Dallas ISD board panel denies appeal for fired investigator Jeremy Liebbe
A Dallas ISD school board panel on Thursday denied an appeal for fired investigator Jeremy Liebbe, who sought to have his name cleared and payment for whistleblower damages.
Bill Liebbe, Jeremy’s attorney and father, made it clear at the hearing that a lawsuit would now be filed for whistleblower protection violations and defamation.
“It will be done by the end of the year,” he said.
The appeal was heard by a board panel that included trustees Lew Blackburn, Nancy Bingham and Mike Morath. They voted 3-0 to deny the appeal.
Liebbe, who had headed DISD’s Professional Standards Office since March, was fired Sept. 5. He had worked in the district for 10 years and had won praise as a DISD police officer for uncovering the “cheese” heroin epidemic that killed several students. He also led an investigation earlier this year into a sports recruiting scandal that caused 15 athletics employees to lose their jobs.
In a DISD statement announcing his firing, Liebbe was accused of poor behavior and decision-making and violating district policy and state law. His attorneys deny the allegations. Liebbe sought to clear his name at Thursday’s hearing and to receive whistleblower damages of $250,000 among other remedies.
Kathryn Long, an attorney representing DISD, alleged that Liebbe allowed the recording of student interviews without parental permission. Long and another attorney for the district couldn’t readily cite a case in which Liebbe actually videotaped students, but they said he instructed his investigators to do so.
Bill Liebbe noted that there are exceptions when recording student interviews without parent permission, such as in cases involving safety and child abuse.
Long also accused Liebbe of using a subordinate to distract while he messed with a server in the district’s IT department. Bill Liebbe said after his son determined the IT department had a backdoor way to get into servers in his department, he did go over there “and close that backdoor” because his office was investigating the IT department.
“I don’t think you want to let the folks that you’re investigating for $8 million in fraud have access to your servers,” Bill Liebbe said.
According to Bill Liebbe, his son’s troubles began when he started looking into the background of his former boss, Tonya Sadler Grayson. Jeremy Liebbe was placed on paid leave the morning after he informed Superintendent Mike Miles of his preliminary review into Grayson’s background, in which he found facts to support opening an investigation.
Grayson served 12 months of probation in 1990 for misdemeanor criminal trespassing in Georgia. But when she applied for a position with DISD in October 2013, she checked “no” on three questions about probation, prior arrests or convictions. In a statement to The News, she said that she didn’t believe her situation applied after reading the questions.
The district said in July that Grayson had “properly disclosed” her conviction “prior to her acceptance of the position.” She started in DISD on Jan. 6. Her criminal background check was completed on Jan. 10, according to school district records.
Liebbe was fired the same day the Texas Education Agency said it was reviewing allegations he had made in a letter to the agency. The letter said the district violated several state laws regarding criminal background checks. Liebbe says the district “may not have properly” checked the criminal history of hundreds of employees before they started work, as required by state law. He listed Grayson as one such employee.
He also sent the letter to school board members and told them “the administration elected to have me placed on administrative leave in retaliation for discovering and reporting to the superintendent suspected violations of state law.”