Complaint: Lansing schools acting superintendent danced in his underwear in front of intern

This story has been updated with a statement from Lansing School District acting Superintendent Mark Coscarella. It also has been updated to correct a quote from Lansing school board Trustee Guillermo López.

LANSING — Lansing School District officials have known for months their top superintendent candidate was accused of sexually harassing a former intern in a locked classroom at a Holt elementary school.

On June 26, Casey Sterle sent a message to then-Superintendent Yvonne Caamal Canul through the Lansing School District contact page and attached a copy of a police report she filed in 2002 against Mark Coscarella, now acting superintendent of Lansing schools.

She emailed the information again to school board President Rachel Willis in mid-July, according to documents provided to the State Journal. Willis sent an email acknowledging she had received Sterle's message but did not comment on the incident outlined in the police report.

Since then, the school board promoted Coscarella to acting superintendent and identified him as a top candidate for the full-time superintendent position left open after Caamal Canul's retirement.

Willis said she was unavailable to comment directly for this story. In an email, she directed a reporter to a statement sent by district spokesman Bob Kolt.

School board members will take this allegation and all others seriously and will review the matter with a third-party investigator, according to the statement. 

"The district was aware of these unsubstantiated allegations when Dr. Coscarella was hired by the Lansing School District in a leadership position in 2014," the statement reads. "The public can be assured that the elected school board members will review all comments and make the right decision."

Caamal Canul could not be reached for comment. 

Coscarella did not initially respond to requests for comment, but, in a statement sent through Kolt hours after this story published, he said, "I am angered by the false allegations that Ms. Sterle has made against me in reference to my time as her mentor teacher. They are absolutely not true. Since I was first made aware of her report, I have vehemently stated that the incident did not happen. Details of her story were proven to be false almost twenty years ago." 

In an email Tuesday morning, Kolt declined to clarify what, precisely, had been proven false and by whom.

"I am aware of the facts and details proven false, but it would be inappropriate for me to share that information with the public," he wrote.

Report: Former intern said Coscarella disrobed in front of her

The report describes an afternoon in 2000 when Coscarella stripped down to his gray underwear and danced, straddling but not touching her, in his first-grade classroom at Holt's Elliott Elementary school. He had locked the door to the classroom and shut the blinds, Sterle told an Ingham County sheriff's deputy.

He also suggested she take off her clothes and asked her to keep the incident "our little secret."

Coscarella was the teacher assigned to mentor Sterle during her internship program when she was a student in Michigan State University's teacher education program. He was her immediate supervisor who conducted her performance evaluations throughout the internship.

Coscarella made repeated sexually suggestive comments about her and other women, the report states. At the time, she described it as "a sexual sense of humor" that made her uncomfortable.

The conduct was not a crime, the deputy who took Sterle's complaint wrote in his 2002 report. Michigan statute considers sexual conduct to be a crime only if there is contact, and Sterle reported to police that Coscarella danced in his underwear near her, but did not touch her. Behavior is considered criminal indecent exposure only if genitalia or buttocks are exposed, statute reads.

Sterle said she told MSU officials about her experience right after it happened. She didn't give a detailed account at the time, but recommended they stop placing students with Coscarella.

She reported the stripping incident to police in 2002, two years after it occurred, because she learned Coscarella had been accused of providing a movie that included sexual intercourse to players on the Holt High School baseball team he coached during a trip to a training camp in Florida.

Students also said they watched pornography on the trip, according to Lansing State Journal stories published at the time.

Sterle said she sought a copy of the police report earlier this year when she saw news of Caamal Canul's retirement and considered the possibility that Coscarella could get the job. That motivated her to email Lansing Schools officials about her experience with him, she said. 

"I just want Lansing School District to be a safe place," Sterle said in an interview with the State Journal. "I want the teachers in that district to know and the parents in that district to know, if he asks you to close the door, it's not safe."

Sterle said neither Willis nor Caamal Canul responded to her first email. She sent a second email to Willis on July 14, documents show.

In the second email, Sterle said she described a more recent encounter she had with Coscarella outside a 2017 Ingham Intermediate School District meeting. He followed her outside after she told him she did not wish to speak.

"Your district has a right to know," she wrote. "He should not be in charge of people. He will abuse his power and he does not think it wrong to do so."

Sterle offered to answer questions about her experience with Coscarella, thanked the women for their commitment to education and apologized for not contacting them sooner.

Other than a Willis' acknowledgement that she received Sterle's second email, Sterle said no district officials have contacted her.

Sterle read the police report about her 2000 run-in with Coscarella for the first time this year when she learned he was up for Lansing schools superintendent.

She had previously kept quiet about the incident because she was embarrassed to have her name reported in the media in connection with the harassment.

Sterle said she changed her mind because she was uncomfortable knowing Coscarella could assume so much power within the district.

"He was my teacher," she said. "He was writing my evaluation for me to be able to get a job. It was the capstone of my education to become a teacher. He held all the cards for me. And he took all of his clothes off in front of me and he asked me to take my clothes off.

"Do I feel like that was an abuse of power? Yes I do."

After Holt, Coscarella worked at MDE, St. Johns, Lansing

Coscarella resigned from Holt schools in 2002 after the incident about students watching pornography on the baseball trip was investigated. He denied the allegations at the time.

Then-Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III decided not to charge Coscarella with a crime according to Lansing State Journal archives.

Coscarella was hired at the Michigan Department of Education in 2003, Deputy State Personnel Director Matthew Fedorchuk said.

In 2012, he left to become curriculum director of St. Johns Public Schools. He was hired as curriculum director of Lansing schools in 2014. 

Coscarella was described as the district's Title IX coordinator in 2016 and as of Monday afternoon was listed as the coordinator on at least one district webpage. Title IX coordinators are charged with investigating claims of sexual harassment and assault, interviewing witnesses, reviewing evidence and talking to law enforcement officers.

Coscarella was lauded as a top candidate for superintendent at an Oct. 17 meeting where school board members agreed to search internally, not externally, for the next person to lead the district.

During that meeting, Trustee Guillermo López noted that Caamal Canul was charged with developing a pipeline of people who could lead the district after her retirement.

"I think with the search that we will do we will find if she did a good job," López said, eliciting laughs from other board members.

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Contact Carol Thompson at (517) 377-1018 or ckthompson@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @thompsoncarolk.