UPDATED: Thursday, Feb. 29: This story has been updated to include statements from the Jackson County District Attorney, Ashland Superintendent of Schools Samuel Bogdanove and the Oregon Department of Human Services' Office of Training , Investigations and Safety (OTIS).
The Ashland Police Department is investigating a recent complaint of sexual misconduct against an employee of the Ashland School District’s outdoor school known as TRAILS. 141 students in grades K-8 attend TRAILS.
That person has been placed on administrative leave.
Ashland Police Chief Tighe O’Meara said the department first investigated this employee for a different incident back in 2022. He said that incident was sexual assault against a minor, and it was referred to the county’s DA office. Jackson County District Attorney Beth Heckert said in an email that her office declined that case due to "insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt."
But it appears that person continued to be employed at TRAILS.
O’Meara said the department received a new sexual misconduct complaint about the same person last week from a different alleged victim. A police investigation is underway.
"More and more information is coming in to the detective handling the investigation now," O'Meara said. "Not all of it is necessarily criminal in nature. Some of it seems to be inappropriate comments, what might be called grooming, which doesn’t stray into the law enforcement realm. The detective is trying to sort through all of this."
In a recent email to parents, Superintendent Samuel Bogdanove said it’s standard practice for certain organizations, including Oregon's Department of Human Services and law enforcement, to report these incidents to each other. He said there was a failure to do that by one of the agencies, so the school didn’t know what was going on.
That failure, Bogdanove said in an interview on Thursday, came from ODHS's Office of Training, Investigations and Safety.
"OTIS indicated that the information they received came through a different way than it normally might have to them. They were able to identify the gap and report it with us," he said.
In an email on Thursday, a spokesperson for OTIS said, "Unfortunately, our investigator inadvertently failed to follow an established protocol that would have triggered the required cross reporting to the Department of Education, and the school district did not receive notification of the founded allegation of sexual abuse of a child. ODHS has already taken action to retrain OTIS investigators on this protocol and is currently evaluating what types of changes are necessary to ensure appropriate cross-reporting occurs in every case."
According to the Oregon Department of Human Services’s Office of Training, Investigations and Safety (OTIS)'s stipulations on child abuse, OTIS is responsible for notifying entities, including the employer of the adult alleged to have committed abuse, when a report of abuse has been assigned for investigation or if it's closed at the screening stage.
TRAILS held a community forum on Monday night to discuss the developments.
According to Bogdanove's email, in the 2022 incident, "The minor was not a TRAILS student and the incident did not occur on any school campus. At point of hire, we do thorough background checks on all potential employees. This incident occurred after the employee was hired and was working at TRAILS."
"Obviously, this is a tremendous concern," Bogdanove said in an interview. "There's definitely been an impact on families and on the school community. And I really appreciate that OTIS, once they discovered the issue, communicated with us quickly. They also provided information that we needed to be able to address our HR concerns."
This story has been updated to correct the number of students attending TRAILS.
