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Teacher on paid leave as court case progresses
By ROBERT CONNELLY
CANFIELD
A Canfield middle-school teacher is on paid leave while a court case alleging domestic violence plays out in court.
His personnel file, accessed through a public-records request, shows times of friction between Douglas D. Dawson and the school district.
Superintendent Alex Geordan said Dawson, who was arraigned last week on charges of domestic violence, obstructing official business and resisting arrest after an incident with his family Thanksgiving night, was placed on paid administrative leave and has not been back to the school since he was arrested.
“An unfortunate incident happened outside of school. The staff member is on administrative leave until events are finalized,” Geordan said.
It is paid leave because of Dawson’s contract.
He was arrested Nov. 27 at his Greenmont Drive home and pleaded not guilty to the charges Nov. 28. He posted bond Tuesday, which was set at $2,500 cash or surety.
A Canfield police report details that Dawson and one of his sons got into an argument about the boy taking a car out. The boy ended up taking his sister’s car, which led to an argument between Dawson and his wife.
His wife told police that Dawson put her in a headlock and “flipped her upside down and pinned her down,” the report said.
A child of Dawson’s called police. Once they handcuffed Dawson, he began to resist by refusing to move. Dawson then threw himself backward into an officer, driving that officer into a glass china cabinet. Authorities then stunned Dawson and pinned him to the ground.
His personnel file contains a few incidents — such as taking students on a walk to McDonald’s for lunch — for which he did not properly notify school personnel.
The file details that he has had issues with parents in prior years, when he was a teacher at Hilltop Elementary, but was transferred by the board of education in 2011 to teach sixth grade and then a year later was transferred again to teach eighth grade. The school’s website lists him as an eighth-grade social studies teacher.
Evaluations indicate he is a “skilled teacher” — the second-highest evaluation on the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System — but noted sometimes he talks about his beliefs too much in front of students and has been known to arrive late to class.
In 2011, Dawson requested to have items removed from his personnel file, but then-Superintendent Dante Zambrini left them in.
Zambrini wrote in a July 2011 letter that issues “continuously surfaced during the 2010-11 school year involving Mr. Dawson and his interaction with parents and students.” The nature of those issues was not specified in the file.
Dawson had an incident in which he was spraying students with a spray bottle — used to clean the tops of desks — at their hips in a joking manner. He was reprimanded for his actions that “caused grave damage to the reputation of the school district and its staff members,” Zambrini wrote in a December 2010 letter.