At least three current and former employees of America’s Finest Charter School in San Diego have filed sexual harassment complaints about their school board’s president, Roosevelt Blackmon, since last June, including a Title IX complaint filed on Wednesday.
One employee alleges that the board, while under Blackmon’s leadership, is dragging its feet on addressing the complaints. Another complainant said the board placed her on leave in retaliation days after she reported harassment; she no longer works for the school.
The charter school’s board, which Blackmon has led as president since April of last year, has not taken action to date to address the complaints.
It has been about four months since an outside investigator substantiated most of the allegations made by one of the complainants, Assistant Principal Dolores Medina, according to a December letter to Medina about the probe’s conclusion by the school’s interim executive director, Kathleen Dougherty.
The law firm that arranged the investigation is not providing the full findings report to the board or to Daugherty for confidentiality reasons, Daugherty said.
In a statement to The San Diego Union-Tribune on Friday, Blackmon said: “There are always two sides to every story. Some of what you’ve gotten so far is bits of information mixed with misinformation and disinformation.”
“I put on the shoulders of the two high school administrators that a lot of hard work would need to be done to keep the (high school) viable,” Blackmon said about two of the complainants.
He denied the allegations in the two other people’s complaints.
Blackmon first joined the board of the 400-student charter school about a year ago. He is also a co-chair of the council for San Diego Unified School District’s Lincoln cluster of schools, a council that convenes families, community members and school and district staff to discuss school issues.
The raft of complaints against Blackmon — which include a federal discrimination complaint, a state employment retaliation complaint, a Title IX complaint and letters sent to the school board — present potential legal liability for the school, which has already been on rocky ground in recent years as it tries to claw its way out of a structural financial deficit and declining enrollment.
This month as more complaints surfaced, the board may consider removing Daugherty and one of the board’s four members, according to a draft agenda for a special meeting scheduled for last Thursday. That meeting has since been postponed.
Daugherty declined to comment on the board’s plans. Blackmon declined to comment on why the removal of those two people was put on the agenda.
Medina, the assistant principal, said she thinks the board’s plans to consider removing the executive director and board member constitute retaliation. She said she decided to speak up about her own sexual harassment complaint this week after learning about the planned board meeting.
“I can’t stay quiet anymore,” said Medina. She is also calling for Blackmon’s removal.
If the board removes Daugherty and the board member, it could bring more turnover and disruption for the school.
The board, which currently has four members, has had eight members resign or removed since January of last year, according to Daugherty. The board placed its executive director on leave last year after community members protested his plans at the time to close the high school, and since then it has had two interim executive directors.
Meanwhile, Daugherty, who became the interim director in August and is supposed to helm the school until June, is in the middle of heading the school’s selection of a new permanent executive director and has helped lead efforts to address the school’s financial and operational challenges.
Medina said she worries further turnover will devastate the school. “We are barely surviving,” she said.
The three employees‘ complaints all allege similar behavior by Blackmon, including sexually suggestive, inappropriate and retaliatory comments and behavior toward them.
The women’s names, other people’s names and several details were redacted in copies of the complaints reviewed by the Union-Tribune.
The complaints allege Blackmon’s inappropriate behavior began after he gained the title of president.
The women say Blackmon called them frequently by phone and visited them frequently on campus, taking up hours of their time in a day. If they didn’t return his calls or said they needed to leave, Blackmon got upset with them, two of the women said.
They say Blackmon made personal and inappropriate questions and comments to them, such as talking about his love life, asking them for relationship advice and making comments about their appearance.
“You’re really pretty … when you put on makeup and dress nice,” one woman said he told her. Another said he asked her age and why she enjoys wearing boots and dresses.
Medina said that during a June 17 budget meeting with other staff, Blackmon told the group: “If Ms. Medina was single, she would go out with me.” Medina, uncomfortable, said she held up the hand on which she wore her wedding ring and said she is happily married.
The women also reported that Blackmon told them he held control over their employment status and their pay. Two women reported he said, as the board president, he “can fire all your asses,” and that he threatened to slash their pay by tens of thousands of dollars.
One employee said Blackmon made a comment about his son getting a new stepmother, which she understood to refer to herself, and she told him to stop. Five days later, she alleged Blackmon told her he would dock her salary by $30,000 and made a remark about his son getting a new stepbrother, which she interpreted as a reference to her own son.
“This comment made me uncomfortable,” the employee wrote in her complaint. “His statements made me feel as if he was in control of my salary and my future.”
America’s Finest also received an anonymous complaint against Blackmon dated July 26, 2024, from someone who says she had used a ride-hail app as a passenger in a car driven by Blackmon. She requested anonymity in the letter, saying she was afraid Blackmon would retaliate against her, noting that he knows where she lives since he picked her up from her home.
In an interview, Blackmon said the complaint was complete fiction and that he had been told by Lyft that it had investigated and found it false.
A Lyft representative told the Union-Tribune that it was not able to locate a matching report.
In her letter, the complainant alleged that Blackmon asked her several inappropriate questions.
“I can tell you are a lovely Latina, can you speak to me in Spanish?” her complaint alleges he said. It also alleges he asked: “Are you almost 25 years old? Because you look pretty ripe.”
The next day, she said she saw Blackmon in his car driving by her house, where he had previously picked her up. “This really freaked me out,” she wrote.
The complaint was addressed to Lamont Jackson, who was then the superintendent of San Diego Unified and who was under investigation for separate sexual harassment allegations at the time. The complainant thought, incorrectly, that Blackmon was an employee of the district.
San Diego Unified spokesperson James Canning said the district received the letter and forwarded it to the charter school’s legal counsel. Canning said the district notified district administrators and the board trustee in charge of the Lincoln cluster and “confirmed nothing similar was happening there.”
Daugherty said the charter school’s board decided not to act on the complaint because the ride-hail company name was not identified in the letter and because it was anonymous.
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