned some important lessons. What appears to be a secret is not necessarily a secret. Sometimes you just need to know who to ask and why.
If you have experience with the state’s opaque teacher disciplinary process, KQED and ProPublica want to hear from you.
