Report: No Wrongdoing, No Concealment by District 67 Officials

• Patch will have a more thorough article posted Wednesday morning.

School District 67 Superintendent Harry Griffith and Board of Education members were found to not have concealed information nor shown intentional ignorance of the facts surrounding the handling of , according to a report given Tuesday night by Ronald Safer, who was hired by the District in December to conduct an internal investigation.

The report at the regularly scheduled District 67 Board of Education meeting comes more than three months since t. Steinert's resignation came after new information in a Nov. 16 Chicago Tribune article detailed his conviction for misdemeanor harassment by electronic communication for sexually explicit text messages, voice mails and a lewd photo from his school district-issued cell phone to a 22-year-old student, who was an intern with the working at Deer Path.

Safer, a former prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, was charged with investigating three areas:

• To determine whether the school district’s policies and procedures were followed.

• To determine if those policies and procedures need to be revised and what are the recommendations for the revisions.

• To determine if any wrongdoing was committed with the matter at that time.

In his report, Safer said Superintendent Harry Griffith nor the Board of Education had experience with the criminal justice system to "guide them regarding the information available to them" in investigating Steinert's arrest and subsequent conviction.

"Although the Superintendent consulted a lawyer, and some Board members were lawyers, they were not criminal lawyers," Safer's report stated.

Safer made three recommendations to the district:

1. The Board should adopt a policy involving misconduct outside the workplace.

2. The Board should adopt a policy requiring all district employees to cooperate with internal investigations.

3. Wherever possible, key documents in sensitive issues should be provided to the Board.

Board vice president John Julian said Safer's report concludes the Steinert matter. The focus will switch to the Board's policy committee undertaking Safer's recommendation to create policies for the district to handle future cases. He would not say how soon they would be created, but noted, "it will be sooner than later."

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