How a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling could make schools liable for dangerous hires

[MUSIC PLAYING] NINA MOINI: It's our top story this afternoon. A Minneapolis charter school can be held legally responsible for hiring a gym teacher who sexually assaulted students. That's according to the Minnesota supreme court, who ruled on the case yesterday. Adam Hjermstad was convicted in 2021 for the sexual assaults of students at schools where he taught and coached basketball.

One of the survivors and his family sued the charter school, Harvest Best Academy, for hiring Hjermstad. Their case and the court's ruling could have implications for schools across the state. So joining us is Sahan Journal education reporter, Becky Dernbach, who's been following this story and joins us now. Thanks for being with us again, Becky.

BECKY DERNBACH: Thanks for having me, Nina.

NINA MOINI: For starters, can you talk us through the backstory here behind this case and what happened, how it ended up before the state supreme court?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah, absolutely. So Aaron Hjermstad was a gym teacher and basketball coach who worked for many years at the charter school Excell Academy in Brooklyn Park. And then in 2015, a student came forward to say that Hjermstad had sexually assaulted him. There was a criminal investigation, but no charges were filed, and then the school didn't renew his contract.

So fast forward five years later, Hjermstad was working at a north Minneapolis charter school called The Mastery School, which has since consolidated under Harvest Best Academy. And in 2020, more students came forward with sexual assault allegations. And as you can imagine, their parents were horrified to learn that this had happened before and he was allowed to keep teaching.

And so one of those students and his mother sued both Hjermstad and the school, claiming, among other things, negligent hiring. And lower courts dismissed the part of the case against the school, saying the school had immunity over its hiring decisions. And so then the survivor and his mother appealed that issue to the supreme court.

NINA MOINI: And so there's a state law that is meant to protect schools from lawsuits over some of the decisions they make. How did that factor in?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah. So this law is actually not just about schools. It's about municipalities, which is to say local units of government, and that includes public schools. And so the idea here is that local government should have discretion over its policy making decisions. So the question here is, what counts as a policy making decision? Is every hiring decision a policy decision? And when are local governments immune from lawsuits?

NINA MOINI: OK. So can you talk a little bit about what the lawyers from each side were arguing about how the laws should be applied to this situation?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah. So what the school was arguing is that every hiring decision is a policy making decision. And the supreme court just didn't buy that. In this case, the school actually had hiring practices in place like calling references, getting letters of recommendation, and it just wasn't following its own policy and it didn't really demonstrate a clear reason for not following the policy.

And so the lawyers for the survivor and his mom pointed out that the school had missed multiple steps in its own hiring process, to the extent that it had a clear hiring process, and said there was a direct connection to that failure to follow the process to Hjermstad's access to the children he assaulted. And I should add, he's since been criminally convicted of assaulting four of these kids and indicted on several additional charges as well. And he's now in prison.

NINA MOINI: OK. What reasoning did the justices give for siding with the survivors family?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah. So they said that hiring could sometimes be a policy decision if there were evidence that the school had weighed social, political and economic factors in making their decision about how to follow their process. But it's a case by case basis. Not every hiring decision is a policy decision.

And in this case, they said there was no evidence the school had weighed those factors in deciding not to follow its own process. And so that means the school could be liable for Hjermstad's actions, although that will be decided in district court. Or I guess I should say, they could be liable for hiring him, although that will be decided in district court.

NINA MOINI: OK. So what could this decision mean for the family who sued and for the school?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah. So first of all, it means that this family's lawsuit against the school can go forward. And, I mean, this has been in courts now for almost five years, and now the part of the lawsuit against the school can continue. And it also means that other victims might be able to sue the school, because there were multiple other victims at this school. And it also means that people might be able to sue other schools or other local government units where something similar may have happened.

NINA MOINI: OK. So what have you heard, if anything, from the school and its lawyers? Have they said anything publicly about this since the ruling?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah. I heard from Christian Schaffer, who is the lawyer representing the school, and he said the school disagrees with the decision and is confident it will prevail on the other claims when the case goes back to district court.

NINA MOINI: Had the school said anything in the past about how they vetted this individual or their practices, and are they happy with the way they followed those practices?

BECKY DERNBACH: I mean, he passed a background check. You know, he had been-- there was a criminal investigation, and there were no charges from that. The Minnesota Department of Education also did an investigation and didn't find anything there. So those might be the places where you would think that something like this would come up. And so they've said, you know, we followed those legally required processes.

We checked with the people we were supposed to check with. And the parts of the process they didn't follow were their own internal process about checking references and-- yeah, checking references, getting letters of recommendation, things like that. And so I think from the school's perspective, they did what they were legally supposed to do. But the family is arguing these other parts of the process actually could have revealed really important information and you didn't follow them.

NINA MOINI: And so building on that, are there sort of standards or best practices, vetting procedures, that all schools use right now beyond a background check?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, there are there are a few laws governing school hiring, like the background check. You also have to check the license with the state licensing board. But those are the only really laws governing how to how to hire. I mean, there are there are other standard practices that are common, but those are the ones that are legally required, and the school followed those.

NINA MOINI: OK. So this case did involve a charter school. I know you've done a lot of reporting on how charter schools are regulated in the state. Is there reason to think that public schools that are directly overseen by school boards have stricter or better vetting procedures? Or what do you think is the-- if it matters that this was a charter school in any way?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah. So speaking really broadly, a perennial challenge for charter schools is that they're often quite small and they're running their own district, and they're also pretty new. We didn't have charter schools in Minnesota until the 1990s. So they're coming up with all of the mechanics of running a school, from how to run the cafeteria to how to create HR procedures, and they have to do that from scratch.

And so sometimes they contract out those services. And I've reported quite a bit on that. That's actually what happened in this case. Some of the hiring processes were contracted out. And I think many larger school districts have much more of a well-oiled machine for hiring procedures. And so I think that this decision puts schools on notice that they need to have clear hiring policies, follow those policies, dotting their I's, crossing their T's, completing every step of their hiring checklist.

For some schools, that might not be much of a change. But something like if you forget to call somebody's references, I think that that's something that should be a red flag for schools. If it hasn't been already, it certainly should be now.

NINA MOINI: Sure. Well, we have a couple minutes left with you, Becky, and I wanted to, since we've got you, to shift gears and talk about another story that you worked on this week. You learned that two Minnesota universities lost grants for teacher training and cuts by the Trump administration. Can you kind of summarize just briefly for us what the programs that were that were funded by these grants and why they were eliminated?

BECKY DERNBACH: Yeah, absolutely. So these were three grants total at the University of Saint Thomas and the University of Minnesota, and they were to train new teachers. And many of these grants were specifically around training special education teachers. You may remember, special education is a particular shortage area in the state. School districts all around the state are really struggling to fill those positions.

And so these programs that lost their funding are everything from it's a key source of funding for Grow Your Own programs in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. It is also training teachers in rural districts throughout the state. I talked to a principal of the elementary school in Warren-Alvarado-Oslo, who was really counting on one of these grants to help train special education teachers in her district through a partnership with the university of Minnesota.

Charter school teachers. In some charter schools, there are a lot of teachers who don't have the special education license that they need, so there was a grant designed to fill that need. And so they lost some of their funding, and now some charter schools are taking their student teachers who were like an extra adult in a classroom, and in order to fill that funding gap, putting them in their own classroom in February, which they weren't prepared to do.

And yeah. I visited Maxfield Elementary in Saint Paul this week. They have a partnership with the university of Saint Thomas, where a lot of Saint Thomas students go to do their teacher residency or to explore a career in education if they're undergraduates and not sure what they want to major in and yet. And so I talked to somebody in the SUTR program there who that's the Saint Paul Grow Your Own program. And he now has to figure out how to pay for his summer tuition, which had previously-- he'd been told would be covered.

And I talked to some undergraduate students who, one of them-- a few of them, actually, told me they had been considering careers in education, and now they just see that as a much more unstable career field and they're reconsidering their plans. And I talked to one student, actually, who is still committed to finishing his special education degree and joined the national guard in order to be able to pay for it.

NINA MOINI: Wow. Well, Becky, I'm so glad we have you in the state tracking all of this. As always, appreciate your reporting. We hope you'll come back and tell us more of what you're working on.

BECKY DERNBACH: Thank you, Nina. Happy to come back anytime.

NINA MOINI: Thank you. That was Becky Dernbach, education reporter at Sahan Journal, a nonprofit news outlet focused on immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota.