Removed Douglas Anderson teacher was accused of sex with 14-year-old

Last year, a former student accused Corey Thayer, a teacher at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, of repeatedly forcing her to have sex with him a decade prior when she was a 14-year-old freshman, according to a sworn statement the alleged victim — now an adult — gave to Duval Schools investigators. 

The previously unreported specifics of the allegations against Thayer shed new light on what preceded Thayer’s removal and return to the classroom before he was removed permanently. He’s one of six teachers who’ve been removed from the school over allegations of inappropriate behavior since early 2023. 

The school district provided Jacksonville Today a court reporter’s transcript of the former student’s October 2023 sworn interview in response to a public records request. 

What she says happened

The accuser said Thayer, then 43, was well known at the school for the attention he paid to female students.

“There was kind of this culture in the department where people were telling me that Corey Thayer, Dr. Thayer, really likes freshman girls,” she told the investigator, who worked for the district’s professional standards office.

She recalled that Thayer invited her to sit on his lap, told her to keep wearing clothes that violated the dress code because he liked how they looked, gave her piggyback rides and rubbed her back, she told the investigator. 

Thayer’s behavior escalated to having her perform oral sex on him several times, and it culminated in alleged “penetrative sex” in November of 2013 in the school’s sound booth, she said. 

“Was it consensual — I mean, not legally speaking, because you were a minor,” the investigator asked the woman. “But was it consensual? Was it forced?”

She replied that she had told Thayer, “I don’t really want to do this.”

“You said it, but you didn’t stop it?” the investigator asked. 

The former student also alleged that because of Thayer’s conspicuous attention, two male students targeted and sexually assaulted her at school. The boys, who had called her “Thayer’s b****,” pushed her into a supply closet, where they exposed themselves to her, forced her to touch them, and pushed up her skirt and groped her, she said.

The investigation

After teacher Jeffrey Clayton’s arrest in March 2023, the district received a flood of emails about him and a few other Douglas Anderson teachers from concerned alumni and parents, according to records reviewed by Jacksonville Today. 

Duval Schools says 12 of the messages were about Thayer, who had worked at the public arts magnet high school since 2008. Some alleged that he habitually behaved inappropriately with female students, and others were written in his support. 

One of the messages was from the former student’s mother. It wasn’t the first time she’d told Duval Schools about Thayer. 

In a phone call after the initial publication of this story, the mother told Jacksonville Today, “I hope that his license is revoked and that he can never teach… well, I hope that he is arrested, honestly. But the goal at the very least is that he not be allowed in the classroom. My goal is to keep the children safe. That’s all we’ve ever wanted. That’s all my daughter’s ever wanted. We don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”

“My goal is to keep the children safe. That’s all we’ve ever wanted. That’s all my daughter’s ever wanted. We don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”

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2015: According to documents reviewed by Jacksonville Today, the alleged victim’s mother first reported Thayer in March 2015 to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and directly to then-Douglas Anderson Principal Jackie Cornelius — though the victim told investigators last year she had not yet told her parents the extent of Thayer’s actions and had instead said that he had only touched her inappropriately. A police report JSO provided to Jacksonville Today indicates the agency briefly investigated but determined the school district’s police department should handle the case instead.

According to a Duval County School Police report, a school police detective arranged for another law enforcement agency to record an interview with the alleged victim because she was out of the state at the time. He also met with Cornelius, the school’s resource officer and other school and district personnel. And he interviewed three other students, telling them he’d “received information that a teacher at school may have touched them inappropriately.” They said nothing had happened to them.

A few weeks later, the detective said, the victim’s father asked him to close the investigation, which he did in May 2015.

In her sworn statement last year, the woman denied her father had wanted to stop the investigation but said he may have been expressing concern over the effect of the investigation on the mental health of his then-teenage daughter. 

“I’m not really quite sure what happened there … maybe I was really upset after the interview [out of state],” she said. 

2016: A year after the mother’s complaint and the police investigation, a Duval Schools memo summarized the detective’s report. It called the allegation of inappropriate touching “not substantiated.” The district’s Office of Professional Standards separately assigned an investigator to the case, but after that person left the district, no one followed up with the alleged victim. 

2018: After she turned 18, the woman followed up with both Duval County School Police and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office to find out what had become of her case. She eventually received “one page” of JSO’s 2015 report.

“I still didn’t really have any answers,” she told the investigator in 2023. “I don’t really know why this didn’t continue, but I’m guessing they didn’t think that it warranted any further investigation, which was disappointing to me.”

2023: Following Jeffrey Clayton’s highly publicized arrest, the former student’s mother again reported Thayer to Duval Schools — this time in an email to the School Board.

“I tell you all of this as I have been waiting for 10 years for the truth to come out about the culture at this school,” she wrote. “I pray that other departments and teachers are looked into.”

A board member forwarded the message to then-Superintendent Diana Greene, who in April directed the district’s HR department to pull Thayer from the classroom and asked the district’s police to investigate Thayer again. 

The district’s investigation lasted one month. Though Thayer was pulled from his classroom because of the mother’s email, the investigation did not include talking to the accuser or her mother. Instead, on a Friday in May 2023, the investigator went to Douglas Anderson and selected six female students at random from each of Thayer’s classes. She interviewed them with a male assistant principal in the room. None of them said Thayer had behaved inappropriately toward them.  

By the time that investigation was complete, the 2022-2023 school year was over. The district put a letter of “coaching and counseling” in Thayer’s file — but specified that it was not a letter of reprimand and did not constitute discipline. 

That summer, district administrators received a certified letter notifying them that the former student intended to file a civil suit. The letter, sent on July 26, 2023, spelled out — in graphic and specific detail — everything she would go on to detail in her sworn statement. 

The accuser’s lawyer, Chris Moser, confirms she sent the letter but she declined to comment further for this story.

After receiving the letter, the district returned Thayer to his classroom the next month.

A few weeks later, Thayer was again removed again after the accuser, Moser and another former student asked why he’d been allowed to return. 

By this point, Greene had resigned and Dana Kriznar was interim superintendent. Records show Thayer was pulled from the classroom for good on Sept. 5, 2023. A Duval Schools spokesperson says he was “reassigned to duties without student contact” for the remainder of his employment until he resigned in June 2024. 

In an email to the school board, Kriznar said they pulled Thayer again because they’d received “new information” regarding his case. Records do not show what information the district received in September that it didn’t have prior to the beginning of the school year.

The subsequent district investigation — the one that included the October 2023 sworn interview — lasted well into 2024 and ended with a determination of “inconclusive,” due to a “lack of sufficient evidence to support or corroborate that Dr. Thayer engaged in inappropriate physical contact of a sexual nature with and/or in the presence of students.” He was found only to have “exhibited poor judgment” by communicating with students over text message. Records show the district investigator requested to interview Thayer this March, but his attorney, Tad Delegal, denied the request.

A document Duval Schools provided to Jacksonville Today says the Florida Department of Education opened its own investigation into Thayer on Sept. 14, 2023. However, a record of that investigation is not available in the state’s online database of discipline against teaching licenses. The state did not respond to a request for clarification. 

Thayer’s teaching certificate remains active as of this story’s publication. 

Duval Schools recently paid out a civil settlement with Thayer’s alleged victim but did not acknowledge any wrongdoing in its handling of her case. 

The transcript of her sworn interview mentions an ongoing criminal investigation into Thayer, but a spokesperson for the local State Attorney’s Office told Jacksonville Today on Tuesday he can “neither confirm nor deny the presence of an investigation.” 

Under Florida law, sexual battery on a child older than 12 and younger than 18 is punishable by up to life in prison.

Thayer has not responded to Jacksonville Today’s request for comment as of this story’s publication.

Thayer’s problems in his previous district

Before he came to Duval County in January 2008, Thayer had faced several instances of discipline for alleged inappropriate behavior as a teacher in Orlando. It’s not clear whether Duval Schools was aware of them when hiring him.

A complaint in his previous district’s employee file alleges that on a Saturday in September 2007, Thayer was eating at a now-closed Orlando pizzeria called Papa Gio’s on Mulberry Street. Some students from his Timber Creek High School were there and reported he harassed them and other patrons and called them racial slurs. Orange County Schools relieved him of duty while they investigated. It’s unclear if the district completed its investigation before Thayer resigned six weeks later.

A few months prior, in May 2007, his file shows that Thayer was also verbally reprimanded for getting into an argument with students “who accused him of being gay.”

“Students label teachers many things often. However, when I retorted, ‘Do you want to see me naked or something, since you are always calling me gay,’ he took offense,” Thayer wrote in a letter that detailed his response to a student.

In 2005, he received a verbal reprimand after students and parents alleged he’d been “rude, loud and obnoxious” during a flight with them, including “sexually” objectifying female students and their mothers. 

And in 1999, while teaching at a middle school, he was alleged to have committed sexual misconduct. The complaint, which Orange County records say was confirmed, alleged Thayer snapped middle school girls’ bra straps, tried to lift up their shirts, touched them inappropriately and called them “b*****es” and “hoes.” Thayer denied the allegations. He received a written reprimand. 

When he applied to teach in Jacksonville in 2007, his first listed reference was a woman he described as a “UCF professor.” According to Duval County court records, the woman, a recent UCF doctoral graduate, signed a lease to live with Thayer in Jacksonville on Dec. 2, 2007. He sued her the following year for moving out and not paying her share of the rent. They settled out of court.

Duval Schools spokesperson Tracy Pierce told Jacksonville Today he doesn’t know if the district knew about Thayer’s Orange County disciplinary record when he was hired in 2008.

“Today, we check state databases for prior investigations and the state’s disqualifier list prior to hiring,” Pierce said.

Pierce said the district has recently made several changes to its policies that protect students. For one, there’s now an online reporting form that anyone can use to report misconduct directly to the district.

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This story was updated after publication to add the accuser’s mother’s reaction.