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Sex suit against teacher
drags on
10/21/01
By
Brian Thevenot
Staff writer/The Times-Picayune
In 1995, Antoinette Miller was a 17-year-old sophomore
with a baby, a strained relationship with her daughter's father and a series of
fast-food jobs that kept the lights on in their apartment only intermittently.
Determined to reverse the downward spiral, Miller fixed her gaze on a diploma
from
She looked forward to science class with Levon Leban, a veteran teacher
known for his trademark bow ties and rigid standards. "Everybody
proclaimed him to be a strict teacher, a you-better-do-your-work
kind of teacher," Miller said. "I was like, ‘Cool, I'm ready to work
hard.' "
Leban seemed eager to have Miller in his class, she said,
but for reasons unrelated to her schooling. "We had uniforms, plaid
skirts, and I used to wear black boots. He started complimenting me on my legs,
saying how pretty they were, how fine I was.
"He kept asking when my 18th birthday
was," she said. "He said, ‘I might have a present for you.' "
What started with suggestive comments would
turn into a year-long nightmare, said Miller, who has sued Leban,
alleging sexual harassment. She isn't the only former student who accuses the
teacher of sexual misconduct: Leban had sex with two
students during the 1985-86 school year at O. Perry
Walker School, one of the students and the mother of the other said in
interviews.
Leban denies all such accusations in sworn statements and,
through his attorney, declined comment. Attorneys for the school system, a
co-defendant, declined to comment specifically on Leban's
case. Miller's lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages for mental anguish and
medical bills, is pending before Civil District Judge Yada
Magee.
As Miller waits for a trial date, Leban remains in a middle school classroom, despite a
damning school system inquiry into Miller's complaint and aborted attempts to
sanction or fire him for other, unrelated allegations, including abusing leave
time, falsifying absence reports and even causing a bizarre explosion at Booker
T. Washington Senior High, after which Leban was
arrested on suspicion of arson.
Miller's story, spelled out in an interview
and court documents, begins in October 1995, when she says Leban,
wearing a blue shirt and a red tie, first complimented her on her legs and told
her she was "very attractive." Soon, she said, he was offering her
money for field trips and baby-sitters for her daughter, Tonisha.
Rebuffed, he suggested Miller meet him at a house on
" ‘You know, your grades could be better,' " she
recalled Leban saying.
Miller said she told Leban
she didn't need his help. She had a boyfriend. She reminded him he was her
teacher. She hoped it would all just go away.
She said she remembers how Leban scribbled notes to her during "notebook
checks," when students were summoned individually to the teacher's desk:
Last night I had a dream about you . . .
I think about you every day . . .
Leban would pass the notebook to Miller for a response, she
said.
"What do you want me to write?"
Don't you want to know about my dream?
"Not really."
We were together. I was holding you, kissing
you . . .
Leban tore up the notes as Miller, silently shaken,
returned to her seat, she said.
Leban, by all accounts a brilliant educator with multiple
degrees, is no stranger to the courts or the school system's Byzantine
disciplinary procedures. Yet he always emerged relatively unscathed as he moved
from school to school, leaving behind accusations that ordinarily would
jeopardize a teacher's job, if not his liberty.
The Teflon quality of Leban's
teaching tenure reflects a system in which principals typically aren't provided
personnel files and hesitate to share damaging information about teachers for
fear they will be sued for tarnishing a teacher's reputation or violating
privacy.
Although he was transferred from the
classroom to an administrative job after the arson arrest, and later suspended
when administrators determined he had falsified absence reports, Leban hasn't missed a week's pay in 19 years, records show.
The same year he was being investigated for
fraudulent absences, and on allegations of sexual harassment, his colleagues at
Cohen selected Leban as the school's teacher of the
year.
Shocked but flattered
Chris Carter met Leban
when she transferred from a high school in
In an interview, Carter told of an uneasy
seduction. "Three weeks after I got there, he gave me a test back. It was
marked ‘F.' I was upset. When I asked about it, he said, ‘See
me after class.' "
When she paid a visit to Leban,
he changed the ‘F' to a ‘B' and, she said, put a note in the corner: "You have juicy lips.' "
"What?" she asked.
"Well, you do," he replied.
Shocked but flattered by a young teacher's
attentions, Carter said she soon agreed to a rendezvous, arranged on a Post-it
note Leban had slipped her. They met at a Burger
King. He picked her up in a black Volvo with a basket of wine, cheese and fruit
in the front seat, she said.
Instead of the picnic Carter had been led to
expect, she said, Leban drove directly to a hotel
across the river where he had booked a room. When they got there, she said, Leban told her to relax, have a glass of wine.
"I was a little naive, and nervous. He
directed me what to do, and I laid down, and we had
sex," Carter said. "Our date was apparently us just having sex. I
didn't know that. He did."
Back at Walker High, Carter became friendly
with two other girls interested in Leban. One
professed to be "in love" with the natty teacher, though they
apparently never got involved. Another, Cynthia Jones, told Carter she was
seeing another teacher, and they confided in each other about their forbidden
affairs.
All three girls decorated their folders with Leban's name; they started wearing bow ties in tribute and
enrolled in Leban's CPR class.
Leban, Carter said, would invite the girls to his classroom
during lunch and give them passes to cut their other classes.
She said she and Leban
soon had another date, at a cheap
Her last encounter with Leban
was on the Cohen campus, while school was in session. She said he asked her to
come to his classroom, then led her into an adjacent
storage room. "He asked me if I'd do something for him, and he pushed my
head down. I gave him oral sex. I didn't want to finish," Carter said.
Sensing her resistance, she said, Leban mocked her. "You're not a woman," she
remembered him saying as he held down her head.
"I remember feeling disgusting, and I
ran out of there. I had thrown up" in the storage room, Carter said.
From then on, Carter avoided Leban as much as she could, and her friendship with Jones
cooled. She would hear later that Jones also had slept with Leban.
Though Carter's mother had begun asking questions, Carter didn't tell her of
the affair for a year, after she'd left the state to join the Navy. Her mother
never pursued it.
Cynthia Jones' mother did.
Mom alleges affair
Cynthia Jones declined to be interviewed, but
gave her mother permission to talk about her experiences with Leban.
Athalia Jones said she didn't learn about her daughter's
affair until after the girl had left Leban's class.
"It was something I pried out of her over time," Jones said. Then,
called to the school by an administrator to discuss her daughter's absences,
Jones said she felt compelled to report the affair.
"I decided I'd better go ahead and air
the issue; it was difficult to deal with," Jones said, "but, I mean,
this guy is a sexual predator. One of Cynthia's friends at the time had also
been bedded by Leban," she said, referring to
Carter.
Jones told the administrator that Leban had taken her daughter to a hotel and had sex with
her. "I told her I was willing to come forward," Jones said.
Jones said the administrator, whose name she
can't recall, said she would get back to her. But Jones never heard from the
school again. Her daughter dropped out of high school.
Leban transferred to Booker T. Washington, a transfer he
had requested, according to his deposition. After two years at O. Perry Walker,
Leban explained, "frankly I was just tired of
driving across the river."
In his deposition, Leban
denied having had sex with Jones and Carter, or even remembering much about
them.
"Have you ever heard the name Christine
Carter?" Miller's attorney Adam
Lambert asked Leban.
"That sounds like a student that was in
my class," he answered. "I can't picture her."
Cynthia Jones? "Vaguely
familiar."
Arson suit fades away
In March 1990,
The suit apparently went nowhere: The
petition is the only document in the court file -- no response from the
defendant, no judgment, no resolution. Similarly, criminal courts have no
record of how Leban fared on the charge. District
attorney's spokeswoman Zully Jimenez said the case
was sent to municipal court, a strange place for so serious a charge, she said.
The arson arrest prompted the school system
to shift Leban to an administrative position for a
short time, but soon he was back in the classroom.
"I went to -- actually I selected --
Walter L. Cohen Senior High," Leban said in his
deposition.
There, he met Antoinette Miller.
Transfer unusual
The area superintendent at the time, René Coman, said in sworn statements that he
"inherited" Leban, and characterized the
transfer to Cohen as involuntary.
But Principal Leroy Gray was not told why Leban was sent to Cohen, which unnerved him, according to
his deposition.
"I was told, ‘Just let him stay there
for a little while, and we'll change him later,' " Gray said in his
deposition. "It's not normal for them to send me
someone in that manner. I usually interview people."
Personnel files, Gray said, don't follow
teachers from school to school. Principals, he said, refer only the most
serious matters to the central office, and those records stay there. Over time,
Gray said in his deposition, he came to believe principals were expected to
keep charges against employees confidential, even if that meant denying
colleagues information they might need to know.
Leban, with his snappy clothes and sharp teaching skills,
quickly soothed Gray's suspicions. "He seemed to know what he was doing in
the classroom," Gray said in his deposition.
Gray has since retired and could not be
reached for an interview.
Bolder advances
After Miller's 18th birthday, in February
1996, Leban was emboldened in his pursuit of her, she
said. One day he asked her to come to his classroom for lunch so he could give
her makeup work for days she had missed while her daughter recovered from
chicken pox.
It wasn't the first time Leban
had asked her to come to his classroom at lunch. As on other occasions, he had
no assignments to give her. Instead, she said, he watched TV, complimented her
on her looks and quizzed her about her daughter and her love life.
Leban again proposed a relationship and again she rebuffed
him, she said. "I told him I had a boyfriend I was messing with right now.
He said, ‘That's OK, I have a wife.' "
Brushing off her rejection, Leban called Miller up to his desk, then backed her up
against the blackboard and tried to kiss her, she said. She said she pushed him
away, left quickly and went home.
She felt sick; Miller felt sick a lot that
year. She began seeing a doctor and a counselor for a nervous condition. She
was exhausted, stressed. Her schedule was brutal: up at 6 a.m., wake the baby,
get her ready for the bus ride, drop her at the Dryades
YMCA day-care center, then off to Cohen before the
8:30 a.m. bell. Miller couldn't afford four bus tickets a day, so she walked
from the Y to Cohen and back.
In the evening, she dropped off Tonisha at a sitter's and headed to her $5.75-an-hour
burger-joint job for a shift that ended well after midnight.
Miller considered telling her boyfriend about
Leban but decided against it: "I thought it
would make the situation worse." Eventually the teen-agers broke up under
the strain of their grown-up burdens, and Miller moved back in with her mother.
She said she was rattled by Leban's sexual advances and started skipping his class, but
he gave her a "B" for the third quarter anyway. Now and again, she
said, she would glance up from her seat in one of her other classes to see Leban in the doorway, making faces at her.
One spring day, he came to her seventh-period
class and told the teacher he needed to see her in the hallway about a science
project.
"He had an address written down for a
house on the parkway (
Leban grabbed her by the arm and shook her, Miller said. " ‘I'm tired of playing with you, tired of chasing
behind you. You come to this house -- or else,' " she
remembered him telling her.
Miller didn't know what that meant. She knew Leban could fail her. She knew he knew where she lived and
worked.
She got sick again.
Student a ‘credible witness'
The day after the hallway incident, Miller
said, she cracked under the strain of her secret. In tears, she told Darlene
Carter, her favorite teacher, about Leban's advances.
Though Miller asked her not to report their conversation, the teacher took the
matter to her superiors.
The next day Miller was called into the
office, where she relayed her story to Gray and a counselor. Gray informed the
central office, which dispatched veteran investigator
The principal took Miller out of Leban's class immediately, but Leban
stayed in place. Falls filed a report a month later. In his deposition, he said
Miller's case was among the most convincing he had seen.
"I felt that Leban
had sexually harassed Miller," he said, calling Miller a "credible
witness."
The report was sent to area superintendent Coman's office, then to compliance officer James Lloyd, who
wrote a memo concluding: "There is sufficient evidence to support the
allegation of sexual harassment."
Simultaneously, the central office was
building a case against Leban for misusing leave
time. In helping himself to 26 days off, Leban had
repeatedly falsified absence reports, claiming to be ill, officially excused or
at out-of-school meetings when he, in fact, had played hooky, according to
school system records.
Though the central office planned to fire Leban, he remained in his classroom at Cohen until year's
end, when he voluntarily transferred to
Leban had never talked of transferring before Miller's
complaint. "I was surprised when he left," Gray said in his
deposition. "Well, not really."
But Gray never told Augustine's principal
about the allegations against Leban. In Orleans
Parish schools, he said, that just wasn't done.
"It's my feeling that the principals who
teachers served under previously don't want to talk about what may have
happened because of liability, what have you," he said in his deposition.
"So it's always closed."
Interviewing for the Augustine job, Cohen's
teacher of the year easily impressed his prospective supervisor, Principal
Florida Woods. Following standard procedure, Woods sent his name to the human
resources department, which approved the transfer without question, she said.
Woods never got a personnel file on Leban. That's not
unusual, she said. "And of course he's not going to bring any garbage with
him" to the interview, she said.
Unaware of past investigations, Woods took Leban at face value.
"He was brilliant. The man can teach.
And he was excellent with computers," she said, noting that Leban constructed a Web site for the school. "It's
extremely hard to find math and science teachers who are degreed and have a
good track record," she said.
Normally, Woods said, principals rely on one
another in conducting informal background checks. In this case, she said, she
couldn't reach Gray, who had become ill and soon would retire.
Leban's harassment charge would stay buried in a central
office file, where it remains. Central officials shelved the sexual harassment
complaint, system records show, reasoning that they already planned to fire Leban for the absences.
After a year at Augustine, Leban was suspended without pay for the Cohen absences.
Woods was informed of the punishment in a memo, but received no word of any
other allegations.
The suspension was supposed to lead to
termination, but that plan died after Leban
successfully sued to be reinstated, with back pay. Leban's
suit argued that, though his suspension and recommendations for termination
came after administrative hearings, he had been denied due process because the
School Board itself hadn't ruled on the charges at a tenure hearing before
removing him.
Civil District Judge Ronald Sholes ordered Leban reinstated.
The school system had argued that a tenure
hearing was unneeded. But it is unclear why the system didn't hold one after
Sholes' ruling.
Leban never went back to Augustine, instead taking a job at
O. Perry Walker Middle School, Woods said.
The investigation into Miller's harassment
complaint was never resuscitated. Miller's attorney Lambert speculated that the system didn't act because to discipline
Leban could have made it more difficult to fight
Miller's lawsuit.
School Board attorney Clare Jupiter, while
not commenting specifically on Leban's case, said it
is common for the system to suspend internal inquiries when matters are being
litigated. "We want to avoid simultaneous inquiries. We don't want to be a
tool in litigation," Jupiter said. "After there is a resolution to
the litigation, we still have the option to pursue a tenure hearing."
In general, administrators make a
"judgment call" on whether to separate students from teachers they
accuse, but "there is no written policy that says a teacher involved in
immoral conduct with a student has to be separated from contact with all
students," Jupiter said.
She said the system has spent about $75,000
defending Leban and the system against Miller's suit.
Life goes on
Today, Miller still awaits her day in court.
She went on to earn her diploma in 1998. Now 23, she works as a cocktail
waitress at a downtown hotel. She has taken a semester off from
Chris Carter is married with two children and
works at a makeup counter. She hadn't discussed Leban
with anyone in more than a decade until she was asked to appear in court. It
was only after she agreed to testify that she worked up the courage to tell her
husband about her dalliance with the teacher. Sixteen years later, she is still
embarrassed and angry.
"I wasn't raped. It was consensual. But
that wasn't the way it was supposed to be. He was my teacher, and that's why to
this day I call him ‘Mr. Leban,' "
she said. "Knowing that it's still going on . . . I swear, if
someone did this to my children, I'd kill them."
Miller wants to put the lawsuit behind her.
She can't believe it has dragged on into her adulthood. She feels she is owed
damages, but said she wants just as badly for "the truth to come
out."
"I'm not saying he'll ever admit, ‘I did
this to this girl.' That's not his way; he's an arrogant son-of-a-bitch,"
she said. "I just hope he never gets to do this to somebody else."
Told Leban is back
in the classroom, at O. Perry Walker Middle, Miller said, "Oh, Lord. And
that's a junior high school?"
This year at
. . . . . . .
Brian Thevenot can
be reached at bthevenot@timespicayune.com
or (504) 826-3482.
10/21/01
© The Times-Picayune.