INVESTIGATION | Douglas Anderson teacher received mostly ‘unofficial’ discipline before arrest

This June marked one year since the sentencing of Jeffrey Clayton, the former Douglas Anderson School of the Arts Vocal Music Department director who’s serving a decade in prison for inappropriately touching and kissing a student. 

This story is the first in a series, The Show Must Go On, examining who knew what, when, and what action they took when confronted with reports of misconduct by Clayton — and other teachers at the school before and after him. It also explores the answers to “Why Douglas Anderson?” and “How do we know this won’t happen again?” 

The series is based on tens of thousands of pages of public records and historical documents, as well as dozens of interviews with current and former Douglas Anderson students, teachers, administrators and district officials.  

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Jeffrey Clayton was arrested in front of Douglas Anderson School of the Arts on a Wednesday.  March 22, 2023.

The evening before, a Duval County School Police detective had recorded a call between the 65-year-old venerated vocal veteran and his 16-year-old student.

“I can feel my hands on the skin on your hip, and you said you like it,” Clayton said on the call. “I just want to kiss you again.”

The Friday before, the girl’s father had driven her to campus for a singing lesson with Clayton, a 23-year warhorse of the D.A. faculty. It was spring break, but she was prepping for a performance. As she sat on the couch in his office, Clayton’s arrest warrant said, the teacher professed his feelings for her. He called them “intoxicating.” He touched her thighs. He kissed her. 

Afterward, she confided in a friend, who told her parents, who called the authorities.

In her case — first reported to law enforcement outside Duval County — the response was swift. Clayton was arrested within days and resigned before the School Board could vote on his termination. He later pleaded guilty to lewd conduct with a minor and other charges.

For years prior, records and interviews confirm, school- and district-level administrators knew  there had been complaints regarding Clayton’s conduct — including some that involved  inappropriately touching students. Though a handful of incidents resulted in district-level investigations, a system of unofficial discipline seemed to obscure the extent of the misconduct accusations against Clayton. 

A Duval Schools spokesperson tells Jacksonville Today the district has, since Clayton’s arrest, “significantly expanded” the training required of staff. District policy now “clearly stipulates disciplinary action for an employee who fails to report an allegation of this nature.”  

Jacksonville Today sent Clayton a letter in prison, but he did not respond. 

‘One of the best’

Clayton began his Douglas Anderson career in the summer of 2000. 

Before that, he taught at a Texas community college for seven years (the school doesn’t have his employee records anymore) and for two at a public middle school in Wakulla County, Florida. (That district says “no disciplinary records or anything else out of the ordinary” are in its files.) 

At the end of Clayton’s first school year in Jacksonville, then-Douglas Anderson Principal Jackie Cornelius wrote in his evaluation: “As a first year teacher and department chair at a demanding school, Mr. Clayton has adjusted well. I look forward to his input in making our vocal program one of the best nationally. His cooperation and dedication are valued.”

Cornelius also lauded Clayton for establishing a “comfortable nurturing environment.”

Over the course of his career, Clayton lived up to the principal’s hope for accolades: The school won a handful of GRAMMY Signature Schools grants — including the GRAMMY Foundation’s highest national school award, twice.

As for “comfortable” and “nurturing”? Many former students and colleagues tell a different story. 

‘He ruled with fear’ 

Some feared being on the receiving end of one of Clayton’s angry outbursts. 

“There would be times in our rehearsal sessions where he would get upset,” says Shyla Jenkins, a junior vocal major when Clayton arrived. “He would slam the piano and — not just the piano, but the piano lid — and scream at us and then go into his office and slam the door, and we’d be sitting there for 30 minutes, sometimes an hour.”

Jenkins says she “naively” thought Clayton clashed with her cohort because he hadn’t been there to select them when they auditioned for Duval’s flagship arts school. She expected his behavior to improve as his chosen students arrived, but instead his outbursts continued, she says. 

“That fear — he ruled with fear — was allowed to be the culture,” says Jenkins, who spent some time as Clayton’s student assistant. 

A decade later, former student Karyssa Nevins says she also experienced Clayton’s anger — with an added element.

“Of course, the girls talked like, ‘Oh, Creepy Clayton…Creepy Clayton back at it again,’” Nevins recalls. 

Interviews with and statements from more than a dozen of Clayton’s former colleagues and students — male and female — include recollections of his habit of putting his hands on or uncomfortably near girls’ breasts while demonstrating breathing techniques.

“At first, I was one of his ‘favorites,’ and it was very uncomfortable,” Nevins says, “putting his hands in between my breasts and telling me how to breathe.”

Jacksonville Today spoke with four professional vocal instructors who independently said touching students that way during breath instruction is not recommended. The National Association of Teachers of Singing code of ethics stipulates teachers should maintain appropriate boundaries in contact with students, including avoiding “insinuations that could be construed as sexual advances.” 

One male alum, who has retained counsel to bring a lawsuit against the district over alleged sexual misconduct by two other Douglas Anderson teachers, says, “I remember how [Clayton] would massage my chest beforehand, but he would only work on my diaphragm for 10 seconds, but then he would go over to [a female student], and he would do the same exact thing but it would take him two or three minutes…there’s no reason that he needed to do that.”

Nevins, who graduated in 2012, says “everyone knew” students had reported Clayton’s “creepy” behavior to Cornelius, but nothing changed.  

“Because of what? Who knows?” Nevins said. “There was lots of rumors — of course it was all speculation — but the only thing that wasn’t speculation was the fact that reports were being made and nothing was being done about it.” 

Five people tell Jacksonville Today they or a trusted adult reported Clayton to school or district officials for inappropriately touching students during breathing exercises. A parent volunteer, who asked not to be identified, also wrote the district a 2010 letter, reviewed by Jacksonville Today, saying, among other allegations, that she witnessed Clayton tell students they looked “sexy” and he commented to her that a student looked “hot in her dress.”

Though the kind of touching Clayton allegedly engaged in was never acceptable under district policy or state law, Duval Schools recently changed its policies to explicitly restrict physical contact between teachers and students. Teachers are now generally discouraged from anything beyond high-fives, handshakes or fist bumps.

‘Greater professional distance’

After nearly a decade, Cornelius’s 2009 evaluation of Clayton said he had “dramatically increased the number of students accepted into top vocal performance universities” — but also, “Suggest Mr. Clayton maintain a greater professional distance with students and parents in the future.”

In her 2011 evaluation, Cornelius noted Clayton needed improvement in two areas: “shows sensitivity to students by maintaining a positive classroom environment” and “demonstrates professional behaviors.”

Cornelius, who retired from Duval Schools in April 2017, declined an interview with Jacksonville Today. She remains involved with Douglas Anderson as executive director of the independent D.A. Foundation, which provides financial support to the school, including financing the construction of a new amphitheater. 

Coworkers’ concerns

Becky Loar’s name still brings a smile to many alums’ faces. 

The former Douglas Anderson vocal teacher, a soprano opera singer whose resume includes performances with the New York Philharmonic and at Carnegie Hall, worked alongside Clayton from 2007 to 2012. She’s preparing to file a lawsuit against the school district over Clayton’s behavior toward her, which she says resulted in a hostile work environment, a pre-suit notice shows. 

Loar tells Jacksonville Today she saw firsthand the kinds of too-close-for-comfort interactions that student after student describe in interviews. She says Clayton once walked into her office while she was coaching a student and came up behind the girl and pressed his body into hers. Loar says she intervened quickly. On another occasion, Loar walked in on Clayton with a hand on a female student’s chest while working on breathing exercises. Again, she intervened. 

Loar says she was one of at least five teachers who reported Clayton to administrators for touching students unnecessarily or inappropriately or for excessive anger. Jacksonville Today was able to verify four of the reporters through records and interviews, as well as another who was not in Loar’s tally.

None of Loar’s complaints — about Clayton’s  inappropriately touching students or his treatment of her — appear among the documents in his official personnel file, provided to Jacksonville Today by the school district under a public records request. 

“I was there two more years with no acknowledgement of anything, nothing changing, no dealing with his behavior — even though I was told multiple times by Jackie (Cornelius), ‘This is it. I’m done with him. I’m firing him today,’” Loar says. “
And then nothing would be done.”

Cornelius did not respond to a list of questions about what Jacksonville Today learned from interviews, including this one. 

In 2011, Loar raised her concerns to an investigator in the school district’s Office of Professional Standards. She says she was told to document them in writing and give them to Cornelius to forward back up to the district.

Text messages that spring between Loar and a school administrator, reviewed by Jacksonville Today, say Cornelius had reviewed the letter Loar wrote documenting her concerns. It’s unclear whether the principal forwarded it along, though; it is also not among the documents in Clayton’s official file.

About six months after she left Douglas Anderson in 2012, Loar again documented her concerns in writing and met with a different district staffer amid a 2013 investigation that included Clayton’s temporary removal from the classroom — though official records of that investigation don’t include her letter. 

Dina Barone, the vocal teacher who replaced Loar at D.A. in 2012, says she didn’t personally see Clayton inappropriately touch anyone during breathing exercises, but Clayton himself talked about his heavy hand. 

“He liked to bring it up: ‘Well, you know, I have to put my hands on the students; that’s how you teach.’ In hindsight, it was more about him defending it,” she says. 

Barone did witness Clayton’s anger firsthand. 

“He treated students horribly,” she says. “I mean, he wasn’t…he was just not a good teacher, not a nice person, to be frank.”

She says students — girls and boys — came to her complaining about Clayton, and she reported him to Cornelius many times, over years, but “nothing was ever done.”

A male teacher who also worked with Clayton tells Jacksonville Today Clayton was “very handsy” with students during vocal instruction sessions — and was “overly suggestive” that he, too, should touch students more.  

The former teacher says he reported Clayton to administrators for behaviors that showed a “lack of professionalism.”

“If some of those things would have been put in his file as warnings or write-ups, any employer or boss would have had the right to say, ‘Hey, we warned you about this three times. This is your last warning and if you do it again you’re gone,’” he says. 

‘Handled unofficially’?

Over more than two decades at Douglas Anderson, Clayton accumulated five official reprimands — two verbal and three written.

But a handwritten note likely scrawled by a district-level administrator, in the personnel file of a different Douglas Anderson teacher who was accused of misconduct, associates Clayton with “17 incidents” and “16 verbals” in just over a decade at the school. 

All of this raises the question of whether a system of unofficial discipline for Clayton made it difficult to progress him through the four steps of official discipline that could have led to his termination at some point before his arrest. 

“There is no doubt that we knew that we had a problem with Clayton — no doubt it was grooming — if he hadn’t molested a kid, he was going to,” says an ex-district Office of Professional Standards staffer, who asked not to be named because it could jeopardize their current employment. 

The person remembers finding a large Post-it note on Clayton’s file that detailed why he should be fired “the next time,” but a supervisor said because previous allegations “were handled unofficially,” they could not be counted toward progressive discipline. 

“Unless we had someone coming in saying they were molested, we couldn’t get rid of him,” the ex-investigator says. 

Cornelius, the former principal, did not respond to a list of questions sent to her by email and registered letter. She did reply to an earlier email with, “I never kept an ‘unofficial’ discipline file on Jeffrey Clayton.” 

More than eight years after she retired, Cornelius’s district emails and paper records from her Clayton era are gone. District IT staffer Jim Moore tells Jacksonville Today the district archives only the last five years of emails and wipes computers clean when employees leave. A district records custodian says some employee paper records are sent to a warehouse for archiving, but, in response to a different records request, the district told Jacksonville Today only “student records and board agendas” are kept there. 

The official complaints

Clayton’s five officially recorded reprimands resulted from eight district-level investigations before his arrest.

His first documented discipline, a written reprimand, came in 2006, shortly after Joseph Wise became superintendent. Clayton had been caught giving private lessons in his office on a teacher planning day — improperly using school property for personal gain. The write-up says Cornelius had discussed this with him on “more than one occasion,” but the district doesn’t have a record of previous verbal reprimands.

Over the next 10 years, Clayton collected four more documented investigations while he continued to receive sizable pay increases and glowing evaluations.

In 2008: two written reprimands for Clayton’s interactions with students, early in Ed Pratt-Dannals’ tenure as superintendent. One case involved closed-door meetings and inviting a student to work out at Clayton’s neighborhood gym off campus. 

In 2013, with Superintendent Nikolai Vitti at the helm, Clayton was again investigated and removed from his classroom for a few days. The record doesn’t detail the allegations, and the district couldn’t provide clarification. The time period aligns with when an investigator contacted Becky Loar, Clayton’s former colleague. 

A note in that investigation file from Clayton’s then-attorney Tad Delegal said, “I am concerned that your investigation suggests that you are intending to resurrect each and every various allegation or inference against Mr. Clayton, and put them together in a fashion that suggests that Mr. Clayton is some sort of problem teacher…Mr. Clayton’s history reveals that Principal Cornelius has evaluated each of these incidents, and has addressed them appropriately. She has enlisted the aid of the district when necessary and has addressed other matters in an informal manner in order to appropriately maintain a positive and successful teaching environment.”

The 2013 complaint was dismissed, and Clayton returned to teaching. 

Clayton was investigated again in 2016 and received a verbal reprimand. On the reporting form, Cornelius typed, “I await the Office of Professional Standards review before taking further action since the teacher has had similar complaints in the past.” She wrote that she had told Clayton not to touch students on the back or compliment them on their “attractiveness, clothing or beauty.” 

Official investigations pick up

Amid the Black Lives Matter movement that exploded in the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd, Douglas Anderson students and alumni began to share stories on social media of their experiences with perceived racism at the school. Stories alleging teachers’ sexual misconduct soon flowed in, too.

Loar says that’s when a former colleague encouraged her to send the district her written documentation about Clayton one more time.

“He’s like, ‘Becky, you’ve got to say something,’” Loar says. “And I’m like…‘I keep saying things. 
I have yelled to the hills. It’s 2020. I left in 2012. What more can I do?’” 

She sent her letter detailing the concerns about Clayton — this time in an email to then-Superintendent Diana Greene. 

District records show Greene received Loar’s email overnight on June 19, 2020, and she forwarded it to staff at 7:21 the same morning. About an hour later, then-HR Director Vicki Schultz wrote to professional standards staff that Greene had already phoned her about the message. “Dr. Greene called and asked for a response right away…You will need to examine for possible investigation,” Schultz wrote.

The handwritten note mentioning Clayton’s “17 incidents and 16 verbals” is written on a print-out of Loar’s email that was forwarded to Schultz and then to Sherry Jackson, then the new executive director of what is now called the Office of Professional Standards, ADA & Title IX. Jackson did not respond to a request for an interview with Jacksonville Today. 

What the district did next is unclear. 

That fall, Clayton received a verbal reprimand for not wearing a mask in accordance with Duval Schools’ COVID protocol.

In 2021, a student reported Clayton had rubbed a different student’s back during a rehearsal. Clayton got another verbal reprimand. 

That investigation included an interview with a previous D.A. assistant principal, Lianna Knight, who was then principal at LaVilla School of the Arts, a Douglas Anderson feeder middle school. Knight said she “could not recall a time when she received a complaint that involved Clayton inappropriately touching anyone” and generally didn’t recall “any other complaints about Mr. Clayton.” 

But documents show Knight authored one of the 2008 reprimands that Clayton received for his treatment of a student. 

And, in an email to a district investigator in 2010, a parent who alleged Clayton had told her daughter to be “more submissive” to him said she had reported the incident directly to Knight. The parent wrote that Knight told her that her daughter would be called in to discuss what had happened, but, “Unfortunately, my daughter was never called to the administrative offices to discuss her concerns.”

Knight did not respond to a request for an interview.

In 2022, the year before his arrest, the district investigated Clayton again for allegedly touching another student inappropriately during a private vocal lesson at Clayton’s house during the previous school year. That student had transferred out of D.A. and described the incident to her new school’s administrator, who filed a report. Ultimately, the complaint was not substantiated because the student could not provide an exact date or a witness.

Missing reports

After Clayton’s arrest, the alleged 2021 incident of touching during a rehearsal became especially salient — as did the process Duval Schools used to investigate, record and report such incidents to the state. 

Records show that Scott Strauss, then vice chancellor of the Florida Department of Education, sent a letter to Superintendent Greene about a month after the arrest, on April 19, 2023. He asked about the 2021 complaint, telling Greene his office was “unable to locate this incident.”

“As you know, districts are required to report all SESIR incidents to the Department of Education,” Strauss wrote, referring to the School Environmental Safety Incident Reporting protocol.

In her response, Greene pushed back, telling Strauss that Duval Schools did report the incident to the Education Department, as required, and also notified the Department of Children and Families of possible abuse. Email records from Duval Schools show DCF received a report of the complaint on Nov. 22, 2021. It declined to pursue the case, saying it didn’t “rise to the level of reasonable cause to suspect harm.”

When news of Clayton’s arrest broke, Greene was at once fiercely criticized and fiercely defended — and she ultimately retired early amid mounting pressure from the School Board over Douglas Anderson and other controversies. 

Months after her exit, speaking from the stage at the TEDxJackonville conference, Greene reminisced about her trailblazing path to academic leadership — she was the first Black superintendent in two districts and had been named the Florida Association of District School Superintendents 2021 Superintendent of the Year.  

“Even when the challenges and the degradation came from the local to the highest levels of government in this state, I told myself, it is still worth it — because someone has to come behind me and take up the mantle of leadership. Because representation matters,” Greene said.

Greene declined an interview when told this story was about Douglas Anderson, but she did respond to specific questions through email, detailed below. 

When reports come in alleging serious employee misconduct, school administrators are supposed to route them to Duval Schools’ Office of Professional Standards, ADA & Title IX, whose investigators’ backgrounds often include law enforcement. The professional standards team is “plagued with high turnover,” according to a 2023 report by the state Education Department. 

In 2020, an investigator named Reginald Johnson was promoted to manage the professional standards group. His supervisors described him as thorough and willing to “ask the tough question.” Johnson had spent about 25 years with the Gainesville Police Department before coming to Duval Schools in 2014.

When Clayton’s arrest threw a spotlight on the district’s handling of complaints, records show Johnson mailed three packages of previously unreported teacher misconduct reports to the state about a month later, and the district later sent more. All in all, the state received 73 “delinquent cases” from Duval Schools dating back to 2020. 

None of the delinquent records were about Clayton, the state says, but Johnson later told state investigators that complaints about Clayton from 2006, 2008 and 2016 should have been sent but weren’t.

Jacksonville Today made numerous requests to the state and the district for details about which cases Johnson submitted to the state, but so far neither agency has provided clarification. 

During the ensuing state inspector general’s investigation of Duval’s “delinquent cases,” David Farcas — later Johnson’s replacement as the district’s professional standards supervisor — testified that Johnson said someone had instructed him to send the cache of complaints. 

“Farcas testified that Johnson directly indicated to him that he was told to do so but did not divulge who gave him the directive,” the OIG report reads. 

Until the state notified the district of Johnson’s mailing, Duval Schools officials including Greene were not aware the documents had not already been sent, they testified.  

In her email response to Jacksonville Today, Greene similarly said she did not direct Johnson to send the files. She said, “I was unaware that the cases had not been reported until I received the letter from Commissioner Manny Diaz. Mr. Johnson later told me that he submitted the files as part of a self-initiated audit, and he did so without informing me or his direct supervisor.”

The final Clayton complaint

Duval County School Police Det. Carl Graham recorded the call between Clayton and his 16-year-old student, E., at around 5 p.m. on March 21, 2023. Graham took the evidence he’d gathered — including about 1,700 texts between Clayton and the student — to the State Attorney’s Office, and an arrest warrant was issued the next day at 8:48 a.m.

Assistant State Attorney Anna Hixon, who prosecuted Clayton, tells Jacksonville Today it was the first time an allegation about him had reached the prosecutor’s office. 

Hixon says prosecutors decided to broker an agreement with Clayton: They would not pursue any other complaints stemming from his employment at Douglas Anderson — sexual misconduct or otherwise — and Clayton would not push for a lesser sentence. 

Adair Newman, chief assistant state attorney, says prosecutors often use this type of arrangement as a way of “minimizing trauma toward the victims.”

“A lot of times in sexual assaults, we have multiple victims — so we go back and we talk to them about the outcome that everybody would like to see and how best to achieve it,” Newman says. 

Less than a month after Clayton’s arrest, the SAO identified 140 of his former students it wanted to interview, according to State Attorney’s Office spokesman David Chapman. He says investigators ultimately talked with just a small fraction of the students.

“Some offered basic information, others did not,” Chapman wrote in an email to Jacksonville Today. “A couple of students provided information that contributed to the investigation and successful prosecution.” 

At Clayton’s sentencing in June 2024, prosecutors played the recording of the phone call from the night before his arrest. The packed courtroom fell silent, except for occasional quiet sobs.

Three other victims who alleged lewd conduct by Clayton took the stand next. One by one, they delivered emotional statements. Then E. stood and told her own story.

E. said she’d been warned about Clayton from the time she arrived at Douglas Anderson but naively thought him to have been “misjudged.” She said he prayed with her in his office and told her he wanted to be “like a father” to her — but “what began as kind words and seemingly innocent touches soon became proclamations of lust and lingering hands I did not ask them to be.”

“I feel that he not only took my ability to trust, but also my innocence,” she said, standing feet away from Clayton. 

“It was surreal,” says Douglas Anderson alum Katie Sacks, a 2015 graduate and former Clayton student who watched a livestream of the court hearing. “That girl was so brave. That was just crazy brave. That never would have happened during my time. Ever. It just wouldn’t have. It would have been silenced or disbelieved — if anyone even dared to say something.” 

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This story is the first in a series, The Show Must Go On, examining the handling of reports of teacher misconduct at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts — and what’s changed in the more than two years since Jeffrey Clayton’s arrest. The next story is about other teachers who also left the school under clouds of suspicion.