The Mobile County Public Schools System followed its standard hiring protocol when it brought on a Denton Middle School language arts teacher last year, according to a spokesman for the Alabama State Department of Education, even though the teacher had previously faced a criminal charge that was not reflected in the state’s screening database at the time.
The teacher, who taught seventh and eighth grade, was placed on administrative leave from Denton Middle School in early March after a student reported that he had made inappropriate sexual comments to her in the classroom. Mobile police later arrested him on a charge of being a school employee who had sexual contact with a student under 19. Superintendent Martha Peek said the district removed him from the school immediately after learning of the complaint.
“When we realized we had an issue we immediately took action,” Peek said, adding that student safety ranks just behind education among the district’s top priorities.
The case drew scrutiny after it emerged that the teacher had been arrested roughly a year earlier while working at a different Alabama middle school, on a charge of indecent exposure. State education officials said they began the process of moving to revoke his teaching certificate soon after that earlier arrest and updated an internal tracking system accordingly. However, the external database that school districts use to check a prospective hire’s certification status was not updated to reflect the pending action when Mobile County schools ran a background check on him in August.
Michael Sibley, the state education department’s director of communications, said the delay was a mistake rather than evidence of a broken process, noting that the department’s certificate portal was updated during one of its busiest stretches of the year, when tens of thousands of renewal requests come in over a matter of weeks. He said the department has since assigned a staff member specifically to keep its various online systems synced in a timely way.
Peek said the district’s own review of the teacher’s file at the time turned up nothing alarming. His references from the prior district were strong, she said, and the certification portal showed no outstanding issues. Sibley confirmed that Mobile County schools did not deviate from normal procedure. “They didn’t break protocol,” he said. “It’s not unusual for school districts to check our external portal for background checks.”
State records also show the teacher had prior guilty pleas for driving under the influence and for breaking into a vehicle, a Class C felony under Alabama law, before he received his teaching certificate in 2012. A department attorney said a breaking-and-entering conviction alone would not automatically disqualify someone from certification, and it was unclear whether school officials at the time were aware of the DUI charge.
The teacher was expected to face a certification hearing before the state in mid-June, a proceeding that typically determines whether an educator keeps the credential needed to teach in Alabama public schools. State officials said the revocation process, once triggered, can take up to a year to conclude.
The episode has prompted closer attention to how quickly state and local systems share information about educators facing discipline, particularly during seasonal surges when certificate renewals and staffing changes are heaviest across Alabama’s school districts.