July 18, 2026
Jointly written by:
Amy Cawvey, Candidate, Kansas State Board of Education, District 1
Kelly Ancar, Candidate, Kansas State Board of Education, District 5
Alana McWilliams, Candidate, Kansas State Board of Education, District 7
Kristian Gerken, Candidate, Kansas State Board of Education, District 9
Sometimes the most consequential decisions happen when almost no one is watching.
Earlier this year, Senate Bill 491 quietly died in committee. The bill was championed by Senator Doug Shane in response to documented cases of educators who moved from district to district after grooming or sexually abusing students.
It was named for a female victim, who was sexually abused by her science teacher, Anthony Kuckelman.
When the Kansas Association of School Boards testified against it, their argument was that educator discipline and licensure are fundamentally the responsibility of the Kansas State Board of Education, not the Legislature. Kansans have every right to ask how seriously the Board is taking that responsibility.
The data is not reassuring.
Between December 2014 and July 2024, 234 Kansas teachers were disciplined by the state. Of those, 128 had their licenses revoked, and 51 of those revocations were for physical or sexual misconduct against students. That is nearly 40 percent of every license pulled in a decade, and those are only the cases that were caught, reported, and formally acted upon.
According to the Safe Schools Project, a local nonprofit, in the past 15 years 432 Kansas students were abused by school district employees, 425 of them sexually, by 141 employees. That averages to more than three victims for every single perpetrator. These were not isolated mistakes. They were patterns, and they were repeat offenders operating inside our schools, sometimes for years, before anyone stopped them.
This is what protecting an institution over a child looks like.
The practice is widely known as ‘passing the trash’: a district moves a problem employee rather than removing one. The receiving district is told nothing, and the cycle of harm continues unabated.
The Kansas Association of School Boards told the Legislature that the Board owns this responsibility.
The Board’s own conduct this Tuesday raises serious questions about whether it is prepared to carry it.
Research compiled by Magnolia Consulting puts the national scope of this problem in stark terms. An estimated 1 in 10 students will experience school employee sexual misconduct before they graduate high school. Fifty percent of offenders had prior allegations made against them before they were finally stopped. A shocking 1 in 3 offending teachers had multiple victims.
When offenders were ultimately held accountable, they were sentenced to an average of 47 months. That is 47 months for what can be a lifetime of consequences for a child. This reality is only possible because the systems built around these educators protected them far longer than they should have.
On June 12, 2025, the Kansas Professional Practices Commission considered the case of a first-year Shawnee Mission teacher who investigators found had credibly groomed a minor student. The documented conduct included more than 200 personal emails, more than 600 text messages sent after the student stopped attending school, and an explicit statement that he was excited to no longer be her teacher so he could be, in his words, ‘just some dude.’ He resigned in lieu of termination and was subsequently hired by a second district, where he remains today.
Rather than allow the formal disciplinary process to proceed, KSDE attorney Scott Gordon bypassed procedures and created an informal restorative justice pathway without regulatory authority to do so. The formal process was paused for an entire year. The educator in question took this process so seriously that he failed to appear for his first two required meetings. He was then coached through four revisions of a reflective paper. At the end of that process, the Board voted 8-0-1 to allow him to retain his license.
Board member Beryl New offered perhaps the most revealing statement of the evening, “I was prepared to vote as I did the last time because I have strong convictions when it comes to things such as this, but I trust you. I trust Dr. Miller.”
A member of the Kansas State Board of Education, entrusted with constitutional authority over public education, set aside her own convictions and established policy not because the law required it, but because she trusted the people in the room.
Whether a victim’s family chooses forgiveness is a deeply personal matter. It cannot and should not determine how the State protects future students. Trust is not a regulatory standard. Accountability requires transparent, consistently applied written policy so that every child in every school is protected regardless of who happens to be in the room on a given day.
There is no comprehensive public list of educators who have lost their licenses or been convicted of a sexual crime. Parents are not notified. Jason Ostmeyer, arrested for aggravated indecent liberties with a child; Brett McGee, arrested for indecent liberties with a child; and Aaron Sullenger, multiple sex crimes including rape, aggravated human trafficking, all still hold their Kansas teaching licenses according to publicly available information. It should be noted, that KSDE’s Educator Misconduct list has not been updated since July of 2024. This is a system that is protecting the institution instead of the children inside it.
Kansas students need State Board members who will protect children over institutions. That is the first duty of the office, and it is not negotiable.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is passing the trash? It refers to the practice of a school district moving a problem employee to another district rather than removing them through the formal disciplinary process. The receiving district is given no warning, no record, and no opportunity to protect its students before that educator walks through the door.
What is grooming? Grooming is the deliberate process by which an adult builds trust with a child, tests boundaries, and normalizes increasingly personal contact in order to create the conditions for abuse. Kansas regulations explicitly prohibit conduct that can reasonably be construed as involving an inappropriate and overly personal relationship with a student. Grooming is not poor judgment and it is not a gray area.
What should the Board do differently? If the Board believes an alternative remediation pathway should exist for certain cases, there is an established way to create one: propose it publicly through formal rulemaking, establish objective eligibility criteria, and apply those standards equally to every educator. That is what transparency and accountability look like in practice, and it is the only way to ensure that no future Board member has to rely on personal trust in a room to make a decision that affects every child in the state.