The founder of a north Minneapolis charter school has been removed by the school’s board following a second lawsuit by a student over sexual abuse at the school.
The complaint, filed Wednesday, says that school leaders at Harvest Best Academy, including CEO Eric Mahmoud, looked the other way when parents and staff members brought forward complaints about a former Teacher of the Year.
By Friday, the board had taken action, ending Mahmoud’s more than three decades leading the schools that became Harvest Best.
“This was an important but difficult decision for the board,” Chair Ezra Hyland said in a statement late Friday. He noted Mahmoud’s contributions and the school’s track record of high test scores for African American students, but said it was time for new leadership.
The Harvest Best board will vote on an interim executive director on Tuesday.
Mahmoud did not respond to Sahan Journal’s email request for comment.
The lawsuit was brought by a former middle-school student and claims the school should be held liable for failing to stop former teacher Abdul Wright from assaulting her.
“It is time for reckoning, it is time for accountability, it’s time for cleanup at the Harvest Best community,” said Jeff Anderson, a lawyer representing the former student, at a news conference Thursday.
Wright, 38, the first charter school teacher to be named Minnesota Teacher of the Year, is also a defendant in the lawsuit. He was criminally charged last August for repeatedly sexually assaulting a former student from March to September 2017 when she was 14 and 15 years old. He has pleaded not guilty to one count of criminal sexual conduct. A jury trial is currently scheduled to begin on June 23.
According to the lawsuit, the former student’s father brought his concerns to Wright and Mahmoud, when he discovered extensive phone and text communication between Wright and his teen daughter. The father then sought a restraining order and reached a settlement agreement with Wright limiting contact with his daughter.
But, the lawsuit alleges, Mahmoud did not report the father’s suspicions to law enforcement, as required by the state’s mandated reporting law, or take other remedial action to protect students from Wright.
“For five years, we have been focusing on the perils that are allowed to persist at the Best Academy under the leadership of Eric Mahmoud, and the choices that he and his staff continue to make to protect offenders and not the kids,” Anderson said at the news conference. “It’s not a safe school, and hasn’t been, in our view, for a decade.”
The civil lawsuit accuses the school, now known as Harvest Best Academy, of negligence. It argues that the school failed to protect the student and take action against Wright. Wright is accused of sexual battery. It seeks a jury trial and monetary damages in excess of $50,000.
“I think that his status and him being Teacher of the Year really was a reason that a lot of people turned a blind eye. I just don’t think anything that happened was a coincidence. I think it was all premeditated,” said the student, named in the lawsuit as “Doe 605,” in a statement sent by Anderson’s office.
Harvest Best Academy said in a statement that its legal team was reviewing the lawsuit to determine next steps.
“The school takes these claims very seriously,” the statement said in part. “Harvest Best Academy is committed to ensuring that our learning environment remains safe, supportive, and conducive to the success of all our students and staff members.”
Reached by phone, Wright declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The lawsuit comes weeks after the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that public schools and other government entities can be held liable for hiring decisions in some cases. That case centered on the actions of a different teacher, Aaron Hjermstad, employed by the same network of schools that are now consolidated as Harvest Best Academy. The school serves predominantly African American students.
In 2021, Hjermstad was convicted of sexually abusing four boys. He is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence for those crimes. Ahead of his sentencing in that case, Hjermstad attempted to flee, and police in Idaho found him with thousands of videos showing him assaulting children. Last September, a grand jury indicted Hjermstad with 12 more counts of criminal sexual conduct. That case is ongoing.
Anderson also filed the previous lawsuit against Harvest Best and Hjermstad, which resulted in the Minnesota Supreme Court narrowing the use of governmental immunity in hiring decisions. He said that ruling should put public district and charter schools on notice that they can be held liable for not taking allegations of sexual assault seriously.
“Administrators and officials have just kind of been taught, informed, that they’re untouchable under the law,” he told Sahan Journal in an interview Tuesday. “So I think there’s a culture of permissiveness and insularity that the law gave them.”
He said he is also exploring lawsuits against other schools that, until the recent ruling, would have been immune from legal liability.
The new lawsuit against Harvest Best shows striking parallels between Wright’s alleged grooming behavior and Hjermstad’s. Both coached middle school basketball for the Harvest Network schools. Both took students to Timberwolves games. Both purchased snacks for students. Both cultivated relationships with students’ families. Both used their personal vehicles to give students rides home.
Hjermstad and Wright’s employment at Harvest Network schools overlapped from 2016 to 2020. At the time, Mahmoud’s educational model was widely regarded as an exemplar of how a school could serve African American children and close achievement gaps. CNN’s Soledad O’Brien filmed an episode of her documentary series “Black in America” about his schools. Mahmoud published a book about closing academic achievement gaps and was inducted into the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Hall of Fame. In 2016, Wright was named Minnesota Teacher of the Year, further boosting the schools’ status.
Test scores at the school have fallen over the past decade, since its claims of closing the achievement gap. Last year, 20% of Black students at Harvest Best were proficient in math, and 34% were proficient in reading — on par with the state average for Black students’ math scores, and slightly above the state average for Black students’ reading scores. Harvest Best test scores are still well above Minneapolis Public Schools’ scores for Black students.
In its statement, Harvest Best claimed it is “among the highest-performing schools for African Americans in Minnesota and is founded on a culture of high expectations for its students that also celebrates academic achievement.”
The lawsuit alleges two examples of sexual misconduct allegations against Wright of which the school had knowledge. In 2012, a staff member claimed that Wright assaulted her in his classroom at what was then called Best Academy, according to a Minneapolis police report. A second staff member also said Wright had sexually assaulted her the previous year, police records say. The first staff member reported her complaint to human resources and law enforcement, but Minneapolis police did not recommend criminal charges and the school did not take disciplinary action.
Then, in the 2016-2017 school year, just after winning the Minnesota Teacher of the Year award, Wright singled out one eighth-grade student for “special attention and treatment.” This grooming behavior escalated into repeated sexual assault. Though several staff members raised questions about “concerning conduct by Wright towards Plaintiff,” those staff members and school officials did not take action.
In the summer of 2017, after she had graduated middle school, the student’s father found evidence of extensive phone and text communication between Wright and his daughter, including calls at 3 a.m. He called for a meeting with Mahmoud and Wright. During that meeting, her father “stated that such communication went beyond a student/teacher relationship,” the lawsuit reads.
But according to the complaint, Wright and Mahmoud did not respond to the father’s questions, report the alleged behavior to law enforcement or the Minnesota Student Maltreatment Program as required by Minnesota’s mandatory reporting law, or take other steps to protect students. Instead, the complaint alleges, “Eric Mahmoud talked about his own stature in the community and his community work and Defendant Wright as a stand-up teacher.”
That fall, the father pursued a restraining order against Wright and ultimately reached a settlement. That agreement stated that all communication with his daughter would be transparent and professional; that they could communicate via email; and that they could not have contact on social media.
“Abdul Wright had to show up in court and had to agree with Doe 605’s father, make an agreement to limit his contact to appropriate teacher-student conduct,” said Molly Burke, another lawyer representing the plaintiff. “Her father had to do this on his own with the tool that he could think of, the best tool, because of the meeting with Mahmoud and his failure to take any action and to be responsive to the concerns in any way.”
Even after that legal agreement, Anderson said, Mahmoud did not take action against Wright.
Mahmoud testified under oath in proceedings for the lawsuit against Harvest Best and Hjermstad. The new lawsuit says that during that testimony, Mahmoud said that prior to March 2020, he had never received a report of suspicions of sexual abuse of any students at the schools that he oversaw.
“The allegations revealed by Plaintiff’s father to Eric Mahmoud belie and directly contradict Eric Mahmoud’s assertions made under oath,” the lawsuit reads.
Wright’s personnel file from the Harvest Best Network shows three employee infractions in his career there, all related to tardiness or attendance.
“To me, this whole enterprise run by Eric Mahmoud is about profit and prosperity, about awards and acclaim,” Anderson said at the news conference. “And little, if nothing, has been done to keep the kids in the school safe from predators like Wright or predators like Hjermstad.”
