What would happen to you if you were accused of assaulting someone at work and refused to talk to the police about it?
Perhaps nothing if you are married to the boss.
According to a column by Victor Joecks in today’s morning newspaper, but posted online two days ago, school teacher Jason Wright, the husband of Clark County School Board President Deanna Wright, was accused back in March of kicking the hand of a 10-year-old student and jerking him about. The teacher refused to talk to school district police and the police declined to press charges, even though Joecks quotes a police report as saying the boy’s pinkie finger was “swollen and bruised.”
The teacher has since been transferred to another school.
To add insult to injury, so to speak, Joecks’ former employer, the Nevada Policy Research Institute, points out that there is a clause in the county teacher union contract that requires all information about such incidents if the accused is “cleared” to be expunged from all personnel files. Is declining to press charges the same as cleared?
Article 12, Section 10 of the contract states: “In the event civil or criminal proceedings are brought against a teacher and the teacher is cleared of said charge, all written reports, comments or reprimands concerning actions which the courts found not to have occurred, shall be removed from the teacher’s personnel file. No reference to criminal charges as described above shall be included in the personnel file. Entries into said file as they relate to civil or criminal proceedings described above shall be limited to violations of School District policy or administrative regulations, which are known beyond a reasonable doubt to have occurred.”
The NPRI article cited a case on point in which a teacher, who eventually pleaded guilty to three felony counts of attempted lewdness with a child in 2015, had his file wiped clean of other allegations dating back to 2008. “Had those allegations been reported on his confidential personnel file when he was transferred to a different school after the 2008 incident, perhaps administrators could have taken necessary steps to prevent the later abuses to which Mazo eventually pleaded guilty,” the article suggests.
We suspect the transfer of teacher Wright was not resisted by his principal. The guardian of the child in question told Joecks that the principal urged her to file a complaint and mentioned that the teacher’s wife was the president of the school board. The principal declined to talk to Joecks.
Mum’s the word.
Teacher Jason Wright (R-J pix)
4TH ST8 
Interesting.