He left Pasco schools under a cloud, then landed more teaching jobs

Tammy Zybell was beside herself.

Her son came home from Lecanto High School in Citrus County in late January, complaining about a teacher who he said belittled him in front of the entire class. The teacher questioned her son’s intelligence, announcing a poor test grade to everyone and wondering aloud how he had ever gotten into the pre-International Baccalaureate program.

Zybell complained to the school, which days later started an investigation. That’s when other students told officials that the teacher separated classes into “smart” and “dumb” groups, and made inappropriate comments about sex and race, among other concerns. The teacher resigned before the district took any action.

Meanwhile, Zybell did some digging of her own.

She discovered articles from the Tampa Bay Times about the same teacher, Michael Maynard, years earlier having made disparaging remarks about students at several Pasco County schools. And she found a disciplinary file from the state Education Practices Commission, showing Maynard had been reprimanded in 2017, placed on probation for a year and required to take a college-level course in education ethics.

She fired off a letter to Florida education commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. asking how a teacher with a yearslong record of verbally abusing students could have landed in her child’s school.

“When does one lose the privilege of negatively impacting and traumatizing our children?” she wrote.

Reportable offenses

In 2007, the Florida Department of Education made it easier for schools to identify potentially problematic teachers who previously had been able to escape notice.

The department launched myfloridateacher.com, an online database of discipline actions taken against teachers’ state certification. It required districts to report offenses for consideration and possible inclusion on the site.

The move came amid concerns that school districts were allowing educators to resign over actions they faced firing for, and not telling anyone the reasons. These teachers then could move into new jobs elsewhere.

The website includes records dating to 1981. But the information is helpful only to the extent it is used.

Pasco County officials understood all that when they sent files about Maynard, who retired rather than face expected dismissal from that district. Assistant Superintendent Kevin Shibley, who first handled complaints against Maynard in 2009, said the district did not ask the state to take any specific action.

“But we knew the things we were counseling him on were reportable offenses,” Shibley said.

During their 2016 investigation into Maynard’s classroom demeanor, Pasco officials heard accusations that he publicly questioned the gender identity of a transgender student, made fun of a student’s Christianity, called students “stupid” and “pathetic,” and caused some students in his classes to cry. Maynard previously had received several warning letters, leading to the superintendent’s recommendation he be dismissed.

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The expectation was that, once the state acted, all other districts would be able to find the outcome during background checks and act accordingly.

Maynard, 70, did not hide his past from Citrus County schools. On his application to work at Lecanto High, he wrote that he had been disciplined “for making disparaging political and religious remarks.” Not disclosing the information could have cost him a job for misrepresenting himself on an official form.

Lindsay Blair, a Citrus schools spokesperson, said the district’s human resources department checked Maynard’s state file and told Lecanto High officials about his history in Pasco. It was up to the school to conduct interviews and reference checks, and decide how to proceed, she said.

Maynard had successfully completed his probation and worked for about a year as a substitute teacher in Hernando County, where he tried unsuccessfully three times to open a charter school. He spent just over two years teaching at the Cypress Creek Juvenile Offender Correctional Center in Citrus before applying at Lecanto.

His references were positive. The principal of the correctional center school, for instance, said Maynard has a “unique ability to teach at each individual student level,” whether low-achieving or gifted, and his efforts yielded strong academic outcomes.

One thing went unnoticed, though — the reference from Pasco was not his final supervisor. Rather, he included a former district principal and one-time partner in the Hernando charter school proposal, who left the Pasco district under investigation before Maynard’s departure.

Lecanto hired Maynard to start in the fall of 2022.

New job, more trouble

A year and a half later, the administration found cause to begin disciplinary proceedings against him.

“Mr. Maynard did tell students that if he discussed ‘sex, drugs and violence’ when teaching vocabulary words, students would learn,” assistant principal Richard Crowley wrote in a recently closed investigative file. “Mr. Maynard did tell the class that in high school he asked girls to get in the back of his car to show them how good he was with his hands. Mr. Maynard did ask a student if there was porn on his phone when the student asked if he could charge his phone in his classroom.”

Maynard declined to write a response, according to Crowley’s report. But he asked officials if the students interviewed for the investigation had been drug tested, because he believed his class had “a bunch of students that were on drugs,” Crowley added.

In emails to the Times, Maynard explained his rationale for criticizing the student in class, suggesting the boy had a cavalier and disrespectful attitude toward education and his teacher. For his mother, Maynard wrote, “the only thing that mattered was her son’s feelings were hurt.”

He said he resigned from Lecanto High rather than deal with “celebrating quizzes with scores of 4 out of 15, Mom’s for Liberty banning books, finding drug paraphernalia in my classroom, out of control absenteeism, living under the threat of empowered students and working long hours for little pay.”

As was the case in Pasco County, he portrayed himself as a victim of “Trump cult Evangelicals” who, he said, made unfounded allegations against him. He pointed to his academic successes with many students — the state recognized him in 2016 for his students’ consistently strong performance — and downplayed the criticism about his demeanor.

“Pulitzer Prize winning novels are banned, Romeo is a child molester and pervert, Dr. Suess is crass and insensitive, and English teachers have been reduced to teaching graphic novels (comic books) because the kids don’t like to read,” he wrote. “And, like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, the kids have been empowered to attack you if you don’t keep them happy. Everyone gets a trophy!”

Eyes wide open

The Citrus County School District has sent its file to the Department of Education for review and possible action. A department spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny whether officials are conducting any investigation into alleged misconduct by Maynard.

Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association teachers union, said he was not familiar with the specifics of this situation. He said he could see the different sides of this debate.

On one hand, he said, everyone wants the best teachers in the classroom, yet some people are not cut out for the job. They might have strong academic skills but poor classroom management, or vice versa. Some might get pushed out.

There’s always the chance that a teacher is wrongfully accused of improper behavior, he added. That’s why there’s due process. And even if a teacher makes a poor decision, Spar added, they might find success when given a second chance.

Florida’s teacher shortage only complicates matters, he noted.

“That might mean people who don’t deserve a second chance, or a third or a fourth, might have one,” Spar said.

The point for employers, he said, is to know what they’re facing and to make a decision with eyes wide open. That’s the point of the state database.

“Obviously, districts have to make decisions based on the information they have,” Spar said.