CUSTODIAN

Employees complained, but nothing happened to the janitor — almost as though he was being protected, one employee said.

On Sept. 7, a female student approached a teacher during a morning class, appeared agitated and wanted to talk, according to the records. The section that alleges the custodian abused the girl is blacked out.

“But you did tell someone, right?” the teacher said she asked the girl. “But (student name redacted) said no, she had never told anyone.”

Was it another student or an adult? the teacher said she asked. “She said to me, ‘It was the custodian at Cedarwood.’”

Cedarwood Elementary is on Bartfield Drive on Columbus’ South Side.

Columbus police are investigating the allegations. The Dispatch isn’t identifying the janitor because he hasn’t been charged with a crime.

Staff at Cedarwood described the 61-year-old custodian as a man who talked like he ran the school, sometimes getting into arguments with teachers for having boxes of supplies stacked in their classrooms, making comments about their appearance, touching them, and once blocking the front door to the school and not letting them pass without a hug.

“He used to stand at the breakfast door and all the kids used to have to hug him as a rite of passage,” one employee told the investigator.

One teacher said the kids in her fifth-grade class told her that the custodian would invite them to come to his office around 3 p.m. to get cookies and chips. The heavy door would automatically swing shut behind them as they entered.

The school district didn’t remove the custodian from Cedarwood for three and half weeks after the allegations, according to the documents.

“Each case is different,” district spokesman Scott Varner said Friday when asked if it wasn’t district policy to remove employees immediately from schools when they are accused of sexually assaulting a child.

Varner said that, in this case, the district immediately contacted police and worked with them, ultimately suspending the custodian Oct. 3 after receiving additional information.

The Dispatch has reported that, according to his personnel file, the custodian underwent training in December 2010 after he “engaged in inappropriate conversation and contact with female students” at East High School. Weeks later, he was transferred to Cedarwood Elementary.

On Oct. 1, the custodian agreed to be interviewed by a district investigator in the presence of a union official, and was asked about an interview with police days earlier. “I don’t know what they were talking about,” he said, according to the investigator’s notes. “That wasn’t me. I don’t even know the girl they were talking about.

“I never asked for hugs. People just want to hug me. They come up and automatically hug me.”

Asked whether the school had reviewed surveillance video to see the custodian’s interactions with students and staff, Varner said he couldn’t comment on the investigation.

When a district investigator asked the custodian whether he had made comments at work about women’s toes, and told them that he had a toe fetish, as multiple employees said, he responded: “Not anymore” — not since a meeting about the practice with district administrators in August, the investigator’s notes say.

The district investigator also interviewed the girl, who said the sexual abuse happened during breakfast. The custodian “would always give her hugs,” she said. She never told her parents about it, she said.