Peninsula teacher charged with student-sex relationship was deemed ‘dangerous for children’ years ago

A Wisconsin school district fired him after parents filed a sexual harassment complaint against him.

A 59-year-old high school teacher charged with engaging in a two-year sexual relationship with a student was hired by the Jefferson Union High School District in Daly City despite being deemed “dangerous for the children in his custody” by a former district where he taught.

Hector Vazquez, a Spanish teacher at Westmoor High School in Daly City, was charged earlier this month with five felonies and is accused of having sexual relations with a girl starting when she was 16 years old.

Before Jefferson Union High School District hired him in 2011, a district in Madison, Wisconsin fired Vazquez in response to a Title XI sexual harassment complaint filed against him by a group of more than two dozen parents.

Jefferson Union High Superintendent Terry Ann Deloria said that the district “did not have any reports about suspected inappropriate sexual misconduct” by Vazquez prior to April 2019 when law enforcement informed her of its investigation.

Yet, a quick Google search by district staff would have produced at least two articles about the allegations made against Vazquez in 2005 when he was teaching in the Madison Metropolitan School District.

Deloria said in a statement that Vazquez cleared the district’s standard fingerprint and background checks. She would not answer any additional questions from a reporter, including whether the district checks news coverage or the social media accounts of prospective hires before allowing them to work with students.

“Because this is still an active investigation, we cannot provide further details about Mr. Vasquez’s employment in compliance with laws assuring his due process and privacy rights,” Deloria said in a statement.

Deloria placed Vazquez on administrative leave on April 11.

‘Dangerous for the children in his custody’

Vazquez was hired by the Madison Metropolitan School District in Aug. 2001 as a Spanish bi-language teacher at Sennett Middle School.

During his first year at the district, several female students complained that Vazquez “sometimes physically got to close to them,” according to a report from an arbitrator. The principal at the time spoke with Vazquez about the complaints but no disciplinary action was taken.

During the 2003-2004 school year, Vazquez allegedly used excessive force on students during at least two separate occasions. In one instance, he grabbed the student’s arm so hard that he left a handprint, the report states.

The following school year, Vazquez was transferred to another school in the district — where he again became a major source of contention.

In June 2005, a group of parents voiced their concerns to the school’s principal, including that Vazquez showed an R-rated movie to students, told explicit stories from his personal life in class and encroached on the personal space of multiple students, the report states.

Administrators allegedly conducted an internal investigation at that time but determined none of the concerns rose to a level of termination, according to the report.

Several months later, in Aug. 2005, the parents filed a Title IX complaint against the district claiming that it had subjected their children to sexual harassment because they failed to properly investigate their prior complaints regarding Vazquez’s conduct.

In response to the complaint, the district’s superintendent placed Vazquez on paid leave and asked the Madison Police Department to investigate his past conduct.

In a report from the police department, an officer determined that Vazquez did not violate the district’s policies but that he “intently focused on gaining a familiarity with his female students (in a way) that is inappropriate for a teacher and dangerous for the children in his custody.”

“I feel Mr. Hector Vazquez is a liability for the Madison Metropolitan School District and should no longer be employed as a teacher of children,” the officer wrote in the report.

The district also contracted with a psychotherapist to evaluate Vazquez and help determine whether he was a danger to students, the record states.

In an interview with the psychotherapist, Vazquez admitted to sharing personal stories in class including going to a topless bar and attending concerts where a woman was only dressed in whipped cream. He also admitted that he was “sexually attracted to people who are substantially younger than he” and that he had more than 23,000 pornographic picture files on his personal computer, according to the psychotherapist’s report.

The psychotherapist wrote in a report that he believed Vazquez would “continue to engage in nontouching boundary violations of students” and “exercise poor judgment in his own personal boundaries.”

The district’s board of education voted to fire Vazquez in July 2006.

San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe said that prosecutors are looking at the prior allegations made against Vazquez in Wisconsin and trying to determine if any of the information can be introduced as evidence.

Authorities in San Mateo County learned of Vazquez’s alleged relationship with the student in Daly City when a friend of the victim told school officials.

Vazquez was arrested May 7 at his home and entered a not guilty plea on May 9 to charges including three felony counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, sodomy with a minor and digital penetration by a foreign object, according to Wagstaffe.