Comanche County school board leaders, principal strive to blunt public outrage
By TIM CARPENTER
Kansas Reflector
COLDWATER — After the father of a small-town, southwest Kansas high school junior reported his daughter was the victim of sexual harassment and unwanted touching by her golf coach, he met with the coach and principal to lay out the teenager’s concerns and disgust.
By the end of that meeting in May, the father said, the three men seemed to have an understanding that the coach violated policy — if not the law — when he made a stunning comment to the girl during golf practice: He told her to grip a club like it was a penis.
At the meeting, the coach signed a document affirming he directed lurid comments at the girl, according to a copy of the document obtained by Kansas Reflector. The student confirmed the accusations in a report with law enforcement and in an interview with Kansas Reflector.
The document said the coach on multiple occasions grabbed the student’s hips, waist and shoulders while standing behind her. She also said that he held the back of her thigh, purportedly to improve her golf posture.
Ty Theurer eventually resigned as the South Central High School golf coach, which was his part-time assignment in the Comanche County School District. He didn’t surrender a much more influential position in the district: Superintendent.
Kansas Reflector interviews with students, parents, educators and elected officials tied to Comanche County schools revealed a concerted effort by insiders to shield the district’s top administrator, despite ongoing law enforcement and Title IX investigations. People with knowledge of Theurer’s past said the golf practice incident wasn’t the only example of inappropriate behavior by the superintendent, who for years personally controlled how the district responded to alleged sexual harassment.
Kansas Reflector reporting shows the Comanche County school board president and vice president along with the high school principal collaborated to minimize disciplinary action against Theurer. It indicated the president sought to tamp down scrutiny of the superintendent as word of the student’s allegation made its way through the sparsely populated district.
In a brief interview with Kansas Reflector, Theurer declined to respond to questions about the complaint.
“I’m not going to answer any of those questions,” he said. “I am under investigation. I’m not allowed to speak about it.”
‘A little bold’
The student who Theurer made the salacious comments to said she had been standing near him at a the Coldwater golf course during practice this spring, according to a Comanche County Sheriff’s Office report and an interview with Kansas Reflector. The student said Theurer approached her and said, “OK, now I’m going to be a little bold.”
She said he moved closer to her and whispered details of how he expected her to hold golf clubs. She quoted him: “I want you to imagine you have a penis.”
When the student responded with alarm to Theurer’s remark, she said, the superintendent cupped his hands around his groin, saying, “Just like this.”
Her description for law enforcement and Kansas Reflector also said the superintendent “ran his hand against the back of my neck and slowly moved me forward to help me with my putting position.” The summary said Theurer grabbed the back of her thigh as he urged her to bend her knees.
The student’s parents requested anonymity in this story to protect the privacy of their teenage daughter. Kansas Reflector and its parent organization, States Newsroom, do not identify survivors of sexual abuse.
In May, the student’s father reported the behavior to Andy Uhl, the Comanche County school board’s vice president. Uhl apparently passed the dad’s complaint up the chain of command. That resulted in the father’s meeting with Theurer and South Central High School principal Bud Valerius.
But instead of all seven members of the school board assuming a role in a personnel issue involving the person hired by the board to serve as superintendent, Valerius dealt with the student’s complaint as if it were a clash between coach and athlete, emails show. Valerius took that approach despite conflicts of interest, including his job as a direct subordinate of Theurer, his assignment as assistant golf coach and his friendship with Theurer.
School board president Kelly Herd said in an email to other board members that in her opinion, “There was nothing in the complaint that would warrant administrative leave” for superintendent Theurer. Instead, she told board members, coach Theurer had been given a “warning” to not offend again.
The school board replaced the superintendent as the district’s Title IX coordinator with oversight of sexual harassment or sex discrimination complaints because it would be improper for Theurer to investigate himself. Those duties were passed several months ago to the district’s elementary school principal, who would be expected initiate an investigation of the superintendent.
Nothing has been handled right’
Dean Yoder is another member of the Comanche County school board, which governs the education of the 300 students near the Oklahoma boarder. Besides Coldwater, the district draws students from communities including Protection, Wilmore and Buttermilk. The district extends into Kiowa and Clark counties.
A majority of the school board was excluded at the outset from the process of dealing with the leadership crisis, Yoder said.
The school board president ordered him to “stand down,” Yoder said, and she argued the controversy involving Theurer had to be resolved quietly.
“Nothing has been handled right,” Yoder said.
Bill Faflick, executive director of the Kansas State High School Activities Association, said he wasn’t aware of the controversy in Comanche County schools before being contacted by Kansas Reflector.
He said the student who made the complaint should know she could have done nothing to warrant harassment by a school administrator. Assuming the complaint was proven, he said, the incident would make “every dad shudder.”
“If true, certainly that’s inappropriate. It’s wrong as wrong can be. There’s no place for that in school sports,” said Faflick, who worked for 30 years in administrative roles in Wichita public schools.
Herd, the school board president, appeared to shield information about the case from the full school board. In a video obtained by Kansas Reflector, Herd abruptly adjourned a June board meeting to circumvent discussion of Theurer’s conduct. She ordered her colleagues to stop speaking with community members about the controversy.
Herd resisted pleas, including from the golf athlete’s parents, to convene a special meeting so the board could learn more about the allegations and investigatory process, and weigh potential disciplinary options.
Since May, the board president sent a series of emails about the Theurer controversy to fellow board members. In that correspondence, Herd said she and the board’s vice president, in conjunction with the high school principal, dealt effectively with the sexual harassment complaint. Herd said “normal procedure” was followed.
Herd, who didn’t respond to Kansas Reflector requests for comment, said in an email to the board that the complaint ought to be viewed as a teachable moment for a coach rather than a leadership disaster centered on a district superintendent.
“As with any other HS coach, Bud (Valerius, high school principal) is the one to handle these issues. All coaches are given a warning and this will be considered (Theurer’s),” Herd’s email to board members said. “Bud called me and Andy (Uhl) to update us. We both agreed it has been addressed and handled. I assure you this was not taken lightly and it was not brushed aside.”
In another email, the board president instructed her elected peers to cooperate with her goal of limiting public knowledge of Theurer’s plight.
“This conversation regarding Ty has gotten far out of control in our community. We as board members must be careful to not continue to fuel the fire,” Herd wrote. “He has been written up and it is in his personnel file. He did not deny nor make excuses.”
Ongoing investigations
The student’s parents, frustrated school board leadership hadn’t moved to guarantee student safety, filed a report with local law enforcement. Comanche County authorities referred the case of alleged battery to the Ford County Sheriff’s Office.
The school board’s president and the student’s parents said the sexual harassment complaint presented to the school district was forwarded to the Kansas Association of School Boards, which advises school boards on compliance with federal Title IX law. A representative of KASB has interviewed students and others associated within the school district regarding Theurer.
School board members expect to be briefed in executive session on the report, the school board president said.
Eventually, the school board association’s draft report must be shared with the superintendent and complainant. A “decision-maker,” potentially an independent hearing officer, would examine evidence and make a determination about whether harassment occurred. Both sides could appeal.
In a recent email to board members, Herd recommended board members fend off any reporter asking questions about Theurer by explaining they were unable to comment.
“I am not keeping secrets. Nor am I acting on my own,” the school board president said.
Creeps me out’
South Central High School graduate Isabel Hackney said in an interview with Kansas Reflector that Theurer’s objectionable pronouncements to students extended beyond the golf course.
Hackney said she accidentally collided with a male friend at the school in October 2024, and it was caught on security video. She and some other students decided to watch the footage in the high school’s administration office.
While they were watching, she said, the superintendent emerged from his office. Theurer asked to repeatedly watch the clip, Hackney said.
“Then he said, ‘Izzy, you just got teabagged,’ ” Hackney said, repeating slang for putting a scrotum near a face. “From then on, I felt honestly scared to be around Mr. Theurer.”
Emily Hackney, Isabel’s mother, subsequently confronted Theurer outside the high school about his remark. She told the superintendent it was wrong to speak to her daughter that way.
“He was trying to ignore me,” Emily Hackney said. “He tried to deny it.”
Klete Hackney, Isabel’s father, said his daughter feared retaliation if the family complained to anyone involved with the school district. Instead, Isabel refused to shake the superintendent’s hand at graduation this spring.
“She did it for herself and she did it for all the kids,” Klete Hackney said.
Upcoming board meeting
An attempt could be made during the school board’s meeting Wednesday evening at South Central High School to compel a vote by the seven-member board on a motion to place Theurer on administrative leave.
“If you don’t know anything about it, it’s because that’s the plan — sweep it under the rug and nobody will ever know,” said Zach Ellis, who has two children at the high school.
Ellis said he signed up to speak at the next school board meeting, but he’s not certain the board would allow him to say what he wanted to say. On social media, Ellis encouraged people with ties to the school district to join him at the meeting.
He said the school board by now should have adopted new policies or procedures designed to deter sexual harassment. It was “absolutely ridiculous” the school board allowed a superintendent under investigation for sexual harassment and battery to run the district, he said.
“I’ve got a daughter who is a junior. I’m all about making sure that her safety is protected,” Ellis said. “She avoids him. Her words not mine: ‘He creeps me out, so I avoid him.’ ”
‘Admit his guilt’
The father of the former golf team member said that during the May meeting with the principal and superintendent the principal read aloud a one-page document that summarized the daughter’s allegations against the superintendent. Theurer and Valerius agreed the signing confirmed they discussed the memo. The superintendent didn’t challenge the student’s recollections at the time, the father said.
“I said, ‘I’m not leaving this office without some documentation that this conversation happened,'” the father said. “That’s when the principal said, ‘Hey, we can all sign it here. He can sign it to admit his guilt.’ ”
In an interview, the student said that when she joined the high school’s golf team, other girls warned her to “be careful, Ty’s a little weird.”
“My first day we were in a line,” she said. “He came up behind me and placed his hands on my hips. I wasn’t asked if that was OK. Whenever I asked the golf girls … ‘Hey, does he do this a lot?’ And they’re, like, ‘Yeah, you’ll get used to it.’ ”
She quit the team after the superintendent made the penis remark.
‘How could this not be a priority?’
In June, the student’s parents attended a regularly scheduled Comanche County school board meeting with the goal of sharing information about what their daughter said she endured while coached by Theurer.
Herd, the board president, called the mother before the meeting in an attempt to dissuade her from making public comments about the superintendent, the mother said.
The mother decided to go to the board meeting. She attempted to read from a written statement. Herd cut her off by adjourning the meeting. A video obtained by Kansas Reflector showed Herd and other board members walking out of the room with the mother still reading from her prepared remarks.
“How could this not be a priority? Not for my family alone, but for the school community?” the mother said in an interview. “The sudden adjournment and insistence that such an issue of import was literally worth walking out on is deeply troubling.”
She said the school board president’s attempt to bury the complaint was “completely unacceptable” and risked the health and safety of students in the district’s three schools. Failure of the school board to address the superintendent’s misconduct ran “the risk of appearing complicit in continuing toxic and dangerous situations,” the mother said.
“There is no result that can serve justice other than immediate termination,” she said.