Teacher controversy addressed at Cd'A school board meeting

The majority of the Lake City High School teaching staff attended Monday night’s Coeur d’Alene School District board meeting in protest of one of their own potentially being fired.

Tim Sandford, a music teacher at Lake City, spoke on behalf of the Lake City staff when he addressed the Coeur d’Alene School District Board of Trustees, asking the board not to fire their fellow teacher.

“How did we get to this place, this moment of time where a good teacher with a family faces the possibility of his life destroyed for the events of nearly 20 years ago?” Sandford said to the board.

The controversy is over a personnel matter, so neither Sandford nor the school board members identified the teacher, though the person they were discussing is likely Jeff Kantola.

Kantola, a Lake City High School science teacher, was placed on administrative leave in October after a parent raised concern about Kantola's professional background.

Kantola's chiropractic license in the state of Washington was revoked in 2004 for violating that state's law regarding professional conduct by license holders, specifically for having a sexual relationship with an adult patient and another sexual relationship with an adult employee.

Coeur d’Alene School District Communications Director, Laura Rumpler, told The Press in October that Kantola passed the required FBI background check during his hiring process and self-disclosed that he had a chiropractic license suspension on his application.

Sandford spoke to the board Monday about a great educator who made an “unintentional clerical error” and is now receiving unwarranted punishment.

“The genesis of the matter would be that which happened, that the Coeur d’Alene Press exposed, so cruelly, is an incident that was paid for dearly — and one which seems will have to be paid for again,” he said. “This teacher is an excellent educator and what is in the past is in the past and has no connection to the classroom or the safety of the students.”

After Sandford finished his speech, about 50 staff members of Lake City High School who were sitting in the audience, gave him a standing ovation and walked out of the Midtown Center together.

Deanne Clifford, the principal at Lake City, said she was proud to be the leader of “such an articulate, well spoken and united group of people.” She added the number of teachers who came in support indicates the unity of the Lake City High School family.

Derek Kohles, a social studies teacher at Lake City and president of the Coeur d’Alene Education Association, agreed with Clifford.

“We support the members of our family, and this teacher has been a very good member of the family, and what has happened to him is not the way it should work,” he said.

Sandford told The Press after his statement that the staff did not involve parents or students in their presentation because it was a staff issue.

However, a group of nine Lake City High School seniors also spoke to the board about the same issue.

Tiger Ashtiana spoke on the group’s behalf about the credibility the board would lose if it decided to fire a teacher it had hired, just because one parent expressed concern.

“We don’t know if we can trust the people you’re hiring if you’re firing them based on the fact of what a parent thinks; somebody who doesn’t know education standards, somebody who isn’t hiring and has never made the decision to hire somebody to educate anyone,” he said.

“If you hire a teacher, we ask that you stand behind the hiring of that teacher, you stand by the principles, and you stand by the fact that you hired them because you know they’ll be good at their job. We don’t want parents who don’t understand what they’re doing, to step into our education and academic standards and hinder that.”

After the presentation, the group of seniors reinforced to The Press that they want to see consistency and accountability when it comes to decisions made by the district.

“I think if they had a problem with his past, they shouldn’t have hired him, but because they chose to hire him, they have to stand by why they hired him originally,” said Paisley Larsen, a senior at Lake City. “Just because a parent has a problem, that shouldn’t have as much weight as it did, because it’s a single parent in a community of thousands.”

The school board has not yet made a decision about the status of Jeff Kantola. He remains on administrative leave while the district reviews the situation.