What To Do When A School Leader Makes Inappropriate Comments About Your Teen: Lessons From The Keith Ervin Incident
My 16-year-old daughter Lila slung her canvas student council backpack by the front door last month, popped open a root beer from the fridge, and leaned against the counter while I chopped carrots for spaghetti night. “That new school board guy, Keith Ervin? He was weird at the meet-and-greet today,” she said, picking at a loose thread on her jeans.
I wiped my hand on my apron and asked what she meant. She shifted her weight, stared at her sneakers. “I went up to introduce myself, because we’re talking about funding new bleachers for the gym next semester. He pulled me in for a hug, and it was too long. Then when I pulled back, he said, ‘Wow, you look hot today. Way prettier than the kid photos on your student council page.’”
My knife froze mid-chop. The sink tap was still running, dripping cold water over the spinach I’d washed, and I had that same tight feeling in my chest I get when something’s very wrong and you don’t know what to say first. I asked who else was around, and she said three other student council members were ten feet away talking to another board member, no one heard. She’d laughed awkwardly and walked away, like you do when you’re 16 and you don’t want to make a scene in front of adults.
I’d met Ervin a couple months earlier at a PTA fundraiser. He ran a small hardware store downtown, handed out free chocolate chip cookies with his campaign flyers, talked a lot about how much he cared about local kids. No one had any red flags before this, just that he was a little overly chatty with the teens that came into his shop. I almost made the same mistake so many parents make: I almost said, “Oh, he’s just an old guy who doesn’t know how to talk to kids, it’s not a big deal.” We don’t want to cause trouble, we don’t want our kid to be the one who stirred things up. But I caught myself, because I remembered when I was 15, a youth coach said something similar about my body, and my mom told me I was overreacting. I didn’t say anything about the other inappropriate things he did for almost 20 years, because I learned my discomfort didn’t matter.
So instead I said, “What do you want to do about this? This is your call.” Lila said she didn’t want a big headline in the local paper with her name all over it, but she didn’t want him saying that to any other girl either. That was clear enough.
That night, I wrote down every word she told me, word for word. I dated it, noted the time and location, named the other kids that were there, and saved a copy to my Google Drive and emailed a copy to my cousin who does family law just to have a timestamped record. A week later, I mentioned it quietly at our PTA executive board meeting, and another mom pulled me aside after. Her 15-year-old daughter had gotten a similar comment at the homecoming football game, when Ervin stopped to take a photo with the cheerleaders. He’d hugged her too tight and said she was “the hottest cheerleader on the squad.”
We put our two accounts together, and instead of going straight to the school board president (who’d campaigned alongside Ervin) we went to the district’s student welfare coordinator, a paid role every public district has that most parents don’t even know exists. If you’re dealing with an elected school official, going to elected peers first almost always leads to political pushback to sweep it under the rug. Paid student welfare staff are required by law to investigate student safety claims, so they have far less room to brush it off for political gain.
It took three weeks of investigation, and three more unreported claims came out after we went public. Ervin resigned before the board could vote on removing him, and there’s still a group of parents in town that say we overreacted, that it was just a bad joke. I get that, to people who weren’t the one being commented on, it feels small. But what a lot of adults miss is that this isn’t just a rude comment. When a person in power—someone who votes on your school’s budget, who sets rules for your campus—comments on your body like that, it makes you feel unsafe in a place you’re supposed to learn. It tells kids that adults will prioritize protecting a popular guy over their right to feel comfortable at school.
From what we went through, the small, concrete steps that helped are things any parent or teacher can do. First, always ask your kid what they want first. Don’t push them to go public if that’s not what they’re comfortable with, and don’t minimize their discomfort by defaulting to “he didn’t mean it.” Second, write everything down the same day you hear it. Memory fades, and having a clear, timestamped record makes every next step easier. Third, if you’re a teacher or staff member who sees this happen, pull the kid aside right away and say “that comment wasn’t okay, what do you need from me?” You don’t have to stay silent just because the person who crossed a line is a school leader.
Last week, Lila and I were picking up milk at the grocery store, and we saw Ervin by the produce section. Lila just grabbed her milk, turned the other way, and didn’t say anything. On the drive home, she said she still gets weird looks from some of his friends at school, but she doesn’t regret it. We’re working now to get the district to add mandatory boundary training for all elected school board members, same as teachers are required to take, but it’s moving slow. There’s still a lot of work left to do, and the awkwardness doesn’t just go away overnight. But at least right now, no other kid has to walk into a school meet-and-greet wondering if the person in charge of their school is going to comment on their body before they even talk about the school business they came for. That’s something, even if it’s not everything.
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